Anti-Shipping is Anti-Recovery and Weaponizes Disabled People

TW for discussions of SA and the like because of the topic.

A huge part of trauma recovery is learning to move on and lower the risk of things triggering you. Avoidance is considered a huge symptom of PTSD, and therefore a net negative when it comes to recovery. Making sure people get back to their old level of comfort with what has become triggers is a part of the process, whether that’s via exposure therapy or other means. It’s a part of increasing functionality, especially in a severely traumatized patient.

A lot of antis will insist on victims’ comfort as a part of the reason that media depicting SA, etc. should be censored. However, they fail to take into consideration:

If the only reason that the media is triggering is because they were a victim and it’s therefore a trigger, that means that it’s a symptom of a disorder that is to be worked on in therapy that makes them uncomfortable, not the media naturally. That means that they’re blocking things that SHOULD be brought back to a level or closer to a level if possible that they were before the traumatic event.

Not everyone is able to reach the level of recovery ideal in trauma-based therapy where they can engage with everything that has become a trigger at the same capacity they were before the trauma, but it is a goal in most spaces. Exposure in healthy doses in a safe space is an huge part of this. Ignoring that as well as how expression of and sharing your experiences is inherently helpful in the recovery process is ignoring a huge part of how actual recovery from trauma works.

People with PTSD generally don’t want the symptoms forever. The trauma will always be there, but therapy aims to reduce the effect of the disorder. Blocking things out from everyone because of a small few is inherently weaponizing their existence and difficulties, as well as possibly interrupting their therapy via censoring their expression and potential triggers they may want to work through.

I’ve suffered a lot of trauma, including incest-based CSA, and I’ve been working a lot on recovery where I can, which is where a lot of my information on trauma recovery comes from (as well as research into official texts on these things). Content depicting CSA and such usually isn’t a trigger for me, but there’s a lot of other things that surround the time of my trauma that ARE triggers. An easy example is a certain music artist, whom was played often in the time I was heavily traumatized due to their popularity. They’re still pretty popular to this day.

I don’t demand my personal trigger of this music artist to be censored everywhere I go. My triggers are mine to manage. It’s ridiculous to assume that everyone will operate with YOUR triggers in mind, and it would be anti-recovery to try to get everyone to remove that music artist from their life. That would be pretty obvious to anyone that heard of that trigger.

Just like dark fiction, some people are uncomfortable with this artist’s work or just don’t like it. They might dislike how much of the music is sexual, not like the artist, or just think the music is bad. Personally, I don’t really like most of the artist’s work outside of one album, triggers aside. However, those people’s discomfort or my personal triggers aren’t a reason for this artist’s work to be expunged from the universe.

We don’t censor media with guns for mass shooting victims. We don’t censor media with murderers for survivors of attempts. We don’t censor media of war for traumatized veterans. We expect people to manage their triggers, even if we don’t actively think of it that way. SA is no different, it just happens to make more people uncomfortable at the baseline.

Weaponizing the pain of people like me to make the point that that discomfort should be prioritized over freedom of expression is just cruel. Sexual violence already strips people of their autonomy and personhood, and is heavily objectifying. Using us as a talking point to further an agenda of censorship just continues that objectification that is represented in our trauma and furthers a lot of anti-recovery spaces that we’ve seen pop up. (We all know those places that demanded TWs for everything because they tried to account for every single trigger members had)