External Support for Internal Troubles

Hello! We’ve noticed that there aren’t very many spaces for people who experience exotrauma to talk about that and seek support from each other and that’s something really important to us so we’ve made this blog!

We’ll post positivity and general recovery tips etc. as we can but people can also send asks to vent or to ask for advice like most trauma support blogs on here!

Here’s our carrd where more information can be found!

[DNI/BYF transcript:   

You identify yourself with "Minor Attracted People" or pedophiles. (Having paraphilic disorders is different, there's no such thing as a thought crime and you are safe here.)   

You're an active part of the proshipper or anti/anti community (the core beliefs of the community that fiction has no impact on reality is in direct antithesis to the purpose of this blog, and while there are no doubt well intentioned people in that community it is not at all a safe one.)   

Are part of any hate groups such as Trans-Exclusionary radical feminists, and All Lives Matter. This also includes "narcissistic abuse" survivors and those against people with NPD or no empathy, and anyone who for any other reason intend on harming people.  

 If you for any reason at all target and fakeclaim or mock systems, people in the kin community, delusional attachments, and anyone else who may believe they've lived lives outside of this one. This is a safe space and there will be no gatekeeping.

]

We can’t collectively really be around alcohol at all. Even “healthy” amounts. Because the smell can trigger a whole host of stuff.

Even outside of situations like that… it shows up in weird ways.

But I don’t feel like I can discuss this stuff because it’s not like any of us ever “really” struggled with that kind of stuff.

Oh that's so real yeah! Problems with alcohol is something we've heard of in fictives before! I think, generally you should be allowed to set boundaries around alcohol even if you don't have current/body trauma with it. If you need ways to discuss it people you could say it's sensory issue related maybe? Since it's the smell that's triggering you.

In any case any relationship with alcohol is valid and you're definitely not alone in this!

Exotrauma can really suck but it cannot take away little moments of humor and joy like that.

-fever

It's been so long that I hope you don't still feel this way but I'll answer this for anyone who does.

I think this goes hand in hand with a lot of what gets discussed when it comes to self harm and self-destructive behaviors. When you feel hurt emotionally and something feels wrong but you aren't able to get support for that it becomes really easy to just wish that you were physically hurt. On one hand there's the idea that you'll be taken more seriously that way, this is complicated and really depends on where you are and who you're with as many people in physical pain aren't being taken seriously either but the feeling behind it is understandable. I think another cause of it is that even if you know you still wouldn't be taken seriously, there's consequences that you know how to deal with. You don't (normally) feel stupid for being upset when you have a physical injury because that's seen as something understandable to be upset about when emotional pain often just isn't.

The pain itself isn't what's going to help you though but rather taking your emotions themselves seriously and treating the hurt there instead. What you need to do is try and convince yourself that your hurt is already real, even if it isn't visible to everyone else. From there, treat that emotional injury like a physical one. What can you do to treat that pain? Sometimes it's distraction and letting it scab over time, sometimes there's ways to treat yourself that work like medicine, and sometimes it means sitting with the hurt to understand and analyze it and then to get it out somewhere.

I think what I'd also say to ease the type of dysphoria you're experiencing is to make your exomemories a greater part of your identity. Your body is abled now but you can definitely incorporate disabled allyship and activism into your everyday life, even if just in small ways. Take these experiences that mean so much to you and find ways to apply that to your everyday life and it will ease a lot of that fish out of water feeling that a lot of people with exotrauma end up getting.

Rather than viewing your life then and your life now as fully separate, view it as a continuation. You're someone who experienced incredible hardship and who was disabled and now you're suddenly physically healed from all of that and taken out of the situation that you were in. What does the future look like for you at this point? What do you want it to look like?

I know that my exotrauma makes me want to get involved with similar ongoing problems, to the extent that I am able and that is appropriate for me. I think that because there's a lot of focus and discussion around privilege and how it relates to exotrauma that it can feel somehow harmful or disingenuous to seek out people currently going through the same things. There definitely can be a problem of voyeurism where people claiming past lives try to enter a community they're not a part of and that isn't okay in the slightest, of course. But if you view it less as being equivalent to people's material reality right now and more as good a reason to be compassionate as any (because ultimately it doesn't matter why you're helping people so long as you're actually helping) then you're able to build a meaningful community around you with allyship.

That's kind of a lot of easily performative sounding words and this isn't me saying oh you have exotrauma? why aren't you taking action to help real people suffering(tm) or anything. I just think that if you look at your life as being one longer one and try and view your new body and circumstances as an opportunity where relevant, that helps fight the hopelessness that's really common and gives you an excuse to do something important on top of that which can be really cool.

Glad that it's not getting to you too badly. There should be a support group for fictives whose exotrauma isn't taken seriously by their source fandoms it's literally so common.

I get quiet sometimes. I can be clever. I know enough to know better, I'm just impulsive. I do have trouble with numbers, and counting, and math, and spelling. But I also know how to calculate how fast a missile comes out of my rocket launcher on pattern recognition alone and how that's gonna affect the poor bastard I'm aiming at.

I'm not stupid. I'm not a joke.

But when people take me seriously, you get things like Emesis Blue, a movie where I am just a husk of who I am. A clone, running down into the fucking Inferno and being shattered into a million pieces You get fics of me spiraling into paranoid madness. You get all this horrible shit that didn't happen to me, and I'm already paranoid as it is, so it sends me into unreality episodes and I don't know what's fucking real.

I dunno. It bothers me.

-Jane J. Doe from 🪽

God you're actually so real for this I don't know this source but the trenches of fandom misinterpretation are so incredibly dire.

I hate it I hate it I hate it sm I want to cry

There's a lot of ways that you can get exomemories that aren't canon or in some cases directly contradict canon and it's very normal to do so. Because there's so many different perspectives on what exomemories are it's hard to point to one specific cause.

If you believe that exomemories are things that genuinely happened to you, in a past life for example, then it can be difficult to parse that with it also being a fictional story in our current universe. I don't even really have a clear answer for where story ideas are coming from if this is true (we personally do believe in past lives to be clear) and it's something that I've always wondered about. Maybe the version of the story they're telling in canon is how it happened for another version of these characters.

Additionally, even if you believe that story ideas are all coming from somewhere they are still being processed through the creator(s) current biases and artistic vision. They're still making choices on what kind of story they want to tell and how they want the characters to be to tell that story and the accountability of that story is still on them. Often times as a writer I will be adapting our own exomemories and making deliberate changes or for stuff that isn't exomemories but still has a similar vivid quality to it, I might still decide to change the story that others are seeing for a number of reasons. Ultimately the fiction we see is fictional in this world so it's going to lack the realism that exomemories often bring.

Taking a step back from the idea of a multiverse, if you're someone who believes that exomemories are created by your brain then there's different reasons that you might get any one particular memory. The most commonly talked about is the idea that your brain is taking a memory your body experienced and has stored but has repressed for whatever reason and repackaged that with your source so it's easier to address. Often people take that to mean that you have to have experienced the exotrauma you have exactly at some point in real life and if it is impossible or exaggerated that you're getting false memories or are "faking" having exotrauma but that simply isn't the case at all. Not only can your brain change details and exaggerate things to better encapsulate the feelings you had during the actual memory but this is not the only place that exomemories can come from.

Ultimately, under this interpretation of exomemories they exist to help you process information. So you may be entirely right that you saw the way the fandom was treating your source and these exomemories were a response to the way that ableism was making you feel. You could be processing ableism you witnessed someone else experience or that you've been exposed to in the media/online or it could just be a way for your brain to contextualize built up feelings you've internalized over the years and give it a single cause.

All of that to say that it is extremely common to have exotrauma and exomemories that do not match what is portrayed in your source's canon. You're extremely valid and I also hope that people stop being ableist about your source posthaste.

It's been a few years since we got this, sorry for not responding to it sooner. We saw your feelings and cared about them. Since it's been a long time now, if you're still around I'm curious how things went with your irl boyfriend.

Even when the people around us are perfectly fine, even if we're happy around them, I think it's really normal still to miss the past. While I want to say that it's easier if you have the ability to introject the people you miss, and certainly that can help, it still isn't the same as the life you used to live and even though in many ways that can be a good thing it still is bound to sting sometimes.

Oh this one is so real. It's so complicated having a source because on one hand there's typically some catharsis seeing our stories get shared and sometimes fan spaces can be lowkey a safe haven for us when we're masking/closeted because it's a place you can express yourself without too many questions asked. Except it's also really rough because people (understandably for the most part) take fiction a lot less seriously than what's going on around us and that often means seeing people be flippant about our abusers or give them more attention than we'd like and sometimes fan spaces do more harm in the long run if we aren't able to filter out the upsetting stuff.

Recovering after death can be hard. Death is (usually but not always) viewed as the end so when that isn't the end of you but does mark change as big as being in a completely new lifetime it can be really hard to figure out what can even come after that.

I think recovery in this case is going to look like a combination of two different things.

The first is that you find things worth living for and add meaning to the life you're living right now. I have mixed feelings on the saying that the best revenge is a life well lived because sometimes it really just isn't but there is some truth to it. Your future is not dependent on him, there's so much more to your life now than what your circumstances were then and what was done to you in the past. When looking for joy there's physical stimulus you'll want (yummy food, getting cozy in a blanket or taking a nice bath or shower etc) and then also activities you'll want to do. (Our go to is video games but it could be different for you, there's so many different fun things to do in the world that you can try out and see what makes you happiest!)

The second thing is to process your past and your exomemories. You'll want to be careful how you go about this because you probably already have times where you just ruminate on your trauma or relive something unpleasant just to feel closer to it all and that's something that typically isn't good for you. Specifically, you'll want to find the things in your exomemories that you cherish and latch onto anything that gives your experiences meaning. You were ripped away from your loved ones and how things ended was not something you got to choose but try to think of everything that you did choose. The life you lived doesn't lose its value because it was cut short by someone, it wasn't all for nothing, just the fact that you lived it is enough to make it important and give it meaning.

Even when it forever changes the trajectory of your life, even in cases where it feels like you would not be the same person without it, your trauma will never solely be what defines you. Please remember that and take care of yourself.

Sorry this took so long to answer our executives have been dysfunction but I'm so glad that we've had such a positive impact on you! I'm really grateful for everyone who's interacted with us and made this a space that we continue to come back to. I know that we're doing the supporting on here but y'all give us the space to organize our thoughts and more or less kinda force us to take our own advice which can be really helpful!

Love you guys/p