Reblog If You Worried About Your Abusive Parent More Than They Ever Worried About You

15-year-old Rolesville student slammed to ground by school officer: “I was in shock”.

In a video posted on Twitter by a Rolesville student, a school officer can be seen lifting 15-year-old Jasmine Darwin and slamming her to the floor.

Jasmine says she saw her sister fighting another student and rushed to break up the altercation. Then the officer grabbed her from behind and slammer her on the floor.

Ruben De Los Santos, the officer seen in the video and a member of the Rolesville Police Department has been placed on paid administrative leave. 

Sources (x/x)

Abusers don’t come with warning labels.  Abusers don’t hit you on the first date. They don’t write “I will humiliate and belittle you” on their Tinder profiles. They don’t wear “I break things to intimidate my partner” t-shirts. People don’t get trapped in damaging relationships because they saw an abuser coming from 20 yards away and decided “I’m going to date that person anyway”. That’s not how any of this works.  In the beginning, abusers can be some of the most thoughtful, attentive people you’ll ever meet. They’re obsessed with you; that’s what makes them so toxic and deadly as time goes on. Abusers buy you flowers. They remember your birthday. They remember to text you “good morning” and “good night”. They listen to your problems, confide in you and share silly inside jokes. They can keep that “loving, doting partner and best friend” mask in place for months or years if they have to.  So the first time they scream at you or hit you, you don’t see an abuser. You see your best friend, your confidante, the person who brought you soup when you were sick and always laughs at your stories about your nutty coworker. You tell yourself they just had a bad day. Maybe they were tired, sick, hungry, or under a lot of stress. You know them. You’ve made a life with them. And they’re so sorry and so ashamed of what they did. This isn’t who they are.  And so things go back to back to normal for a while. Wonderful, even. This is still one of the best relationships you’ve ever been in, even counting that one incident. You go back to date nights, cozy nights in and 5-hour-long conversations that feel effortless. And then it happens again.  And you still don’t see an abuser. You see the person who means the most to you in the whole world. You decide that maybe they’re just struggling. Maybe they have mental health issues. They’ve told you every horrible thing that’s ever happened to them as a child, and maybe it has something to do with that. But either way, they’re not an abuser. Not yet. They’re just a person who needs you more than ever.  Then things are good for a while. Then something bad happens. Then it’s good again. Then it’s bad. Good. Bad. Good. Bad. And every time it happens, it gets a little harder to get out. The time you’ve invested in the relationship goes up, and your self-esteem goes down. By the time you realize that, yes, the person you thought you knew is an Abuser with a capital A, you’re in deep. You’re a frog that stood in a pot of water so long it turned you into soup before you even noticed it was getting a little warm. But you didn’t ask for this. And you certainly didn’t know it was coming.  We have this image in our heads of what abusers must look like. We picture brawny men with low foreheads and stained white tank tops, screaming at their wives while they drink beer in front of the TV. We think they’re like wildlife, as if we could spot them with the help of a guidebook and know to stay far away from them. But they’re not. Abusers can be anyone. They can be female. They can be accomplished. They can be well-groomed. Queer. Politically far-left. Politically far-right. Artists. Athletic. Charitable. Intelligent. They can come from any walk of life, any spot on the gender spectrum, any religion, any background. It’s not the abused person’s fault for not spotting them - they can’t always be spotted. It’s the abuser’s fault for abusing. 

It's officially Banned Books Week, so now is as good a time as any to remind everyone that libraries still get frequent challenges to books on our shelves. Books continue to be challenged, banned, and even burned. I'm a librarian in a blue state, yet one of my neighboring libraries has recently been the target of book bannings and threats of violence (they had to shut down an all-ages LGBTQ event due to these threats too).

Please support your local libraries. If you want more books by queer and disabled authors and authors of color, TELL US. Give us recommendations. Check out books and ebooks when we get them in. Tell us when you write books too. We're here to make information and stories accessible.

P.S. And if you notice patrons or staff acting like assholes (particularly managers) please let someone know. Library government is weird, so a lot of libraries aren't union and also don't have any sort of HR. Trust me, if you frequently notice someone being a jerk, chances are good everyone else has to and has been stonewalled.

Amen, amen, amen.

For victims of abuse, it’s almost essential to gain ability to stop empathising with our abusers, not only because it’s keeping us trapped in their manipulations, but because we deserve to know that we don’t have to prioritize the feelings of a person who is actively doing harm to us.

Empathy for victims of abuse is almost mandatory, to the point where we’re punished for every moment we’re not displaying extreme and unconditional empathy for the abusers. We can get called out and berated for simply going about our business and not thinking of what the abuser might want of us in the particular second. We get shamed for ‘not knowing better’ and 'failing our role’ if we take a minute to consider our own needs.

When they’re doing their usual play – hurting us, then quickly acting hurt and playing the victim, bringing out their past trauma, crying about how hard they have/had it, how our feelings hurt them, even in the case we don’t fall for it, and refuse to apologize and accept that our feelings are just collateral damage in their personal crusade, we will get attacked immediately for being an emotionless and selfish person. Fail to react empathetic to the abuser’s guilt trip will get us called out for being horrible, for not caring, for being the most vicious demon, the worst person, the most unworthy and ungrateful human being in the world. That kind of thing sticks. We don’t just get over that. It becomes etched in our brains that displaying empathy, even to someone who is walking all over us, is our biggest priority, that showing empathy is the last thing that might protect us against an even bigger outburst, that might help us deserve to not be attacked for our lack of morality. We don’t get to be mad. We don’t get to stand up for ourselves. We have to put up a display of empathy or endure personal attacks that will make us feel like we don’t deserve to live.

To finally be able to cut the empathy and stand up against the abuser, is an act that fights years, maybe decades of brainwashing and conditioning. To not care if the abuser has it bad anymore, means we faced and fought years of trauma, lies, personal attacks, self doubt, self hatred, pain and injustice. Abusers want to take away our ability not to care, not to empathize and not to prioritize them, and seizing that back means seizing ourselves back, existing in a place where our empathy is not mandatory anymore, where we’re not pure compassionate receptacles of trauma anymore. Where empathy isn’t forced and squeezed out of us under the threat of pain. Where our value and personality isn’t dictated by whether we endlessly forgive and accept people who will only continue hurting us and bringing trauma into our life.

It is not a mark of a healthy and normal human being to offer our entire compassion and understanding to a creature who is destroying us in return. If someone proves to be a danger to us, it’s normal to disregard everything except the knowledge that this is a threat, and nothing else to us. To keep away because our well being shouldn’t be put under a fear of a constant threat. We are normal for following our sense of self-preservation and turning away from whatever is damaging us, regardless of how sad or upset this being becomes. We are not to be a collateral damage to someone’s misery or manipulation. Our empathy doesn’t have to be an opening to accept harm. We can save our empathy for those who also feel for us. We’re not bad people if we close up under a threat of abuse, and want to retreat to safety. We’re not evil, cruel or selfish for extending our hearts only to those who also keep ours safe.

🦇🖤🦇🖤🦇🖤🦇🖤🦇

Naptime (㇏^. ᵥᵥ .^ノ)

If someone is trying incredibly hard to please me, I know something is wrong. That kind of desire doesn’t come naturally. I know something bad has happened to this person, and they need attention rather than people indulging in their sacrificing acts of servitude.

Nobody should be desperate and try to please anyone out of fear that they’ll be punished, or that they’ll be hated and despised if not useful and pleasing enough. That is a form of control with the threat of terror and pain hanging over a person’s head, their desire to please and be useful isn’t coming from their own sense of fulfillment, but out of fear that there’s no other alternative, no other way they’re allowed to exist.

I would prefer not to exist than to have someone live in fear of what’s going to happen to them unless they make my existence pleasurable for every second of my life. That is not humane, no person alive needs this kind of servitude. This is what abusive parents do to children to terrorize them into convenience and usefulness and it’s a form of torture. Nobody should be benefiting from that torture. Nobody should want that kind of thing to exist.

Emotional and psychological abuse often go hand in hand to the point where you don’t even notice the person abusing you wasn’t merely ‘hurting your feelings’, but also changed the way you perceive yourself and your surroundings. Psychological abuse doesn’t only break your heart, it puts you in a reality where you’re worth nothing and can’t achieve anything on your own. Constant gaslighting, changing the past, convincing you of your own incapability and the cruelty of the world, is not only hurtful, it’s brainwashing. It can make you feel endangered, cornered and wondering if you’re insane.

This isn’t something small you could brush over, and it isn’t done to you when you’re in your full strength, this is done to you when you’re at your most vulnerable, most trusting and defenseless. There is nobody fully resistant to it, and nobody who could get out of that unscathed. Psychological abuse will make you blame yourself, hate yourself, ask your own self what is wrong with you, and the emotions will follow, making you ashamed, guilty, desperate, hopeless. You will find yourself living in environment where you’re powerless, unimportant, not taken seriously, not even heard if you try to voice your pain and anger. It will make you try thousand different ways to make it better, to become someone worthy of attention and care, and when it doesn’t work, you’ll fall depressed, and feel even stronger that everything is your fault somehow.

Psychological abuse might be the most dangerous one, because it will take your life, and your personality away from you. You will not see an exit from a life that breaks you into little pieces every day, you will not even feel as if you deserve any better. You wont even dare to think you could be worth more of that. You will lose sight of everything except whatever it is abuser wants you to think and believe, you will be reduced to merely surviving and not knowing what happiness even is. That is devastating for any person to go thru. It’s cruel, dehumanizing and torture to inflict on a human being. If this is what you’re recovering from, you can feel the extent of which your own life was taken away and broken into pieces for someone else to use. It’s revolting. It’s comparable to being held hostage against your will. It’s not a 'lesser’ type of abuse. It’s the worst.

Happiness Will Come To You.