Aiden Harte

I made some mini zines. I'm selling them on Etsy to raise some funds for my top surgery. Please share around and consider buying. ❤️

Abuse is also a mental health concern. Abuse is often a cycle of behaviors that a person develops to cope with trauma, insecurities, anger, and/or mental illness. Often these behaviors may have been learned from caregivers during childhood who had the same or similar behaviors, learned as a defense mechanism at some point in life, or learned through toxic social norms.

Abusers are fully capable of change, but it takes a lot of time and effort to pull themselves out of the cycle of abusive behaviors. They have to really want to do it. They have to earnestly and consistently put in effort to unlearn these abusive behaviors. This process can be excruciatingly difficult. It demands a lot of insight and realizations that can be very uncomfortable to process. I think that this why so many abusers refuse to change. Also, relapses are possible, which is why an abuser may need to distance themselves from certain relationship dynamics in which they behaved abusively in the past until they're far enough along on their healing journey to no longer partake in the abuse.

Support for a recovering abuser can include holding them accountable for their behaviors, checking in to see how their recovery process is going, being a friend they can vent to now and then, and maintaining firm boundaries in order to maintain the relationship/friendship. If your safety is at risk, consider ending the relationship/friendship or at least putting distance between the two of you.

Professional help in this country (USA) isn't good enough, especially for people with severe, treatment-resistant mental illness (such as myself).

Therapy sessions are only one hour a week. Psych medication helps, but it doesn't fix everything. Mental hospitals are short-term and focused on stabilizing with medication, but therapy rarely happens in them, even group therapy. Long-term facilities are often too expensive for people who are already unstable to afford.

Most people wanna pass on their friends to professionals when they are suicidal. But you don't have to be a professional to save a life. All you have to do is be a GOOD FUCKING FRIEND. If you know your friend is suffering, don't let them suffer alone. Don't leave it to the professionals alone. The professionals play an important role, yes, but friends and family play an EQUALLY important role as professionals.

In fact, whenever a professional is making a crisis safety plan with me, Step One is ALWAYS to call a friend or family member. And that's for CRISIS SITUATIONS, which people often pass on to a professional because they don't feel like doing it themselves or because they don't think they're capable of helping.

But you ARE capable of helping,

So reach out. Check in on your friends. They are sick. They need help. IT TAKES A VILLAGE. PEOPLE NEED COMMUNITY. We CANNOT do it alone. It may be difficult to you. Some days it will seem impossible. But it's not. And if it's hard for you, imagine how painful it must be for your friend to go through this every single day.

Real friends are gonna stick around, even when things are tough. Even when things feel like they're tough all the time. But being that friend who CONSISTENTLY shows up to remind a struggling person that they care and love them UNCONDITIONALLY will help them feel so much less alone in what they're going through.

Imo this is a well-intentioned, but very cruel thing to say to someone. Because that's just how not being a human works. Nobody is able to feel truly happy while living in isolation and not knowing how to form meaningful connections with other people.