Love – actual love – makes us real to each other. It is as much a light as it is flame, and it calls us back to ourselves. There can’t be love where there is abuse. There isn’t light in that darkness. Stopping the cycle of abuse starts with understanding what love is and what love isn’t.
About
r/AbuseInterrupted started as my personal library after Google shuttered Google Reader, and became a project exploring vectors of abuse and power dynamics.
I wanted to stop the cycle of abuse in my own life and in my own family.
Over a decade later, and the subreddit became more than a repository of information, but a place where I worked on deconstructing the underlying elements of not only abuse and abusive systems, but of healing and restoration, and love.
This website is for the purpose of preserving and expanding this work.
Blog
“…for those who don’t know what an apology is, ‘I’m sorry’ is the start of an apology and behavior change and repairing the connection (or at least tending to the harm) is the true apology.”
via Becca Lauren, comment to Instagram (excerpted)
Abuse and manipulation work because they hijack normal attachment mechanisms such as “empathy”
Their weaponizing your own empathy against you means you have to, within yourself, shift your empathy from ’emotional empathy’ to ‘cognitive empathy’. Emotional empathy, for example, has you bailing out your loved one because you ‘know what a hard time they’ve had’, whereas cognitive empathy has you recognizing that they need boundaries/consequences for their choices …
Herding is a process through which the forces of togetherness triumph over the forces of individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members…but when you try to be empathetic with someone who’s emotionally unhealthy, you can end up being un-empathetic to everyone else
Groups tend to organize around a weakness. When a group experiences a threat, they’re apt to circle the wagons. Group cohesion becomes the most important goal. This instinct to come together with others when we’re feeling anxious and uncertain can be healthy in moderation. But according to Friedman, the herding instinct becomes dysfunctional when togetherness …
Contact
You can reach me at abuseinterrupted at gmail.com
abuseinterrupted@gmail.com