Narcissistic Abuse Survivor Support Blog

Support blog for survivors of abuse by narcissists and other forms of emotional abuse. Url reclaimed from a narcissistic abuser.

[crimesagainstwomen]

Woman sentenced to 50 years in prison for killing the man who had groomed her since she was 14, raped her, and financially coerced her into multiple cosmetic surgeries.

50-year-old Hal Sasko invited 17-year-old Sarah Brooke Gonzales-McLinn to move in with him after she graduated high school. Three years earlier, Sarah worked for Sasko at the pizza shop he owned. When she left that job, Sasko continued to contact her. Sarah confided in him about her complicated relationship with her parents, her neighbor molesting her as a child, and her experience being raped by a man that burned her with his cigarette.

“Sasko promised to take care of her.”

Sasko charged Sarah rent and provided her with “unlimited access to marijuana and alcohol” while increasingly demanding more money for gas, her phone, and other bills. 

When Sasko shared that he was attracted to Sarah, she “shut him down.” When she discussed moving out, Sasko threatened to sue her and told her he could wreck her credit so that she could never get an apartment or buy a car. Eventually, Sasko started demanding sex alongside rent.

After this, Sasko bragged to his friends about having a “young” but “unattractive” girlfriend and started pushing Sarah to have cosmetic surgery.

He paid for her to get a nose job, then added the $6,000 cost to the bill she would have to repay before she could stop having sex with him. He told her that men don’t like flat-chested women. She needed a curvier body. He wanted her to have breast augmentation surgery, but the doctor said she was too young. He arranged for her to have buttocks implants instead. She objected but felt she had no choice. He added the $10,000 cost to her bill. She estimated that he raped her two to three times per week for 10 months.

On Janary 14, 2014, Sasko texted Sarah to apologize for trying to rape her earlier that week. But at 5:15 pm, he sent a text asking her to put beer in the refrigerator. Sarah said she knew if Sasko was drinking, he would try to rape her again. When he lost consciousness that night, Sarah reportedly made the decision to slit his throat.

Lawrence police questioned her after she was found 11 days later in Everglades National Park. Detective Jamie Lawson wanted to know why she used Sasko’s blood to write “FREEDOM” on the wall. “What were you trying to express when you did that?” Lawson asked. “That’s how I felt,” she replied. Later, [Sarah] told Hutchinson that killing Sasko felt like standing in the sun for the first time.

During her 2015 trial, prosecutor Charles Branson argued that it would be “inappropriate” for the jury to hear about Sasko’s abuse because it might cause them to “feel sympathy” for her. The jury never learned that Sasko was a rapist or of his constant use of pornography that featured children, bestiality, and videos of men raping women who appeared to be sleeping.

On September 4, 2015, a judge sentenced Sarah to a minimum of 50 years in prison. In May 2021, Sarah’s defense attorney successfully argued for reducing her prison sentence to a minimum of 25 years, after which she would be legally allowed to seek parole.

In a column for the Kansas Reflector, Sarah’s prosecutor and defense attorney co-wrote an article claiming, “battered woman syndrome defense wouldn’t be a Get Out of Jail Free card.”

Prison staff continue to taunt and objectify Sarah.

[Sarah] said her unwanted buttocks implants are a constant reminder of the physical and emotional pain Sasko inflicted on her. Shortly after she arrived at prison, she asked to have them removed. “They were all just curious,” [Sarah] said. “I remember one nurse went and called another nurse in and they both touched me.” The state denied her the medical procedure. “Yeah, it would be ideal if all of the nurses would, you know, follow HIPAA and keep your medical stuff private, but they don’t,” [Sarah] said. “And they told a lot of people — a lot of officers, a lot of inmates. That was just very traumatic.”

Sasko was attempting to groom two 16-year-old girls before Sarah stepped in. Her reported actions likely saved these girls years of similar torture.

"Confidential police reports revealed Sasko was grooming 16-year-old twin girls before his death. Their mother was furious at the attention and gifts he provided them, including cash, gas, clothes, subwoofers for their car, and an unsolicited envelope of marijuana. When the mother blocked his number on their phones, he bought them new phones. If they ever wanted to run away, he told the girls, they could move in with him" (x).

Send funds to to Sarah Gonzales-McLinn's commissary account through accesscorrections.com/send-money:

Register Number: 2000080128 Located at: Topeka CF-Central Earliest Possible Release Date: 02/01/2039

Create an account through https://www.accesscorrections.com/createaccount. The form asks for a first and last name, DOB, phone number, and email. You will receive a confirmation email after submitting this form.

After confirming your account and logging in, navigate to the Send Money page. Select Kansas for the state, KS DOC for the agency, and type 2000080128 for the ID. Sarah’s full name will populate immediately.

Select your payment method. Access Corrections accepts Visa, Mastercard, and money orders.

A four-digit security code will then be sent to the phone number attached to your account. Once entered, you can click “next” to be directed to the Deposit Information page.

Add your deposit amount. Handling fees range from $2.95 to $8.95 depending on how much you would like to send.

Add your payment information and click PAY NOW. You can view your transaction history on your account dashboard.

Mail for Sarah should be sent to this address: Sarah Gonzales-McLinn 2000080128 Topeka Correctional Facility 815 S.E. Rice Road Topeka, KS 66607

Learn more about sending mail.

[scorpionlafemme]

[queeranarchism]

For healing that stems from being unsafe, out of control and/or powerless: yeah, this definitely checks out, feeling safe, in control and capable is an essential part of healing.

Unfortunately, that experience isn't always available. If you're in a country at war, or an undocumented migrant in the current US, for example, feeling genuinely safe is not going to be on the table and the cause of that unsafety is beyond your control.

In such situations, you can trick your nervous system a bit to give it some of those experiences anyway.

For experiences of safety: try to cover your basic physical needs if possible (food, drink, warmth, rest, caring for physical injuries) and try to build routine, rhythm and familiarity into your life if possible. That could be making tea every morning, or praying at set times, or playing your favorite song every evening before bed. Whatever fits your situation: routines are gonna help your nervous system feel stable and less constantly unsafe.

For experiences of control and capableness: try to regularly do little things that affirm your sense of accomplishment. Fixing your bike, doing a crossword puzzle, learning to play a new song on your guitar, putting on make-up in a way that makes you feel stunning, finish a level of a video game. Again: whatever is available to you. Little moments of 'fuck yeah i did this' help your nervous system feel like you are capable of things and less constantly powerless.

This isn't going to totally save you from the constant stress of your situation, but it can reduce the worst of the stress and make life a little more manageable in the situation that you find yourself in.

[kittyit]

"Repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of the personality already formed, but repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.

The pathological environment of childhood abuse forces the development of extraordinary capacities, both creative and destructive. It fosters the development of abnormal states of consciousness in which the ordinary relations of body and mind, reality and imagination, knowledge and memory, no longer hold. These altered states of consciousness permit the elaboration of a prodigious array of symptoms, both somatic and psychological. And these symptoms simultaneously conceal and reveal their origins; they speak in disguised language of secrets too terrible for words.

Chronic childhood abuse takes place in a familial climate of pervasive terror, in which ordinary caretaking relationships have been profoundly disrupted. Survivors describe a characteristic pattern of totalitarian control, enforced by means of violence and death threats, capricious enforcement of petty rules, intermittent rewards, and destruction of all competing relationships through isolation, secrecy, and betrayal. Even more than adults, children who develop in this climate of domination develop pathological attachments to those who abuse and neglect them, attachments that they will strive to maintain even at the sacrifice of their own welfare, their own reality, or their lives."

Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence –from domestic abuse to political terror by Dr. Judith Herrmann (read here)

[ameliacakee-blog]

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

— David Foster Wallace (via emotionaltrickery)

[birdblogwhichisforbirds-deactiv]

I cannot emphasize enough how much of a life hack it is to exclusively be friends with, date and marry people who are not constantly mean assholes to you.

[angstmonsterwrites]

This may seem like basic common sense, but one interesting (and kind of terrifying) thing I recently read was that some individuals who grew up in an emotionally abusive environment find that their anxiety level actually decreases in the presence of those who are mean or overly critical of them because it's familiar. Their nervous systems are hard wired to react to that kind of treatment as "normal" in the sense that it knows what to do with it--what defense mechanisms to employ when, etc.

Meanwhile, kinder, more peaceful, and healthier relationships are quite a dramatic adjustment, and ironically feel less predictable because of all the threats that are absent and never materialize. It feels suspicious or too good to be true, which in turn ratchets up hypervigilance and hyper-arousal. Instead of knowing what BS is coming because it always does, there's the nebulous sense that the other shoe is just waiting to drop. Safety and respect can feel the most unsafe for a while, because as far as the traumatized nervous system is concerned, those things don't exist, or if they do in any form, there must be a million unseen strings attached.

This is part of what traps a lot of people in abusive relationships, consistently draws them to want to please assholes, or keeps them moving from one unhealthy environment to the next--a highly toxic comfort of familiarity where being on the receiving end of cruelty feels like "home".

[headspace-hotel]

This does a good job of explaining WHY this phenomenon occurs. The brain prefers an open threat that can be anticipated and predicted, as opposed to what appears to be a concealed threat that could strike at any time unexpected.

[antiporn-activist]

A life coach once told me:

“We seek the familiar because we know we can survive it.”

Then she said it again in case I didn’t get it.

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Don't get sucked into the "if they really cared I wouldn't have to say something" spiral. No matter how close you are with someone, it's unfair to expect them to know things you haven't actually communicated.

[daily-reminders-that-ur-enough]

Your past does not define you, you are allowed to be hurt by what people have done to you, but that is not all you are. You are allowed to heal and you will be okay.

[p0pipos]

"be kind" sounds like wonderful advice.

too bad it's too often code for "accept without question," "allow your boundaries to be crossed," "make yourself uncomfortable/unsafe for others' benefit."

especially directed towards women! who are already socialized to do this.

[elfyourmother]

i am seriously not exaggerating or joking when I say the #1 sign of an abusive person is how they respond to an attempt to assert boundaries

i’m not a psychologist but i got my degree from the school of hard knocks ok and that is really the common denominator

don’t trust anyone who tries to argue with your need for them

[thepeacefulgarden]

[symptoms-syndrome]

When will we, as a society, move past the idea that victims and abusers are two discrete, mutually exclusive categories of people.

[symptoms-syndrome]

Believing that you cannot do harm because your behaviors are due to harm imposed upon you is how you end up becoming the type of person who caused your harm in the first place. Trauma responses, even when they feel out of your control, are not inherently acceptable behavior simply because they are trauma responses.

[afro-evolutionary-astrology]

Accountability stops meaning simply 'doing better', as if trauma responses are a lack of moral consciousness or actions. Accountability isn't just some righteous action taken when one could've gotten away with harm or poor decisions/impacts, or knows they need to make amends or change.

Accountability necessitates healing, and the centering of healing -rather than a moralizing shame- in order for one to triumph over their trauma responses. That can only happen through a loving and honest awareness of self, while simultaneously understanding that one's safety and betterment and healing requires a similar extension of humanization to others.

[z0ruas]

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”

— bell hooks

[free-my-mindd]

It’s not your job to figure out people and why the mistreat you, your responsibility is to get out of harm’s way and start doing what’s right for you.

[theambitiouswoman]

[ofironandivory]

A reminder: You don't have to forgive your harassers/stalkers

Being wary of people who've hurt and scarred you doesn't make them "the bigger person"

You deserve to feel safe within your online spaces, your boundaries and well being should always come first

[accessibleaesthetics]

I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but intrusive thoughts are basically your brain’s (sometimes very upsetting) way of saying “If there were two guys on the moon and one of them killed the other with a rock would that be fucked up or what?”

I’ve personally found that adding the “would that be fucked or what?” part in myself really helps put the more disturbing thoughts we sometimes get into perspective. Helps me say “yeah thar sure would be fucked up” and move on with my day.

It’s not not a secret desire, it’s not something that only occurs to you because you’re a bad person. It’s just your brain deciding to process the fact that it knows an uncomfortable thing exists in the world by feeding it to you in an absurd “what if” with you as the main character.

[accessibleaesthetics]

Words cannot describe how happy I am that this resonated with so many people.

[therapistconfessions-deactivate]

“If you enter into healing, be prepared to lose everything. Healing is a ravaging force to which nothing seems sacred or inviolate. As my original pain releases itself in healing, it rips to shreds the structures and foundations I built in weakness and ignorance.”

Ely Fuller “The Courage to Heal” (via therapist-confessions)

[gatheringbones]

in my personal experience— choosing to believe someone who uses therapyspeak to try to convince you that you’re exhibiting toxic power over them and pulling away for that person’s own safety and dignity and well being is the best way out of the trap. they hate that. the point of leveling accusations of abuse against you is to get you to grovel for forgiveness and squirm to escape the image that’s been projected onto you and the whole game is ruined if you neither grovel nor squirm.