I see a lot of people using words like abusive, gaslighting, or traumatizing to refer to people just being shitty or something bad happening. And I gotta say it’s really troubling for me, a sexual assault victim with complex PTSD, who was engaged to a clinical narcissist!
I need folks to recognize that things can absolutely be bad (indefensibly so!) without being *abuse*. Someone doing something shitty to you is bad! You can be upset! But you can be mad without claiming language that people need to describe specific and incredibly harmful things
I’m thinking of that TERRIBLE take from a week ago about how mismatched relational expectations invalidated consent and how harmful a statement like that is to assault survivors. It turns out that if EVERYTHING is assault or abuse then nothing is.
Not everything has to be the worst thing for you to justifiably lay claim to having been harmed and to seek support from your community. But I think it’s long past time for us to ratchet down the language we use to construct and define those harms.
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