#experience snippets

[ex-sjw-resource]

Beware the Anti-Cult: the dangers of leaving one extreme for another.

When I left SJ I was riddled with anxiety, fear, and most importantly, anger. Anger for the community that had made me whole-heartedly believe it was the sole safe and correct way of life, only for me to eventually begin to unravel it’s long thread of winding hypocrisy. 

When you go through a loss, and leaving a community you once believed was genuinely your family is certainly a loss, you go through several stages. These stages are well known as the ‘Stages of Grief’, and one of the major ones being a stage of anger. You are rightfully angry, as you begin to process the abuse and manipulation of the community you left, of how it radically altered your perception of reality to one very fearful and aggressive. 

The stage after, but as I found, can also happen during, is reflection. Where you start to truly begin to process what you had experienced. And during this... it is not uncommon to seek out the other side, the forbidden fruit so to speak -- the opinions of those that the SJ community deemed as overwhelmingly impure, people you were never allowed to even consider the opinions of as a mere thought experiment.

And I did just that. Angry, isolated, silenced, I sought out many anti-SJ blogs as I could dredge up. And some of these people were complete opposite of my political views. Not only did I seek out anti-SJ blogs, I began to consume and digest the opinions of people who were SJ but had the polar opposite opinions of me.

And it helped. It genuinely, truly did help. Seeing the opinions of the other side allowed me to level out my own sense of reality, my own balance, and find the gray area in between political morals. But during the phase of anger... I became susceptible to the opinions of people who had a strong and fiery hate for SJ or those who had hurt me. Here were people who listened to and agreed with me, people who were genuinely shocked and taken aback by the abuse I experienced. People who listened more than the people back in my own community who claimed they would listen to me.

During this time of anger and reflection, I found my opinions doing complete 180s, seeming as if I became a different person over night. And I lost friends because of it, people who weren’t completely SJ, but more shocked about... how I had completely flipped my opinions in such a short span of time.

And I don’t blame them. I regret it, but I understand why it happened. And it took me many months to eventually work out of that anger stage. To realize... the community I went to was the same thing but with different scenery. That the only reason why they listened to me is because my experiences could be used to fuel their own very black and white hate of the other side.

And that is the danger of the anti-cult. It’s a common phenomenon for people leaving cultic communities to catapult into a cult developed around hating the cult they came from. It happens in all sorts of cults, religious, political, social, etc. It is the result of the anger stage of grief.

That is why this blog leans so heavily on the fact it would prefer to stay politically neutral. While I feel that reading the opinions of the opposite side is a very IMPORTANT part of recovery, you must be careful to not fall back into your same behaviors with the same kind of people under the opposite flag.

It IS possible to reach a stage of recovery where you can view politics from a genuinely middle ground point of view, from a point rooted in empathy for both sides. But it takes trial and error. You’re going from a community with extreme political imbalance and trying to find a central balance point, where you stand on your own without the support of a community. But to get there it will take some wobbling.

[ex-sjw-resource]

Entitlement To Your Peers: Manipulation, Control, and the Assumed Authority to do so

[This is written in a more experience-snippets format, as I’m not entirely sure how to approach the subject abstractly, without being personal -- as the topic is focused on personal reality.]

A disturbing behavior I don’t often see discussed, or even noticed, is the assumed authority of active control over the personal lives and opinions of your peers.

It’s something I notice often. Friends trying to control whom their friends are being friends with. People assuming authority of people’s harmless headcanons in fandoms, or what they choose to draw or write about. People feeling as though they have the authority to degrade others on opinions that don’t entirely line up with theirs over even the most benign subjects. 

And I personally was guilty of all of the above at one point or another -- it’s encouraged in SJW culture, and ties heavily into the concept of Purity. I felt personally threatened by the opinions, hobbies, and friends of my peers. I felt as though it was a direct attack on myself to allow themselves to continue in this manner. And the SJWs around me encouraged action on this -- to control the language, opinions, hobbies and friends of my peers with the active overhanging threat of exile from the community.

I was completely unable to separate someone else’s life, their reality, from my own. I was completely unable to see their context due to only being able to focus on my own context, for all the things and events in my life that lead to me being who I was. And I was so focused on my own context, that I dehumanized the people by feeling I had any right to have control them.

People don’t do the things they do in a vacuum. I act the way I do, I have the opinions I have, due to my life experience. Every tiny thing that happened to me made me who I was. And yet, a community that claims so aggressively to want to honor the lives of everyone and promote understanding and coexisting has only succeeding at doing the polar opposite.

It took a really long time to unlearn this way of thinking. I began to realize how selfish it was to feel I had any right to control people around me. I had been blinded by my own life, my own experiences, that I never stopped to consider what life or experiences other people have had to make them who they are.

Like, hey, maybe that person is friends with someone I don’t like because they genuinely, truly get along and enjoy each other’s company. Who am I to make the decision for them on whom they should or shouldn’t like? What made me think I had any right to dehumanize others and decide this in the past?

And maybe that person ships a character or two in a way that I personally find insulting, but I’m not them. Who am I to demand someone to muzzle and gag their own life experiences, opinions, interests, and sexual orientation to appeal to someone whom isn’t them and they cannot personally understand?

Thinking back on all of it, it comes off as completely absurd how self centered I was in assuming that my reality had the right to affect anyone else’s at all. It was difficult to set down my sense of entitlement and take responsibility of my own well being. Demanding the change of my peers to suit specifically MY NEEDS, MY OPINIONS, MY REALITY, is the most selfish thing I had ever done.