[bodyncoherence]

i feel i should make a disclaimer at this point, (this blog has like 15 followers and those that are still here and not bots probably chose to be here, but in case anyone accidentally stumbles over me and settles to do a scroll-down): this is a selfish navel-gazing blog and specifically currently i am preoccupying myself with rape, csa and incest narratives as a personal project which includes talking of memoirs i have read and narratives i meet and how they relate to my experiences with these things, something i apparently don't want to do 'entirely alone' but can also only do 'anonymously' online.

some tags i use for this.

[bodyncoherence]

sex musings

everybody telling their CSA vs adult guy who was into you when you were a teenager stories and mine is this guy in his 30s that i met in judo practice with this extremely common name (if i told you his nationality coupled with this information you'd immediately know his name) who befriended me and who courted me and who took me on trips and who introduced me to his sister and who proposed skinny dipping and who seduced me and who was, philosophically, not entirely estranged, i'd argue, from the child-lover crowd, a claim i make based on the following: a) his "best friend" was seven, he told me, b) his "soulmate" and "perfect woman" had been 12, which, alas, was too young :(, c) the pictures he drew and the movies he showed me and the comments he made on them, in which he fetishised the skinniness and prepubescent litheness of the limbs, a beauty ideal we more than once discussed, d) the story of a graphic child rape written by his friend he translated for me and gave me, and who, i think, found me attractive both on personal as well as on legal-pragmatical grounds, since i was 15, pushing 16, and he might have thought: well, that's close to acceptable, and will soon be! anyway, what happened to this guy, and his project with me, was that, yes i was a lonely weird teen, yes i was estranged from my family and grateful for his positive attentions, yes i was an excitable teen who was extremely happy to be adultly included in his adult group of friends, and i liked hanging out with them and him, but alas, i was already sexually traumatized up to there, which meant that any and all attempts to get to any physical base with me, any even gently escalating touch, had me hysterically physically sick, puking all over the place, absolutely incapacitated, supremely unsexy levels of you Cannot subtly pressure this teen into anything without their body doing all that. i would not, for instance, remain sitting, heart beating fast, in confused discomfort, as things happened, i would sit there like that for some seconds or some minutes, and then puke would erupt all over his shoes, i'd wail sobbingly, total dysfunction. he'd have had to rape-rape me to make anything happen, and that, he did not. i do not know if this guy would have been Good for me or Bad for me, as a teen, probably slightly bad, i'd assume, potentially a mixed bag, but the thing i have often thought on is the strange fact that CSA, which in so many ways made me vulnerable, and caused such lasting hurts, actually, i think, in this case, acted as defence. minus the CSA, this somewhat inadvisable guy with his somewhat inadvisable opinions would have had sex with me, and we would have had a 15-16 to 30+ sexual-romantic relationship. but we didn't.

[kakudo45]

being a little handsy

[bodyncoherence]

spent a weird week. nominally i've "played sick" (went to my primary care guys and asked to be written sick for 1 week because i'm stressed out), i've also "been sick" (sick of it all!!!!), but also i've "been sick" (genuinely, several things i wanted to do undone because exhausted and incapable), also "sick?" (insomnia up to there, like. ridiculous levels), which i told my friend(s) whom i ghosted/flunked on/etc that a) the insomnia b) kind of depressed, but. actually actually part of the non-sleeping and non-doing was that i was frantically, frantically, and, i'll add, quite joyfully (not much depressed) writing away and occupying away and doing away at my little files and little projects, but none of which i can connect to myself, they must remain a hidden pocket (for now?) because, in content, they are not even weird quirky content, oh that's strange content but VIOLENCE FETISH !! VIOLENCE FETISH !! VIOLENCE FETISH !! (etc), and i am, admittedly, somewhat besides myself, so, what did you do all week? i couldn't sleep and i was sick :(

[euritsua]

[cleaningouttherooms]

its wild the degree to which people talk about reading and eating in similar terms - the concept of a "reading diet", of "media consumption", the idea of certain stories as "empty calories" or "fast food" and some as "eating your vegetables", the moralization of both as personal failings, the framing of health with the specter of degeneration if not complied with... the idea that there are things that are sensorily pleasant and that you find yourself craving, and there are things that sustain you, and those are not the same things. the framing of literacy as reading the correct way and taking away the correct meaning from a text. according to nutritional guidelines

[cleaningouttherooms]

@fractalradio you are so right for bringing up 'slop'

[treely-ruly]

Palette cleaning painting (you know when you have a watercolour palette and you've got a billion muddied colours on the mixing tray??)

[bodyncoherence]

not even sure of the topic, on decisions humans make maybe

there's this clinical concept of "sense of foreshortened future" which i really strongly related to when i first read of it, and the way it can look like is one oscillates between worse days where one debates whether to kill oneself or soothes one's anxiety with the knowledge that one could kill oneself or seriously plans steps on how to kill oneself and better days where one is occupied with something engaging enough that one doesn't think much of the past or future, or specifically, not much of the future.

this can remain so for a long time, for me for instance, some 15+ years. any "future planning" is impossible because it creates such acute dread. i remember just six years ago, and since i'm approaching 40 i already was in my 30s then, someone told me of her easy plan for economising for retirement and i remember angrily rebuffing her like you Know i cannot think of Such Things and my heart racing out of my chest. i could not participate in anything that needed active planning like a ticket one should buy some weeks in advance because even three months or three weeks in the future was Too Much. what did work for me though was following tracks i had, at some prior point, been sat on, if only because i lacked the courage, and ability, and planning power to change tracks.

and i'm thinking of this phenomenon and how common i think it must be. because in the meanwhile, of course, life and its demands go on. and here then it depends on our levels of disability. where we are disabled to incapacitation or are not. some are, totally, in all relevant respects. but if we are not, we will meet expectations. expectations both enforced by direct materialities like, you want food you want housing you need a job and so on, but also, class/gender/etc based social expectations on what to do. for instance, for some social backgrounds, get an education and advance your job, or, get yourself married and start a family. and especially if the way you are as person is such that you cannot touch certain topics, it's very possible that you'll just do what you're told, or what is done, or what seems available at the time, even if in other slices of your self, you might be grappling with other problems altogether, in strong opposition, maybe. and so a life proceeds on these parallel tracks, because time proceeds.

and we end up with adults but "sometimes eight sometimes twelve" years old with three children, or 45 year old professionals with responsibilities and powers who have not quite an idea of what they are doing here and why. what i'm thinking is some people gain power, become empowered, if only through aging and luck and circumstance, but also the splits or connections between power and purpose and ability and 'self' are not always immediately logical. "why did you have children if you couldn't take care of them", "why did you become X if you Z", "you are A but also B???". well, i'll have to try and phrase this one differently, i'm not sure it makes sense. i guess i think the splits here can be much bigger and stranger than usually acknowledged and the two extremes of explanations a) hypocritical liar b) D.I.D. don't quite cut it, it's not the correct register to think of this.

[pommegf]

wednesday evening walk home after work

[nemfrog]

"Root systems of shrubs and herbs of the forest floor." The ecological relations of roots. 1919.

Internet Archive

[psikonauti]

Eric Roux-Fontaine 

A country in your eyes 

Mixed media on canvas

[bodyncoherence]

the goal then would be to live life beyond secrecy which doesn't mean not having secrets or keeping things intimate but that there aren't whole big planes of life that cannot touch each other lest they'd disintegrate and also the dignity of honesty. there's been lots of shifts towards holding better together over the last decade, but also still total breakages of sense, i look at this, i look at that, both is true, it doesn't make sense together, or only if i'm completely bullshitting people or myself, which i am not, though.

[blooming-lenses]

field of poppies 2025/06/14

[bodyncoherence]

in a society permeated by psychotherapy and psychology and psychiatry and self-help and so on and forth, many people have been to therapy, but those that haven't might have read self-help books, but those that haven't might have scrolled by a self-help post, but those that haven't have a friend that have, and so on.

examples of bad therapy-speak dialogue like: "do you want to do [x]?" "oh, sorry, i'm not sure i'm comfortable with that..." "that's, fine, would [y] work for you?" "ah, yes, probably, sorry for being difficult..." "please don't apologise this is totally valid" "<3" "<3" are conversations i have had irl. it's also, i'd say, a spontaneous mode of interaction among many people i (voluntarily) hang out with. checking in, validating, i-statements, all that.

obviously, also, we have all encountered people explaining their problems using icd/dsm diagnoses, people talking of their diagnoses, people talking of their issues using the language of psychiatry/psychotherapy, we are aware of the ubiquitousness of words like narcissism, toxic, trigger, dissociation, trauma, ptsd, my boundaries this, my feelings that, self-care. thoughtful people use this, assholes use this, friends use this, enemies use this, your boss uses this, corporations use this, advertisements use this, etc. this goes beyond gender, class, race, and background, there is no really rugged manly man left that genuinely has remained entirely untouched by this.

AS SUCH in a contemporary setting, i believe decisions must be me made not so much whether characters know (some of) these words, use (some of) these concepts, but how. would character A by the type to selfdiagnose with audhd, would character B have ever been sent to useless therapy, would character C haughtily scoff at all that but silently identify as psychopath, would character D consciously distance themselves from [psych label], would character F "misuse" [psychological term], etc. legitimately i don't think it makes sense to aim to avoid therapy-speak in a contemporary setting, or to imagine a character that would be entirely innocent of it. maybe doing so creates another fantasy, the fantasy of the "pure" the "real" the "non-artificial". where emotions and deeds are so honest, where mental illness is "real" and not "learned in a book", where characters do not preoccupy themselves with such trivial manners, where they have real problems, were encounters are raw and natural and not guided by cringe little scripts...

as for fantasy or pseudohistorical settings, it is one thing to avoid using terms like trauma, dissociation, ptsd, depression, trigger, borderline pd, because these words have no place in the setting. this is easily done. but it is another to not write what is happening according to the logic of these concepts, as learned by us. one might avoid all 'modern parlance' yet show-not-tell a flashback, show-not-tell a dissociation, show-not-tell a panic attack, show-not-tell something right out of trauma theory book. how to genuinely not conceive of this character's inner working, this character's problems and troubles following the logic of psychotherapy and psychiatry, influenced by these terms and concepts? even going "and i'm precisely NOT going to give this character this issue/this reaction" "and i'm going to make their conflict not about that" "and i'm Not going to make it about [repression/trauma/insight-as-plot-moving/etc]" is in dialogue with this. how to avoid therapyspeak in our texts and in our hearts, to truly write beyond that, in a different register altogether? this might say more about what kind of person i am and my background than it being generally true, it's hard for me to tell, but i know that personally, with my abilities and skill level, i'm not even aiming for that, i struggle to imagine what that might look like, and content myself with being as deliberate as possible in playing with the rulebooks laid out in my therapyspoken mind.

[expressions-of-nature]

the blood of the earth by Lionel Fellay

[bodyncoherence]

.

even allowing for various 'domestic' torture definitions that exist some legislations, though not the one i live under right now, i don't think any of my experiences would meet those criteria, in fact, apart from the child sexual abuse, i'm not sure anything i've experienced meets any 'legislative' criteria for any crime at all. which isn't the point. and also irrelevant, as i will not pursue any way of law and have not. but just for framing and honesty.

but i am interested in some contents to be found in some accounts.

for one, that anguish is on purpose and willed. knowing this is something that effort was put in, being told this.

second the presence of rituals of degradation, of course abuse is always humiliating, right, the way people inch away and past in embarrassment when they notice, 'victim' as schoolyard insult. but special enactments. the use of nakedness, disgust: spit, puke, pee, excrements, dirt, smeared on, smeared into, made to ingest, etc. (one thing about th.eon in a.soiaf for me for instance is the social humiliation play around not being allowed to bathe and being insulted for it. which i actually don't write fanfic about, btw. incidentally. lol.) as often, it's interesting to me that various people 'come up' with elements of this independently. being 'made to look and smell bad' as social humiliation/isolation/punishment, being peed on or into as penetrative sex experiments, being made to eat a piece of shit for group bonding over shared cruelty, are all very different things, yet, kind of the same category of thing, i think. fluids/body/disgust. i'm not sure if this is so shameful that many simply never speak of it, but i don't often see this related, to this extent, in account of rape or abuse, but i do in accounts about torture. this is also, more than experiences of pain, something that has stayed, curtailing, physical experience and social possibilities. or maybe that's not true, as the terror of pain also has dramatically blocked a number of intimacies, but disgust is something of its own.

i'm also interested in the lack of dignity, where it's not specific relationships, but an overarching social position, that this can happen to some, and it's not really that special, either. but sometimes this is described as a specific logic or method. i recently had a brief situation with a friend where i noticed that knowing this can so easily happen makes a difference, maybe just a very small one, but either something to think on, or not. or to be terrified of, frankly.

i also think it strange that 'questioning', long, overwhelming, scary, exhausting 'questioning' sessions can be part of normal familial life, or even social life beyond, but then of course, this becomes a subject i'm interested in.

that's what i want to write about this so far. i have in my head clouds or circles of overlap, patterns, about varied of these preoccupations.

[theegoist]

El Anatsui (Ghanaian-Nigerian, b. 1944) - Resolution, Mixed media, 320.0 × 336.0 cm (2016)