You dont have to share this if it's too dark, but I'm tired of keeping it to myself.
I was molested as a child. Fictional content containing pedophilia doesn't trigger me. Nonfictional content concerning pedophilia doesn't even trigger me, though it is certainly upsetting because of the real children involved.
Here's the thing: I never got the therapy I should have. I never learned how to deal with it after. Even when you do learn all the right things and you get the help you're supposed to, that doesn't always help.
Reading stories that don't flinch.
Stories that take you through every messy confusing detail about how it feels, how it affects you, how hard it is to reconcile. Because it's fucking confusing. It's not just horrifying and scary. It doesn't just make you cry. When you're as young as I was, you don't even really understand what happened for years. Then it finally hits, and it's just weird.
Because a lot of pedophiles aren't violent. They don't physically hurt or threaten their victims. I was never afraid of my molester. I loved him. He was family.
So stories that walk through that journey of trying to understand, finally getting what happened to you, the confusion because they didn't really hurt you, but you know what they did was wrong...
It helps. It's VALIDATING.
And fetish content doesn't upset me either. 1, because it's NOT REAL, and 2, because it feels like taking the power back. It's something I've seen other victims talk about, but I've never seen anyone else acknowledge. Revisiting the circumstances of your trauma in a controlled way can be healing. It's not real, I can end it whenever I want to, I have the power now.
Proship doesn't hurt people. Censorship does.