Why I am not “getting help”

A response to this post (archived here) that I started drafting; it got too long, so I’m just going to post it here instead:

(to add on:

There’s a very easy answer to this:

“Like any disorder, when these thoughts are not worked on with a professional or are fed into they become dangerous.”

“When you have disorders like these and you don’t even *try* to work on them, or even try to get help with anyone or anything, those thoughts and urges will become actions.”

“If you have urges to kill your entire family, even acknowledging you know it’s wrong and realistically speaking you’d never do it, but if you don’t get help for it eventually that urge is going to break you and that shit will happen.”

“It’s not bigotry or fucking sanism it’s common sense. Pedophiles and zoophiles are dangerous if they don’t try to get help. When you feed into these thoughts they only worsen.”

The answer being that if you genuinely think this way—that if someone has any thoughts or urges about harming others without “help” they will inevitably turn into actions—then you yourself are a danger to others and are projecting your own utter lack of self-control/ethics onto the rest of us, or you have significant internalized paramisic/saneist rhetoric and are just projecting your personal fears about yourself onto others, and you are the one who needs help. I see this a lot, actually, with antis with OCD who haven’t worked their shit out—they think everyone who has thoughts about abusing/committing violence experience them in the same way they do, as intrusive thoughts and intense fears that they will act on them. And this is saneism, whether you like it or not: the idea that if you have intrusive thoughts or urges that distress you you are a bad person unless you submit yourself for Correction by The Institution.

But not everyone is like you. There is—shockingly—a diverse range of different brains and different life experiences in this world outside of your bubble, and reality doesn’t become what you think it should be at your whim. The anti narrative doesn’t align with most people’s lived experiences.

Yes John the pedophile whose trying to get help and avoids kids to keep them safe isn’t a bad person, but dinosaurtitconiseur on tumblr whose a pedophile and makes fucking pride flags for it and actively encourages other pedos/zoos/necros to act out on their paraphilias while thinking these thoughts are perfectly healthy is fucking dangerous.

Tumblr has constructed this sort of narrative where “pedophiles who are currently trying to get help + avoid kids at all costs + think their thoughts are unhealthy” and “pedophiles who are proud of their pedophilia + encourage paraphilia pride + thinks their thoughts are healthy (or health-neutral) + actively encourages others to offend” are the only two types of pedophiles there are, and that traits from the two categories never ever overlap. Use your critical thinking for half a second and spend a single minute actually looking at actual pedophiles in actual pedophile spaces and this is obviously wrong.

(And don’t think I don’t notice how default pronoun here is always “he”)

And all of this is occurring before the backdrop of a psychiatric system which is institutionally violent, ableist, saneist, classist, racist, queermisic, and paramisic, which has a long history of oppressing, abusing, and murdering the aforementioned classes of people. For which nearly every single marginalized person attempting its therapy/treatments has been abused/traumatized.

Every demand for a paraphiliac to Get Therapy Or Die is a demand for the poor to spend money they don’t have, for everyone but the most privileged to wait on long waiting lists for months and months before they’ll even consider us, for minors living under guardians who refuse it to accomplish an impossibility or out themselves to high risks of domestic violence from bigots and authoritarians, for paraphiliacs to out ourselves to high risks of violence from psychs, for psychiatric survivors to retraumatize ourselves in the same institutions which abused and traumatized us in the first place, for POC (hi) and queers and gender-marginalized people and neurodivergents and disabled people to force ourselves to endure constant microaggressions, condescension, misunderstandings, gaslighting, or even just general incompetency and uselessness.

I mean this in the most respectful way possible—but the psychiatric institution cannot be separated from its histories in racist oppression and violence, and people who claim psychiatry is good because they had perfect experiences with psych are almost always white and/or otherwise privileged, and OP (who’s white) does not have the experiences that POC tend to have with therapists and doctors.

I don’t know how to tell yts that therapy cannot provide me with what I need, not when my past therapists (nearly all of whom have been white) all were in support of racism and other systems of oppression in some way. None of whom had my experiences with CSA/SA, particularly SA which targeted my marginalizations (particularly my degeneracy and freakness), which is exponentially more ignored and shoved to the side and unrecognized than the already-barely-recognized CSA of normal children. All of them were bigoted. I politely corrected her during every session trying to explain to her why she was wrong about trans people, CSA survivors, queers, paraphiliacs—and every next session she said it again, and she was paternalistic and defended my own abuse to me repeatedly until I was so tired and worn down and desperate and hurting that I did everything I could to get away from her. She didn’t help me. She couldn’t. She didn’t know the basics of how trauma works, she didn’t know the difference between OCD and OCPD, she thought wants to kill animals = sociopath = no empathy = no insight = evil, she was not a revolutionary or a radical and I cannot spend time around anyone who is anything less than absolutely revolutionary and radical because otherwise I find myself performing the same exhausting emotional labor and ignoring my own boundaries and comfort again and again.

I cannot benefit from interactions with someone who does not have all these vast necessary contexts of my life already down. And if you are already inside the institution, you automatically will not think this way. For the sake of my health and wellbeing, I avoid liberals like the plague. I am willing to sacrifice several more decades of prolonged suffering (from my actual disorders) and a miniscule (possibly) slightly increased risk of harm to others (which probably doesn’t exist actually, to be honest) in exchange for clinging to what I have left of my bodily autonomy and dignity, so that I do not throw it away for the promise of everything which turns out yet again to be absolutely nothing.

I have been abusive to others. Part of learning to take accountability was understanding that, unlike the myths saneists perpetuate, that my disorders did not “make” me abuse others, not the C-PTSD, not the three personality disorders, nor the associated sadism or the thoughts/impulses to abuse. I made the choice to perpetrate harm because I believed it was okay and was entitled and valued my own selfishness over the wellbeing of others. Sessions with therapists didn’t stop me, because my therapists were pro abuse too and did not know how to deconstruct the harmful beliefs that I held in a nuanced manner. Community did, and finding others and certain other comprehensive anti-abuse ideologies did, and life experiences did, and figuring my shit out did.

Did you know that psychiatrists are thirty-seven times more likely to rape than the general population is? Did you know that psychiatrists have a long history of promoting and perpetrating our torture, rape, and murder to try to reduce, fix, or eliminate the problem we pose? Including targeting children and young adolescents who are pedophiles or have other paraphilias with sexual assault the moment they disclosed they had attractions outside the norm, among others?

Do you really think someone like me could benefit from an institution like that, where systemic abuses as such are constant, where our pain is ignored and completely erased such that people like you never knew all of this happened until I told you?

So far, from what I’ve seen, pro-map radicalization with like-minded people who understand each other’s struggles is the easiest and most efficient solution to both self-hate and genuine risk of harm to others. Debunking myths; organizing; finding our power. Liberalism will not save you; putting all your eggs in the psych institution’s basket will not save you; nor will it save children, CSA survivors, paraphiliacs, or those of us who are multiple of the above.

Fight with us. Reject and revolt against institutions of power. Reject the state’s lies that deviance is what causes abuse and not the violence of hierarchy and authority that they wish to keep in the shadows. Kill rape, not just individual rapists. Kill psychiatry, not just individual psychiatrists. Free your mind.