Easily the most effective for me has been to develop, review, and/or do one action item off a plan to be able to leave the job and work towards something I want to spend my time working on. Knowing I have a plan, remembering it and seeing that it’s a good plan, and taking steps on that is a concrete reminder that the job I hate is temporary and I’m not stuck. That reduces the scaries significantly for me.

Then I also like to clean my place, light a scented candle, and read/watch something to make where I live feel cozy, comforting, and home-y. A reminder that even though the job is shit, I have at least built a home that I come back to. Might call a friend and talk it out too - works on both levels.

What do you do?

And here’s the itch.io link: https://minusonepublishing.itch.io/frontiers-of-the-mind

…you have a link for that electric kitchen knife?

He was allegedly trying to meet up with the minor at Twitch-Con, so you may be right.

You do know the hope is not to treat symptoms but underlying disorders, right?

When both claim to be the victim…I mean, that’s basically every single case. There are signs you can look for, especially if you are trained on it, but where I’m from, the people who will be responding to it aren’t all that well-trained and sometimes the response is to provide IPV/SV resources to both parties. Which isn’t the worst option to fall back on. If you’re working with a survivor and trained, in my experience, you can usually tell pretty quickly who is the survivor and who is the abuser. But that eye is not trained into a lot of the people interacting with the situation legally, that’s for sure. And that hurts all genders. To your point: including men too because any gender can perpetrate and there is still the idea in so many places that men cannot be abused.

I will disagree with your point that self-defense doesn’t hold up if you stay for years or decades though. Leaving an abusive situation is a nightmare. The physical violence is never reported to be the worst part either; it’s the destruction of self that is the worst part. IPV is designed to make people helpless, hopeless, and reduce their access to all resources that can help. Sometimes all they feel like they have is self-defense in singular moments. I don’t think we can hold that against people.

What a shit situation, yo. I’m sorry that happened to you, and I’m glad you’re willing to call it what it was, a sexual assault. It sounds like your system largely failed you. I wish that wasn’t so often the case. Hope you’re taking care of yourself.

Lotta good stuff there, but two things in response:

First, I’m not so sure that people being comfortable with the idea of men being the abuser in most intimate partner violence situations is all that shocking. There is a long history of sexism, including systemic sexism, from men against women, dating back to Hammurabi’s Code. I think there’s a bit of an earned reputation there unfortunately.

Second, I would very much not lump self-defense into the category of domestic violence, as that equates the survivor’s attempts to protect themselves as similar or equal to a pattern of intensely destructive behaviors meant to gain power and control over them. The two are not remotely equal, and whether “mutually abusive” relationships even exist is still debated because of the dynamics of abusers and abusive tactics.

“…because you don’t understand sourdough”

Made me spit up my coffee.

Yeah, that really brings me back. I had like 4 tokens on Steam to give the game away when they were trying to get more people to play. There was some other hero shooter MOBA a little after that too, by Epic or something. Didn’t last very long and wasn’t all that great, but I still played the shit out of the falcon character that could “fly”. Man, I need to jump into another one of these games.

Oh shit, I hadn’t heard of that. I’ll definitely check it out; thanks for the recommendation.

It was a hero shooter MOBA but with some verticality, so that’s about as far as the Overwatch comparison goes. I had a great time with it. I like traditional MOBAs but don’t have the skill/patience/time for them, so hero shooter MOBAs are the perfect way for me to be able to play them more casually. In my opinion, of the few I’ve tried, Paragon was the best implementation of a hero shooter MOBA; the core gameplay just felt really tight to me.

Or Paragon even. That game was so fun back in the day before it got killed. If anyone can make something that fun again, it’s probably Valve.