A Roundup of Things I’ve Written About Trauma and Abuse

So I thought I might do a roundup page of links to stuff I have written about trauma and abuse, especially since more people may be coming to my website looking for that content.

A bit of background:

I am a survivor of multiple different kinds of abuse and trauma. I have complex PTSD as a result of that. I have had many close relationships with trauma survivors.

I also spent close to 20 years in the trauma field, where I did a range of things from training for professionals to evaluation to research to direct service work to supervision, primarily focused on services for survivors of intimate violence (e.g. sexual assault, intimate partner violence, intimate partner stalking, child abuse). Ten years of that was full time work at a large victim assistance agency in NYC. I left the field a few years ago.

In addition to my personal and professional experience, I facilitate community workshops for survivors, particularly sexuality & kink focused workshops for queer, trans & kinky survivors of intimate violence.

I also write queer kink erotica and romance that centers survivor characters, specifically for survivor readers. On occasion, I do sensitivity reading for books with trauma survivor characters.

General Posts About Abuse & Trauma  

• Discerning Emotional Abuse in Relationships: This post describes common tactics of emotional abuse and gives concrete examples. It is intended to aid folks in discerning whether emotional abuse is going on or has been part of their relationships.
• In Support of the Practice of Discerning Abusive Dynamics and Behaviors: This post describes why I think it’s important to practice discerning abusive dynamics and how I do that. It also contains links to resources that may assist you in this.
• Emergency Emotional Safety Plan: This downloadable PDF is a resource I have used when teaching workshops for survivors. I use it myself to manage being triggered. It lays out ways to recognize whether you are triggered, and a plan for how to manage that, which you can personalize.
• #DailyCoping Strategies Round Up: This post collects the thread of my detailed explanations of my coping strategies–how they work, when to use them, where I learned about them. I write about one strategy per day, on Twitter.
• On #WorldMentalHealthDay, talking about stigma and internalized ableism: This is a personal post about why I prefer to use the language internalized ableism instead of mental health stigma, that talks about my own internalized ableism around PTSD and some things that help me grapple with it.
• On Taking Space In Romantic Relationships And Getting Clear About Abusive Dynamics: A thread of tweets discussing the importance of taking space and how it helped me get clear about abuse in relationships.
• On Being Trans & Non-Binary & Abusive Relationships: A thread about abuse tactics commonly used to target trans folks, how we survive abuse, and the long term impact of abuse on the kinds of things we dream about.
• One Trans Response to “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds”: A post discussing transphobic abuse by partners, and my response to a story by a trans author that centers a cis character grappling with her transphobia.
• On Self Esteem and Imagining the Relationships We Desire: A livejournal post about the Self Esteem episode of My So Called Life and on wanting more from relationships than not being treated badly.
• Physical Reactions to Trauma: a thread of tweets about physical trauma symptoms and how difficult they can be.
• On Hyperarousal: a thread of tweets explaining what hyperarousal is, how it can work for trauma survivors, and offering some strategies for managing.

Posts About Reading & Writing Stories that Center Trauma Survivors

• My blog series on writing trauma survivor characters. Currently, there are 3 posts with more to come: one defining trauma & PTSD; one describing what it’s like to be triggered, one describing ways trauma survivors manage being triggered.
• A dialogue between two survivor erotica writers, myself and Oleander Plume (hosted on her blog), about trigger warnings and writing erotica as a survivor.
• Making My Kinky Erotica Accessible to Survivors: A guest post on Radical Access Mapping Project, about the strategies I used in putting together my erotica collection, Show Yourself To Me, to make the book accessible to survivors of trauma and abuse.
• Going At My Own Pace: The Impact of Rose Lemberg’s “Geometries of Belonging”: A post talking about pacing and the ways I have been impacted as a writer by Geometries of Belonging, particularly around the representation of disabled characters, including characters with PTSD.
• Illustrating Verbal Negotiation of Consent in Sex Scenes: A post that discusses the importance of illustrating verbal consent and shares an excerpt example.
• Do you have to directly depict abuse?: A thread in which I discuss my thoughts on this question.
• A compilation of quotes from the blog tour for my recent book, focused on writing survivor characters and writing as a survivor.
• How Partners Respond to Survivors Being Triggered in Romance Novels: a thread of tweets discussing the ways partners of survivors in romance novels often respond to survivors being triggered.

My Fiction that Centers Survivor Characters

• Show Yourself To Me: My recent queer kink erotica collection has many stories that center survivor characters. For more information about survivor representation in this collection, you can see this post.
• Shocking Violet: This is a work in progress, a queer kink polyamorous romance centering 5 characters who all have PTSD. All excerpts are collected here. A few that talk specifically about trauma and coping with trauma: Chapter 1 (both audio and text), and this excerpt showing Jax coping with trauma symptoms.
• Jonah’s Book: This is a work in progress,  a novel about trauma, desire, music, gender, disability and ghosts. It centers an autistic physically disabled kinky queer genderqueer character named Jonah, who loves musicals, has survived awful shit, and is having a very hard year. It doesn’t have a real title yet, so right now I call it Jonah’s book. Here is a short excerpt that describes how Jonah thinks about trauma.

Posts about Trauma, Consent, Sexuality & BDSM

• Safewords in Kink Life and in Kink Fiction: A post describing how safewords are one of many ways (and not The One True Way) to get consent in BDSM.
• A guest post on F. Leonora Solomon’s blog where I tell a story about my experience bottoming in a cathartic scene soon after leaving an abusive relationship.
• One Sadists Consent: A post describing my experiences with consent and my approach to consent as a top, particularly around sadism
• Being a Disabled Top in Kink Community: A post where I talk about my experiences being a disabled top, that includes discussion of PTSD.
• The Spaces Between Desire and Action: A guest post on Rebekah Weatherspoon’s blog, about the complexities of consent, specifically discussing the way that naming desires does not mean you are consenting to act on them, and how taking a breath between desire and action can be an important part of honoring consent.
• The Importance of Context: A livejournal post on the ways context matters to me a great deal, and outside of the context of consensual BDSM, things that might be read as kink are read as violence.