No, reading/creating dark fiction to deal with ptsd or other mental illness is not just re-traumatising selfharm
Apparently not typing this is costing me sleep because I canāt stand people being this aggressively wrong on the internet and actively harming other peopleās treatment because theyāre a fuck wit who thinks their feelings are more true than medical research and other peopleās personal experiences.
1. Iām going to upfront state if someoneās re-traumatising themselves using dark fiction they are DOING IT WRONG.
This is why the variety of warnings exist. This is why tags exist. Weāve created a space in which the viewing experience can be more informed than that of the average book or tv show explicitly to protect people and allow them to inform their viewing experience. Hell we even broke down rape and sexual assault tags to cover multiple varieties of these things to make sure people were as safe as they could get.
While objectively rape, non-con and dub-conĀ are all rape tags, itās not about softening that itās rape, itās about classifying the type of rape or grade of content so someone can inform their viewing experience. Can you senseless fucks please stop insisting itās claiming these things arenāt rape. Two seconds of googling the tags would tell you up front theyāre all rape, theyāre just differentiating the variety of rape so people can inform their viewing experience and not be triggered.
For people who claim to be fighting for victims you sure fucking love actively removing things victims have to protect themselves.
2. Shipping to cope isnāt just exposure therapy. God thereās a million fucking ways people can use fiction in recovery and only like two of those are forms of exposure therapy.
The more common usages are:
āusing fiction to break down the events that happened to you into a manageable set upā because post abuse for a lot of people the thoughts, memories and understanding of the experience are a big old noodly jumble that gets tangled up and eventually fucks with the ability to move past it. By reading or writing about the experience the feelings and thoughts can be de-tangled and ideally turned into something manageable to process.
ācreating a fictional version of events of how you wish things happenedā which is simply a variety of wish fulfilment that can make the experience in the past less painful or otherwise lessen the effects of the trauma sustained.
Ā Seeing a character you love experience what you went through and come out the other side of it possibly recovering or working towards recovery can help enable seeing yourself eventually doing the same. if you canāt conceptualise recovery or surviving, itās very difficult to move forward, sometimes seeing a character you love doing it is the push needed to think āI could do this.ā
Alternatively, simply seeing a character experience the same thing can just make you feel less alone.
Sometimes fictionalising the experience helps separate the experience from you.
Sometimes sexualising the experience makes the event less threatening to reduce the fear of future victimisation or take control of existing experiences. This doesnāt diminish the seriousness of the original event, itās simply how the person chooses to handle this.
If youāre unable to express what personally happened to you, sometimes putting those experiences on a character and vicariously experiencing sympathy through the audience or the story can help.
And thereās so many more, this is just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. The fact is everyone recovers differently and thereās as many ways of utilising fiction in the process as there are people whoāve experienced some form of sexual assault. As long as theyāre not hurting themselves (re-traumatisation), tagging correctly (preventing others from accidentally being triggered), and listening to tags on the fics they read (again preventing re-traumatisation) AND thus not hurting anybody else, itās legal, itās safe and it isnāt your business.
3. Not everyone is coping with victimisation. Specifically generalised anxiety disorders and OCD which is also an anxiety disorder are two obvious examples of mental illness that can be treated through fiction.
The biggest thing with an anxiety disorder is that they love to jam random intrusive thoughts into your brain, and it really isnāt as simple as just ignoring them or pretending a douche bag is telling you to do something.
In an anxiety disorder, trying to ignore it will make it worse. Worrying about it will make it worse. Trying not to worry about it, guess what? makes it worse.
Sometimes the only way to ditch a thought is to address it directly.
People whoāve experienced intrusive thoughts about how if they donāt perform the rituals theyāll murder their family, therapists have them write out plans about killing their family to prove that despite what the brain is telling them, they arenāt going to do it. Therapists have handed people knives to prove they can be trusted not to murder people.
With the use of fiction an intrusive thought can be assigned to a characters actions. Fiction can be used as a way to think about an intrusive thought without becoming anxious you might turn the thought into action and by having directly addressed the intrusive thought you can get rid of it.
If youāre anxious about an event, you can write about a character experriencing the worst case scenario to reassure yourself that the thing your scared of is fictional. Or you could write about what youāre worried about going well as supporting evidence youāll be fine.
Again these are just examples, there are many many more ways people manage mental and physical illness with fiction just as fiction can be used and mental health upkeep after a traumatic event.
And hell, even if youāre not mentally ill and havenāt experienced a traumatic event, if you want to write about a dark scenario, you should. Because not everyone going through these things can write or draw and rely on others to provide content to manage these things.
