daily reminder that any therapist who says indulging in fictional romanticisations of your abuse as a coping mechanism is ok and healthy, is going against the psychological consensus
shipping abusive and unhealthy ships to cope with past trauma is regressive, it doesn’t move you forward and blocks the brain from properly processing what you, as a victim, went through – it’s a subconscious form of self-harm and avoidance
coping mechanisms that are progressive help your brain process your trauma and move on
a good example of a healthy coping mechanism is attending therapy that focuses on exposure and root-cause solving, it’s a painful and emotional process but it eventually moves you forward and teaches you how to live alongside your trauma (a free alternative is joining forums that connect you with other survivors where you can talk freely and find support as you struggle to process and move forward from your trauma)
another example of healthy coping is channeling your trauma into something good, like becoming a spokesperson for the de-stigmatization of mental health problems – this will help affirm that you can take control of your trauma and make you feel better about yourself
if you do choose to keep indulging in your regressive coping mechanism, it’s inconsiderate of you to do so in public, not only are you contributing to the normalization of abuse, you are also potentially harming other victims who are undergoing progressive treatment
tumblr is a public website, many of its users are teens in their most mentally susceptible period of life and shippers promoting unhealthy coping mechanisms as positive and helpful is absolutely inconsiderate and dangerous
so like, maybe think for a second before y’all post this quackery bs
[ID: screenshot of a post by @anti-anti-survivor titled “Daily Reminder” that reads: People have no right to tell you what to cope, (sic) and people on tumblr do not know you better than your therapist.]
daily reminder that “indulging in fictional romanticisations of your abuse as a coping mechanism” is a gross and deliberate oversimplification of the issue that serves no purpose except to give an imagined moral high ground.
daily reminder that “shipping” doesn’t mean “holding up a pairing as the ideal to which all relationships should aspire,” it means “being interested in reading/writing for/engaging with a pairing.”
daily reminder that confronting the idea that you deserved what was done to you by looking at a (real or imagined) situation featuring someone else’s abuse and recognizing that they don’t deserve it is literally a CBT technique.
daily reminder that the vast majority of shippers are the teens you mentioned, who recognize their own past and current situations in the ships, and are forming communities around that, exactly as you suggested.
daily reminder that the fact that tumblr is a public website is irrelevant because private 18+ websites like fetlife are subject to even more of the exact same types of criticism and backlash, simply for existing.
daily reminder that it is and has always been the responsibility of every person on the internet to regulate their own experience and that any person, regardless of age, who is not capable of doing so should not be on the internet alone.
^^^
“Therapy that focuses on exposure and root-cause solving” can literally include reading and writing about reflections of the things that happened to you, and making art about them, and there are tons of books about this.
OP, you are attacking people for undergoing the therapy you are recommending, and undermining their progress. Please stop.
TheOriginalGodsGirlRachel 