I am Inas, a mother of two young children: Muhammad, 7 years old, and Hala, 5 years old. They should have been living their childhood like all children—safe and warm in the embrace of their father. But the war has stolen that dream from us😭😭😭

Six months ago, my husband Anas, a kind-hearted man who endured a life of poverty, was killed by a random shell while on his way to work as a taxi driver. Since that tragic day, I’ve been left to carry the unbearable weight of life alone.

I held a diploma in international secretarial studies and was about to start a job to help support my family. But the war shattered not only our home but also my hopes and dreams. We’ve been displaced six times and now live in a tent that offers no shelter from the bitter cold or the ever-looming fear.

My young children face relentless hunger that weakens their fragile bodies and a cold that knows no mercy for their small hearts. Each day, their cries for warmth and food grow louder, and each day, I feel more helpless to provide them with even the basics of life💔😭😭

I appeal to your humanity, to your compassion. We need your help to survive, to find a safe shelter, and to feed my children. Your generosity could be the reason Muhammad and Hala continue to live and find hope amidst this darkness🥹

Please, help me keep the light of these innocent children from being extinguished by this cruel world

Donation Link

My brother urgently needs another surgery along with medications and treatment to continue his recovery and avoid further complications 💔 Amount needed: $1500

Deadline : 3 June Only 3 Days

Current Progress: $23,432 / $24,932

This amount will help cover:

• Additional surgery

• Medications

• Medical supplies & follow-up care

We are doing everything we can, but we truly need your support 🙏

Wayne, 22

“I’m wearing Decora Kei. What inspires my style: Rainbows, maximalism, and tamagotchi.”

This is a difficult question and I’m not sure I can give a simple answer. Abusers often pretend to have forgotten things (particularly their abuse), sometimes they forget it because it simply wasn’t important to them and didn’t impact them the way it impacted their victim/s, some are able to convince themselves that certain things didn’t happen (denial).

It might help to consider if there are multiple things they claim they don’t remember and if there’s a common element between them, e.g. if they only forget incidents where they were abusive. If they always deny or “forget” their abuse but remember other interactions fairly consistently, that may be a sign that they’re lying. Another helpful approach is to consider what they gain or lose by saying they remember or don’t remember; abuse usually has a payoff, it achieves something and gives the abuser something they want. If all the things they forget work in their favour, that’s potentially a sign that they’re lying. Two of the primary ways abusers benefit from lying about their memory is that it enables them to escape responsibility for their abuse and it makes the victim doubt their own reality. The latter is a form of psychological abuse and, as you mentioned in your ask, gaslighting.

In terms of memory, there are a variety of different conditions that can interfere with it, too many to list, in fact. In general though, these memory issues will come up across the board and interfere with the person’s life, whether they can’t remember important events, what their schedule is for that day or where they put their keys.

(Men do this a lot but so do, for instance, white women dating partners of colour, or established adults dating someone much younger, cis people dating trans people, etc. It can happen in any combination but it’s most common when there’s already a power imbalance.)

In this abuse tactic, the abuser neatly places all responsibility for their behaviour on someone they have wronged.

You’re the one who had a problem with what they did, and they’ll claim this means it’s your job to handhold them through the process of Not Being A Shitty Person. This tactic often really lays on the guilt and makes you feel like if you don’t agree to be their ethics tutor, it’s your fault when they fuck up again.

Sometimes they’ll claim they were just Never Taught Any Better, or that abuse from someone else has made them unaware of how to act, but the key aspect of this tactic is that they use these as excuses to not try to learn appropriate behaviour on their own.

Someone who genuinely wants to learn to be better will seek out information on their own time on how to respect boundaries and how to engage with you in a safe and respectful manner. They might do research, seek therapy or talk to someone they trust about how to engage with others in a more respectful way.

If, however, they have zero intention of actually changing, they might just make a big show of repentance, claim they had no way of knowing, and then somehow by the end of the conversation you’ve agreed to not just proactively inform them of your own boundaries but be responsible for teaching them how to respect boundaries at all. Or even to be a sort of unpaid tutor in How to Not Be Misogynistic/Racist/Transphobic/etc.

In a healthy relationship, you may have to communicate your boundaries verbally, but once you have communicated them, the other person takes responsibility for respecting them and proactively checks in to make sure they fully understand those boundaries. If they mess up, they apologize and don’t put it on you.

You may have to communicate verbally how the other person can make you feel cared for, but once you do, the other person takes the initiative to treat you with care. If they are being careless with your feelings and you point it out to them, they make an effort to take better care.

You shouldn’t have to constantly remind someone to care about you and to treat you with respect.

You are not responsible for the moral growth of anyone but yourself and any children under your care.

In order to keep abusing people, an abuser needs everyone around them to think they’re not doing anything wrong. In order to do this, there are some pretty common patterns abusers follow.

It’s not always exactly like this, and some abusers skip some parts or do things that aren’t addressed here. This is also mostly geared toward non-family abuse, though some parts are applicable to family abuse. Anyway, here’s some stuff to watch out for.

First, the abuser dazzles their victim. They can do this in a number of ways: with extravagant gifts, charming flattery, intensity that feels like a compliment, or weirdly early declarations of love. This is the honeymoon period, where an abuser reels a victim in. Emotionally vulnerable or inexperienced people are the most susceptible to this; more experienced or secure people sometimes feel like something’s “off” but can’t always identify why. (Trust your instincts!)

This stage gets the victim to invest in the relationship, and, sometimes, gets the victim’s friends and family members thinking that the abuser’s a great person.

Second, the abuser slowly starts to break down their victim’s self-esteem and convinces the victim they deserve to be treated badly. It usually starts off with negging-style remarks or passive-aggressive comments. This sets the victim up as someone who deserves bad things to happen to them and the abuser as being really nice just for refraining from doing those bad things.

This sets up a version of reality where abuse is normal and the lack of it is a special kindness. This way, the victim feels grateful to the abuser for lapses in cruelty, and begins to believe that anyone else would probably treat them worse.

Third, they isolate their victims. This can happen in a lot of ways. The simplest is to monopolise the victims’ time and make the victim feel guilty for spending time with friends or family. Sometimes the abuser manipulates the victim into thinking that their friends and family hate them or treat them badly. It’s very common for the abuser to create an “us vs. them” mentality and try to get their victim to choose between the abuser and everyone else in the victim’s life.

Sometimes it’s more subtle: the abuser will act like a completely different person in public and in private, and make large parts of the relationship a secret from anyone who doesn’t think abuse is normal. The abuser may get the victim to keep the secret and keep up the pretence by making the victim feel guilty, ashamed or afraid.

This makes it so the victim has no support and no one telling them that the abuse is wrong or not their fault. (If someone tries, it’s common for the abuser to tell the victim that their friend is “trying to tear us apart” because of jealousy or other bad motives, reinforcing the us vs. them mentality.)

Fourth, they increase the intensity and frequency of the abuse gradually. What starts as a few mean remarks once in awhile turns into constant criticism and emotional manipulation.

If the abuser wants to be violent, it’s usually only after a long period of emotional abuse and isolation that they will start to physically hurt their victims. Any sexual abuse/violence usually happens after a period of emotional abuse, and can happen either before, after, or instead of physical abuse.

The abuser will often go hot-and-cold, and do really nice things out of the blue to keep the victim hooked. The abuser wants the victim to think that honeymoon period is the baseline and the abuse is the exception, to keep the victim invested in the relationship. The abuser will minimize the bad times as much as possible and treat them like they’re rare occurrences that were brought on by the victim’s extreme horribleness.

This whole time, they convince their victim that it’s not abuse. The victim feels like it’s their fault. They have no one else to talk to about it. Any time they call the abuser out, the abuser twists the victim’s words to make it seem like the victim is crazy, mistaken, or manipulative. The victim can become convinced that they deserve even worse than what the abuser does, that the abuser is being nicer to them than they deserve, and that anyone else would probably treat them worse and they’d deserve it.

If it looks like the victim will tell others what happened, the abuser destroys the victim’s credibility. Abusers do this by acting completely different in public and in private, by telling friends and family how emotionally unstable and out of touch with reality the victim is, by painting the victim as a malicious liar, or by claiming that the victim was actually abusing the abuser. This makes it so friends and family are reluctant to “choose sides”.

Since so much of the abuse happened behind closed doors, it’s easy for the abuser to muddy the water enough that the community says, “We can’t know what really happened.” And since the victim is the one who’s too upset to focus on maintaining ties, while the abuser is out actively campaigning for community support, the end result is often that the abuser remains welcome in the social group while the victim is forced out by community opinion or the need to remain safe.

The next time the abuser does this with someone else, the community is already invested in believing the abuser is not an abuser. To say that the abuser acted badly in the new case means that the community might have been wrong in the old case, which is an uncomfortable thought.

In addition, each new case where the entire community rallies behind the abuser normalises the idea that most accusations are lies and that the abuser is a sympathy-worthy victim who keeps being targeted by malicious false accusations. Even if someone privately disagrees, there’s a lot of social pressure to keep the abuser around. So it’s not uncommon for the community support of the abuser to actually become stronger each time there’s an accusation. 

—

Why Does He Do That? - Lundy Bancroft (75)

just started this book yesterday, finally. I’m sure I will be posting more excerpts in the coming days.

I don’t care what someone’s own background is

I don’t care if they’re victims of abuse themselves

I don’t care what issues they’re trying to work through

or what traumas they’ve endured

NOBODY has the right to abuse you

NOBODY has the right to direct that pain onto you

If somebody tries to write off what they’re doing as a product of their abuse or trauma, do not buy it

You do not deserve it

None of it.

They don’t have that right.