We post about RAMCOA/OEA, trauma, paraphilias and abuse. If that unsettles you, curate your feed, not our content.
β±ΰ§βΏοΈ΅ BYF/BYI
We donβt play the syscourse Olympics. Donβt bring harmful transID, radqueer, or pro/neu-contact paraphile discourse here (we are strictly anti-contact but pro-paraphilia). We donβt believe in βCluster B abusersβ or βrecovery purity politics.β Endo neutral in the sense that we couldnβt care less about what you do with your life as long as you leave us out of it and donβt harass us. Basically neutral on a majority of the discourse stances on this hellsite. If you enter our inbox/comments with nonsense, expect to be blocked or roasted.
We don't have a DNI because let's be honest people rarely read/follow them.
βDonβt mistake my kindness for weakness. Iβll choke you with the same hand I fed you with.β
I'm in the process of setting up a WordPress site. This does not mean any of the things from my masterlist will be removed here or be blocked only to the site, I will keep posting on this Tumblr. The site is simply a bit more personalized around things like my spiritual beliefs, certain daily experiences, general daily entries etc. Mainly an area where people can't twist my words and share my posts (they still can obviously, just not in the similar Tumblr cesspool fashion.) Once I'm happy with the setup I may add the link to my pinned post.
Hello there. I was scrolling through your blog, once again, and I thought I'd pop up and say that I do appreciate the way you approach all the topics you discuss, and your contributions to this community. It honestly is a shame that your posts don't get the attention they deserve, because they really are useful, deeply interesting and more relatable than anything else I have ever encountered. Thank you, and take care.
Pd- I'd be intrigued to read about your daily life as a farmer, simply because of a post you made about it back in May.
Hello anon, thank you; thatβs genuinely kind of you to say. I appreciate it. I write these posts mostly for myself and the small handful of people who actually get it or want to understand, so knowing someone out there finds them useful and relatable makes the work feel worth it.
And yeah, I can do a post or little daily series about daily farm life. Itβs a weird mix; equal parts peaceful and chaotic, depending on the day. Iβll put it on the list and try to get it written up properly.
Thanks again for the message. Itβs rare to get one that doesnβt feel like someoneβs trying to poke me or turn me into their next project, so this was a nice change of pace.
Selective Objectivity: When Being βThe Reasonable Oneβ Becomes a Trap
I am very good at being the reasonable one. Annoyingly good at it.
I can take a messy, emotional, heated situation, strip out the theatrics, and hand back a clean, accurate read of what is actually happening. I donβt get swept up in the group feeling. I donβt automatically side with whoever is loudest or most distressed. I can hold multiple perspectives at once without needing one of them to be βthe victimβ and the other βthe villain.β People have called this emotional neutrality, analytical empathy, detachment, even coldness. I just call it thinking clearly.
For a long time I thought this was an uncomplicated strength. And in many ways it is. It keeps me out of pointless drama. It stops me from escalating when escalation would be stupid. It makes me useful in crises. It means I rarely look back at a conflict and cringe at how irrational I was. My self-awareness + low emotional contagion + high pattern recognition make me very effective at being the person who can still see the board when everyone else is flipping the table.
But there is a cost that no one warns you about when you are consistently βthe reasonable one.β
The Trap
Once people clock that you are the person who stays calm, who doesnβt take things personally, who can discuss ugly behaviour without immediately moralising or exploding, they start using you.
Not always maliciously. Often just lazily.
You become the designated:
Conflict mediator
Emotional dumpster
Reality-checker
Free therapist
Person who is expected to absorb shitty behaviour without βoverreactingβ
Because you can handle it. Because you have handled it before. Because you didnβt cry or scream or make it about your feelings last time, so clearly you donβt mind.
The problem is that capacity is not the same as consent.
Just because I can stay objective and functional while someone unloads their unfiltered chaos onto me does not mean I want to do it constantly, or that it costs me nothing.
It does cost me.
It costs energy.
It costs patience.
It costs the finite resource of me giving a shit.
And the more reliable you are at being reasonable, the less other people feel they need to be reasonable around you. They donβt self-edit. They donβt check their own projections as carefully. They donβt protect your peace because they have absorbed the idea that your peace is basically indestructible.
This is important: I am not talking about my actual close friends here.
With people I genuinely consider close, I donβt mind helping. I donβt keep a ledger. If they need to vent, process, or dump something ugly, I can hold it without resentment because the relationship is real and reciprocal. They are not just here for the service I provide; they are here for me, and I am here for them. That changes the entire equation.
The trap Iβm describing mainly applies to two groups:
1. People I donβt know well yet (acquaintances, new contacts, semi-friends).
2. People who have decided I am their designated dumping ground instead of actually trying to be a friend.
The second group is the most draining. They want the benefits of my clarity, steadiness, and lack of judgement without offering any real relationship in return. They donβt check in. They donβt reciprocate. They donβt protect the dynamic. They just arrive with mess, expect me to process it cleanly, and then disappear until the next crisis. That is not friendship. That is unpaid labour.
How It Shows Up
Iβve lost count of the number of times someone has said some variant of:
βI can tell you this because you wonβt judge me / you wonβt get weird / youβre not like other people.β
What they often mean is:
βI can hand you the most unfiltered, self-indulgent, poorly-regulated version of myself and you will still process it cleanly and hand me back something useful.β
And I usually do. Because that is how I am wired, and because I value clarity. But every time I do it with someone who hasnβt earned that access, a quiet ledger in my head makes a note. This person is making withdrawals. Are they making any deposits? Do they ever bring me clean thinking, or reciprocal steadiness, or do they just bring mess and expect me to be the filter?
Being the reasonable one also means that when you finally do draw a boundary or express irritation, people act shocked. Betrayed, even. You have broken the unspoken contract. You were supposed to be the endless capacity. The neutral zone. The one who doesnβt have limits like normal people.
I have had people get genuinely angry at me for disengaging after months of being their free emotional processing machine. As if my previous free time and mental resources were something they were entitled to. As if me saying βI donβt have the bandwidth for this anymoreβ was an act of cruelty rather than basic self-preservation.
The Double Bind
There is a particularly stupid double bind that comes with this role:
If you stay reasonable, people use you.
If you stop being reasonable, people pathologise you.
Suddenly the same traits (self-awareness, bluntness, low reactivity) get re-framed. Youβre not clear-headed, youβre cold. Youβre not boundaried, youβre abandoning. Youβre not refusing to be a dumping ground, youβre βsplittingβ or βshowing your true coloursβ or whatever pop-psych language is currently in fashion.
This is especially sharp when you already carry stigmatised labels. People are pre-loaded to read any firmness from you as evidence of the disorder rather than evidence of a limit. So you end up in this exhausting loop where you have to be more regulated than everyone else just to be seen as equally entitled to basic boundaries.
What I Have Learned
I no longer think of selective objectivity as a pure strength. It is a tool, and like any tool it can be overused until it breaks the user.
These days I run clearer internal checks:
Is this person actually looking for clarity, or just looking for a place to put their mess?
Have they earned this level of access to my thinking?
Am I offering objectivity, or am I being conscripted into unpaid emotional labour?
If I stopped being available in this way, would the relationship have anything left?
I still value being able to see clearly when others canβt. I still take pride in not being ruled by emotional contagion. But I am much more selfish with it now; especially with people who have not put in the work to be actual friends.
Objectivity is a resource I choose to spend, not a public utility other people get to demand.
The right people (the real ones) respect the difference. They donβt just like me because I can hold their chaos without flinching. They like me enough to try not to hand me chaos in the first place; and when they do need to, it sits inside a real relationship instead of replacing one.
And the ones who get angry when I stop being endlessly reasonable? They were relating to the service I provided.
For the sake of people not dogpiling this person I removed the name.
This post is where the comment was.
If you block someone simply for being corrected on a shitty assumption it really says a lot about you. And yes admittedly I am being a bit shitty about this because I've had a long fucking week and I have absolutely zero care for being nice to people who annoy me at the moment.
For those who may be unable to see my response to this person, this was it:
No, 'all men suck' is not correct; that's the exact harmful generalization my post called out. Treating maleness/masculinity as inherently suspect doesn't protect anyone; it just trains people to sort everyone into threat categories and pulls trans men, transmascs, and intersex folks (hi) under the bus when convenient. I've been victimized more by women than men. The stats on male suicide, homelessness, workplace deaths, and suppressed emotions exist for a reason: rigid scripts hurt people, not 'men bad.'
The terf-DNI in your bio while doing this on a trans intersex guy's post is loud. Bisexual doesn't exempt the hypocrisy.
Hey mutual, I was wondering if having a built in hierarchy system is inevitable while being a narcissist and how to exactly *stop* thinking of people in a hierarchy? Any advice or explanations are appreciated
Hello mutual, apologies for the late response. I've been very busy and wanted to give you a proper answer instead of something rushed.
Inevitable? Not in an absolute "all narcissists forever" way; it differs person to person, and it overlaps with how a lot of people (neurotypical or not) navigate social systems. Hierarchies are baked into society: jobs, schools, even informal friend groups. Neurotypicals do it too, often subconsciously. For NPD specifically, yes, ranking people (superior/inferior, useful/irrelevant) is a common cognitive pattern. It often stems from deep insecurity, unstable self-worth, and learned ways to feel safe or in control. In vulnerable/covert presentations like mine, it can feel more like hyper-awareness of where you sit (or fear you sit) on the ladder, which then gets projected outward.
For me personally, I still have a hierarchy system in my head. It's automatic: scanning for status, competence, threat, usefulness. In the past, someone "below" me would basically be invisible or worthless. I now consciously try not to treat people according to that internal slot. I learned kindness as a skill from working environments: even if it grates or feels performative at first, it benefits me (being seen as a "good worker/colleague") and reduces unnecessary conflict/drama. Treating people decently became a deliberate override.
How to actually stop (or reduce) thinking in hierarchies? It's not a full erase; more like turning down the volume and adding new habits. From my experience and what I've read:
- Catch it in the moment: Notice the automatic judgment ("this person is lesser/better"). Label it neutrally: "Hierarchy brain activating." Don't shame yourself for the thought; that's fuel for a narc crash. Just flag it.
- Humanize instead of rank: Force a quick shift; ask "What might this person be dealing with?" or focus on shared humanity. In vulnerable NPD, this counters the envy/shame loop. It doesn't have to be emotional empathy; analytical/cognitive works too.
- Behavioral override > internal fix: Act "as if" the hierarchy doesn't dictate treatment. Kindness, basic respect, listening; these are skills. Over time, repeated action can weaken the automatic ranking (like how therapy or self-work rewires patterns). In workplaces, this is gold for reputation and stability.
- Address the root insecurity: A lot of the ranking comes from unstable self-esteem. Building self-worth that's not purely comparative helps. For me, validation, precision self-management, and understanding my full system (NPD + SzPD traits + etc.) have been key. Hierarchies lose some power when your sense of self isn't constantly on the line.
It's ongoing work. I still slip, especially under stress, but the conscious effort makes a real difference in how I move through the world and how people experience me. No one's "cured," but you can get better at not letting it run the show.
If this resonates or you want to talk more about specific situations, I'm happy to. And check my masterlist if you're curious about how this plays out in vulnerable NPD; there's a post on switching personas based on perceived hierarchy that ties in directly.
There's a nation wide anti-immigrant protest happening tomorrow (June 30th) in South Africa and I'm so incredibly heartbroken and disgusted. The xenophobia in South Africa keeps escalating. People are being murdered, assaulted and tortured. All because our stupid fucking government is corrupt and blame all the issues they created and still perpetuate on illegal immigrants.
Despite government telling protesters they must follow the law and not be violent or kill people or be destructive...we'll have to see. Angry mobs don't tend to be rational or follow the rules.
Not my tags but I felt the need to add them because I agree as someone who also lives in South Africa. Post was yesterday but protests are happening today.
The SzPD Trade-Off: How Detachment Kept Me Out of Prison But Keeps Me Lonely by Neurotypical Standards
Masterlist Link
Iβve written before about how my schizoid traits probably kept me out of prison. That same emotional detachment and low need for stimulation from others acted like a built-in brake on a lot of the reactivity that couldβve escalated things. But it comes with a cost that shows up in ways neurotypical people would call βlonely.β
By their standards, I am lonely. I have friends. I have a partner. And beyond that, I have zero desire to expand the circle. Not because I hate people, but because most interactions feel like optional noise I didnβt ask for.
I love my partner; or at least my version of love, which for me means a stable, low-friction attachment where I can tolerate her presence indefinitely and actively show affection without it feeling like performance or obligation. A big part of why it works so smoothly is that sheβs autistic. We think in similar patterns: direct communication, reduced reliance on unspoken emotional labor, and a shared understanding that not every silence needs filling. It removes most of the friction that usually builds when Iβm around others.
With everyone else, though? I donβt seek new friends. The prospect is exhausting before it even starts. People come with layers of idiosyncrasies, emotional needs, and social expectations that drain my resources fast. I have to monitor their nonverbal cues, manage their feelings, and navigate their individual quirks while trying not to let my own flat affect or withdrawal get read as hostility. Itβs a lot of cognitive overhead for something that gives me no real payoff.
The ones who try to get close specifically because of my disorders annoy me the most. It feels like theyβre not interested in me as a person so much as in the clinical curiosity or the βedgy trauma narrative.β That kind of attention triggers a quick shutdown: polite distance at best, sharp disengagement at worst.
Iβm genuinely content spending an entire day; or several, completely by myself, pursuing my own interests without any external input. Solitude isnβt a consolation prize; itβs the default setting that feels right. Social situations, on the other hand, turn me into someone even I donβt enjoy being around. The stress of constantly decoding emotions and cues builds fast. I get irritable, withdrawn, and unpleasant because my system is over capacity and just wants an exit.
This isnβt depression or self-pity talking. Itβs how Iβm wired. The same traits that protect me from worse outcomes also limit the kind of social life that looks βfullβ to outsiders. Iβm not missing anything I actually want. I have the connections that matter to me, and the rest is optional overhead Iβm happy to skip.
I know some people bond through sex but this is a huge burden on me who only considers it as a physical activity. And if I can really be honest I would say it's disrespectful because not only do you want my body, now you want my time and energy, too? No thanks. Like seriously. Most romantic relationships are disadvantageous and as somebody driven by self-interest it's something I can never picture myself doing.
Some of you ppl need to understand that ASPD is not curable. "Getting better" doesn't mean our brains have changed. We still think like this. The difference is that we aren't taking action on most of our thoughts anymore.
And just so you know, "getting better" is almost always for our own benefit. We're not doing it for you and your comfort. We're doing it so we don't go to prison.
His blog posts very bad-faith takes on feminism, LGBTQIA+ and trans people. Essentially boiling down to asexuals being/having "a rape fantasy", trans people being predators and taking away rights by having our own rights or advocating for our own rights, etc.
Don't try to confront him, all he does is block people who disagree with him. Just block/report.
During your npd research, have you come across any studies going in depth on perceiving oneself in third person? It's a thing I've been trying to correct recently as I've realized there's few experiences(if any) that I've gone through without viewing and analyzing myself from a third party's perspective.
There isn't much NPD research specifically on living from a constant third-person perspective, but there is research on self-objectification, self-monitoring, and sensitivity to external evaluation that overlaps with the experience. It's also common in autism, trauma, dissociation, and social anxiety. The experience of constantly observing and analyzing yourself from the outside may be related to narcissistic traits for some people, but it isn't unique to NPD.
What I have seen is research touching several adjacent concepts:
Β· Self-objectification (viewing yourself from the outside as an object being evaluated).
Β· Observer-perspective self-monitoring (constantly imagining how others see you).
Β· Self-distancing (viewing yourself as if you're another person).
Β· Hypervigilance toward social evaluation, especially in vulnerable narcissism.
The closest thing to what you're describing is probably self-objectification and chronic self-monitoring. Some recent research found that people higher in vulnerable narcissistic traits are more likely to view themselves from an observer's perspective because they're highly sensitive to how they might be perceived by others.
I myself tend to experience self-objectification and self-distancing very often, I don't particularly recall ever experiencing myself in "first person view".
I'll expand on this ask once I've done more proper research as my usual device I use Tumblr on is currently useless so I'm on the mobile version of Tumblr for the time being.
I think if I randomly started posting about my daily life as a farmer without any context of the farm people would either think I want to die 24/7 or I hate animals or that I'm simply unhinged.
Either that or I'd become very ridiculous very fast because farm life is honestly just one absurdity on top of another.
Me: "Damn people are REALLY BAD at knowing when to tag their eyestrain art/images...either that or they just don't care about photosenitive epileptic people like me. I feel really sad now."
Person: "But Allison, what if they just don't know or understand what qualifies as eyestrain and what doesn't?"
Me: "You know what? That could be a factor...While it is always better to be safe rather than sorry (so YES people should always tag eyestrain even if they're unsure if it "counts" or not) maybe you've got a point?"
Anyways! HERE'S YOUR HANDY GUIDE TO WHAT CAN COUNT AS EYESTRAIN! I'm pulling this straight from the Artfight rules page about what needs to be labeled and filtered as eyestrain because it's VERY helpful and VERY accurate! I also know not everybody has an AF account and might not always have access to this handy guide, and this is an important resource; That's why I'm sharing it here! (under the cut)
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!
Full eyestrain AF page link
"But Allison! How were you able to screenshot that example if you're so sensitive to eyestrain?"
I dimmed the HELL out of my computer screen and looked away while taking the screenshot and did the same when putting it into this post, that's how lol. BUT YEAH ANYWAYS!!! Once again:
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!
Likely a hot take. I've been sick as fuck and my brain is mush, so if this is messy I'll probably redo it later.
I saw a post earlier that took a study on self-identified sexual aggressors and turned it into a "cis men suck/cis men dni" generalization. Then another about a cis intersex man who was castrated at birth by a female surgeon who just hated men/boys that much. It got me thinking.
I've met and dated shitty cis men. I've also met wonderful ones. Same with cis women and queer people; some have been just as harmful (or more). Generalizing entire groups like this is harmful. In my experience, it doesn't reduce harm; it makes those groups more defensive and escalates everything into a vicious cycle that hurts people who don't deserve it.
Most boys/men grow up with rigid, damaging messaging: "man up," don't cry, don't show weakness, your worth is in what you provide or achieve, suppress needs for help, take risks, etc. Those scripts absolutely damage men's mental health, relationships, perception of women and other men, and even lifespans. The stats are clear: men die by suicide at much higher rates, die younger on average, make up the vast majority of workplace deaths and homelessness, and often face real barriers around emotional expression, custody, or asking for help without seeming "less masculine."
Rigid sex-role expectations and cultural norms hurt everyone; they just distribute the costs and benefits differently. Men get certain social permissions and advantages at the high end (leadership, risk tolerance paying off for some), but they pay with higher variance: more men at both the extreme top and the extreme bottom. The "privilege" narrative often ignores the parts where the system chews men up and discards them; especially working-class, POC, neurodivergent, or non-conforming men.
It's the same with women internalizing harmful stuff under the same pressures. We can acknowledge real patterns and average differences without sliding into "therefore all members of group X are bad/oppressors."
The "cis men suck" rhetoric slides very easily into "all men suck" because the underlying logic is often essentialist: treating maleness or masculinity itself as tainted or inherently dangerous, rather than specific behaviors or cultural patterns. Once that frame is normalized, transmasc and trans men get pulled under the umbrella whether they like it or not ("you're socialized as male," "male energy," etc.). Trans women catch it from the other side: suddenly their birth sex is the only thing that matters and they're framed as infiltrators or predators.
I've already experienced this flip-flopping with intersex stuff: people weaponizing whichever gender lens hurts most in the moment. It's especially frustrating when people in transmasc/trans male spaces echo "all men are trash" rhetoric for clout or solidarity, then act shocked when it gets reflected back at them. You can't spend years calling masculinity suspect and then expect everyone to magically exempt your masculinity when it's convenient. That inconsistency erodes trust inside communities and hands outsiders easy ammo.
I've seen firsthand how bodies and histories don't fit the neat oppressor/oppressed scripts a lot of online discourse demands. Generalizing "men" (cis, trans, or otherwise) as a monolith doesn't protect anyone; it just trains people to sort each other into threat categories instead of dealing with individuals.
It's okay to want better socialization for boys and men without hating men as a category. And it's okay to push back when your own community imports rhetoric that eventually bites them (and you) in the ass.
Individual people still get to be judged on how they actually treat others. Some of my friends being decent cis men doesn't erase the shitty ones I've met, and the shitty ones don't erase them either.
Genuinely nothing pisses me off more than when someone I barely know just vents to me unprompted. I do not care. Leave me alone. Go to therapy. I'm not your free dumping ground. Sure, close friends, I don't mind them venting. But someone who's essentially a stranger? Fuck out of here with that shit.
