What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: I’m a CSA survivor who writes to help me process my abuse. I was wondering if you have articles or links, forums, etc. that talk about this? When I google i can’t find articles about it. Thanks! And thank you for speaking out for us!

star-anise:

fozmeadows:

Most of what I know about those experiences has been shared with me directly by individuals in conversation. That said, I’ve made a lot of those friends through fandom and fandom spaces, so if you look around for people to talk to, I’m sure you’ll find someone :)

Hi! I can do a bit of wayfinding.

First I want to acknowledge Anarfea’s essay On the Subject of Noncon Fanworks: Thoughts of a Reader, Writer, Survivor. It’s trod a lot of this ground ahead of me, much more courageously.

Next, to explain terms Foz is using: PTSD symptoms are grouped into four categories. Two of them are avoidance symptoms (wanting to avoid reminders of your trauma) and intrusive symptoms (having memories of your trauma go HI I’M BACK without you deliberately inviting them). Both of them are components in PTSD, but trauma survivors are HUGELY diverse as to which symptoms show up where.

So a lot of the “bad fic” discussion is a conflict between people whose avoidant symptoms are ascendant (”I don’t even want to be reminded that abuse exists”) and people with strong intrusive symptoms, especially of the kind, “My abuse is the only thing that gets me really interested and aroused".

These links aren’t things I’ve deeply vetted; I’ve just done searches, knowing the right kind of search words to use, and skimmed the surface of what’s out there. If I’d included academic research articles behind paywalls, this list would be endless. People have been paying serious attention to the tendency of CSA survivors to have, enjoy, and sometimes be entirely fixated on, fantasies very reminiscent of their abuse, for thirty or forty years now. (As has been the fact that the vast majority of these survivors do not go on to abuse others.)

When this is addressed in therapy it’s less often to reduce occurrence of the fantasies (though that can be done when survivors feel guilt and shame and want to get rid of them), but more to help the survivor become sexually aroused by things that aren’t related to their trauma, when having a fixation is getting in the way of them having the sex life they want. 

So, a sampler of what’s out there:

Reblogging for useful links!

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  5. edward-mustbang said: @vfd-sugar-bowl Here’s some sources since you clearly lack the common sense to research on your own :)
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