Shades After 057
It’s difficult to learn, especially if you love a person, but often when people are upset they don’t need cheering up, just acknowledgement of the pain and a place to feel the emotion their past selves couldn’t express.
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I don’t know. When someone has been abused it’s often not okay to tell other people behind there back, even if you mean well. It’s clearly a hard spot to be in, but still.
Of the naive mistakes War has made thus far, I think this is one of the more forgivable. It’s hard to know the right thing to do for someone who’s been in that position, especially when they aren’t particularly verbal about it. It seems like War doesn’t really understand much about BDSM to begin with and I could see this as his way of making sure that what he thinks was abuse in Chris’s past isn’t considered normal/acceptable in the kink world, as well as reaching out for how he can best support Chris. It still might not have been okay to say it (even if only to say he suspects it) but at least this mistake was made with much better intentions than a lot of the other “young and stupid” things he’s done.
I agree that you should never tell someone else about someone being abused… but some people find horrible things happening to people they care about hard to deal with. SO I think him confiding in one person for the sake of Anwar getting support himself is forgivable…
To add to this, note the lead-in to the conversation: asking whether anyone ever abused anyone else in kink circles. if he hadn’t given JD a straight answer to their question, I think they would have worried about him. So, he didn’t necessarily confide for the sake of confiding – part of it also looks to me like The Greater Good.
The problem is he doesn’t know *who* abused Chris. It may not have happened in a kink circle.
Chris said that some people liked the punishment thing outside the bedroom. The way it’s implied would make it easy for Anwar to draw the assumption that one of Chris’ previous Dom/mes(? I seem to remember the implication that Chris was submissive?) took it too far.
The first person that introduced me to kink was one of those people. I broke all contact with them after the first incident, and it’s one of the very, very few times in my life that I was able to disassociate myself entirely with an abusive situation so quickly.
May everybody escape and recover from such jerks.
It took me a marriage, child with, and divorce from the asshole for me to realize just how abusive mine was. Some of us sadly are very, very blind to it when we’re brand new to the lifestyle, and he made sure I wasn’t around anyone who might point out just how bad things were.
I can forgive Anwar for telling JD about Chris’ abuse. I’d have liked there to have been some sort of “Hey, this stays between us, okay?” But getting support from a friend to deal with something like that is totally and 100% chill with me.
I can only assume that ‘this stays between us’ was implied, especially as ‘War and JD have a great friendship going on.
BUT. I can ONLY assume this.
“It’s difficult to learn, especially if you love a person, but often when people are upset they don’t need cheering up, just acknowledgement of the pain and a place to feel the emotion their past selves couldn’t express.”
YES YES YES. There’s a focus in media on a friend or partner ‘fixing the problem’ or doing something concrete to help the individual ‘get over it’, but in my experience these attempts can be annoying or even harmful, as you’re not focused on the individual’s needs, but your own.
Listening and being supportive (without giving advices of “help”) is a NonViolent Communication kind of mantra, It’s far more useful to listen to the person and wait for him/her/… to ask (or not) for any help before trying to impose some. Giving “solutions” or “fixing tips” can be pretty violent to receive, especially when most of the time, people already thought about those “solutions”…
I get the “don’t out people about abuse, about gender identity or sexual orientation without their consent etc”, I totally do. But when asking for help to know how to react, what to do and not do, to avoid hurting more and all, I can understand it 100%. It can be really hard to deal with this kind of thing alone, especially if you don’t know anything about it, so well… sometimes it’s best to get help :/ But I understand how it can be hard for the person “outed”… :/
While I agree that focusing on giving unsolicited advice instead of actually caring about the person can quite harmful, it can be pretty important to at some point ask if they want any help. I as a kid under a few visits to their office told a school counsellor extensively (on their request) about the psychological abuse at home and all she did was encouragingly smile and nod and do absolutely fuckall with the grief and pain I didn’t know what to do with, and that just to me confirmed what my parents had been telling me. That what happened to me didn’t count and that if my parents didn’t remember it/have a problem with it (after all, my parents had it so much worse as kids so that obviously rendered my issues null and void) then clearly it doesn’t matter and nobody gives a fuck about me anyway. I probably should add that I didn’t bother showing up to the 4th appointment with her (she was the one who told me to come back after each one, I was not the one soliciting it) because it just made me feel dead inside. Nothing happened after that and everything kept going like usual.
tl;dr: Yes, unsolicited advice can be damaging, but going to far in the other direction and normalizing/ignoring issues, especially if they are still ongoing, can as harmful too.
“active listening” isn’t just listening while shutting up, it’s not ignoring issues or normalizing and yeah of course, asking if the person need/want help is very important. But we should “give advices” only when we’re asked to do so.
The school counsellor wasn’t listening to you, she let you talked but listening isn’t just “letting the other talk”. It takes reformulating /reflecting what the other is saying he feels and needs (“you’re feeling that way, aren’t you?” or “so what you mean is that you feel […] and you would need that or to feel this way ?”). For the other to understand he’s listened to and understood, and cared about.
What you went through shows how those kind of people, said specialists, aren’t not well trained for the job, and that’s really an issue , especially in schools and place with children or young people..:/
Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. I apologize for misunderstanding what that was about. I just meant that for instance I would never have thought of asking for help even though I wanted it, as I didn’t realize it was possible for me to be given/take, so someone outright putting those options in front of me would have been necessary.
It IS hard not to want to fix the problem…Fixing things (computers mostly) is what I do for a living…just standing there and feeling like I’m doing nothing (just listening) while my spouse is hurt or angry is VERY hard….sometimes trying to fix things is too hard to resist…
Yeah, but wanting to fix other’s problems (or feelings..!) is a way of saying they can’t fix them themselves. When people don’t ask for help, mostly they have the “solutions” or “answers” in them. They have to find it themselves, and being here to listen, to aknowledge one’s feelings is most of the time enough. Being listened to, aknowledged and NOT JUDGED is what people want most when having issues…. In NonViolent Communication (NVC), you learn how to listen, to “echoe” the person’s feeling, or at least try to (if you’re wrong that’s ok, the person will correct it and by doing that, s-he will express her/his feelings verbally.), and that helps people express themselves and find their solutions…. or helps them to express a request (and ask for help if they think they need to).
I can garantee you since the day I listened instead of “giving help”, I really saw the difference. And I was helping people a lot more by listening than by imposing them advices or solutions etc. :)
I dunno, if I were in Anwar’s position, I would reach out to my best friend to get a handle on the situation. I know jack about kink as well, and I would want to understand what Chris was going through, and I’m sure JD is discreet enough to keep their mouth shut.
I would also want to make sure that person was no longer in my significant other’s life and if they were I would hunt them down and make them wish they died as a child, so this is also why I would confide in a friend so they can stop me from going to prison. >_>
I know what you mean. I know a fair bit about kink but I would have no idea how to deal with someone close to me telling me they’d been in an abusive relationship. I’ve got no real….framework for it and I’d want advice. That said I think it might have been better if War had been able to discuss it with someone who doesn’t know Chris, there by getting himself support without uh outing Chris to a friend.
I know the experience. I’m fortunate enough to have some Safe Sane mentors in my community, but not without a hard time happening first.
Quick seque: What is the second panel? I keep staring at it but can’t make sense of it?
Bedsheets and a tissue, I think?
Tab, on the small avatar of the discussion between Anwar and JD, it really looks like a picture, not a drawing, and clearly looks like JD posing with Anwar. Did you used actual pictures of real people to draw your characters ? Are they people you know or random pictures you found ?
Thanx :)
I am the goddamn wet nightmare of motherfuckers like that because i have proven that I WILL TEAR APART THE FABRIC OF SPACE AND TIME FOR THE JUSTICE DESERVED
Not against the wishes of the survivor I hope. This just reminds me too much of the machoismo attitudes of “I will kill/beat up anyone who I find out raped my [romantic interest/family member]” where they know for a fact that the survivor does not want to their special one(s) to completely throw the survivor away by valuing petty revenge above the survivor’s needs.
Often times there’s no “fixing” people. Sometimes people are not ready to heal, and you just gotta be let them be.
Yes. Sometimes, just being available as support for someone is the best thing you can do to help them get to/through that process of healing.