#Survivor Tactics

[avi-mation]

Apocalypse buddies

[abusedandromeda]

Grey Rocking Mega Post

Hey y’all! Sorry I’ve been gone but I’ve just been pretty busy lately but I’ve decided to talk about the thing that helped me the most throughout the last years of my abuse, which is the grey rock method. It can be used against toxic family members, toxic romantic partners, or maybe even toxic friends. Basically, in any abusive situation. It can also be used when meeting with said abuser after moving out of close proximity to them, such as during child pick up between divorced parents or during family reunions if you want to see a friendly relative.

Before we go on, just a quick trigger warning for abusive situations that are gonna be used as examples in this and since they’re based off my own personal experiences, they’re gonna feel a little more real than my other posts so PLEASE if you wanna skip the examples, there will be an “example start” and then an “example end”.

Anyway, let’s dive in!

What is the grey rock method?

The grey rock method is when you act as emotionally unresponsive as possible so the abuser loses interest in you in that moment. How you use is it that you don’t make eye contact with them and act uninterested. Don’t show many emotions, or any emotions for that matter, by having a flat voice, show no facial expressions and answering back with one or two words. Keep your sentences short so they don’t have ammunition to use against you or go off of.

I’ll give y’all an extreme example:

*EXAMPLE START*

Abuser: Why didn’t you put the dishes in the dishwasher yesterday?!

Victim: I’m so sorry. I was just so busy doing homework yesterday and I was just so tired and I just forgot. I’ll do it right now, I promise.

Abuser: Right now?! You were supposed to do it yesterday! I swear, you kids are so damn ungrateful. What do you even have to be tired about?! I worked a 40 hour shift and I still gotta cook for y’all lazy asses.

Victim: How am I ungrateful for not loading the dishwasher?

Abuser: Oh, so now you’re talking back?! You know what? Get the fuck out of my house before I (insert threat here) and go move in with your stepfather. You treat him so much better than you treat me. Since I’m such a bitch that you treat me like dirt, go live with him. Fuck you! Get out of my house after you load the dishes! *Storms out*

Victim: …but all I did was forget about the dishes…

It’s constantly draining when you try to defend yourself when, in reality, you will always be in the wrong. The abuser WANTS a reaction. They WANT to feel validated in their power. Now here’s an example with grey rocking:

Abuser: Why didn’t you put the dishes in the dishwasher yesterday?!

Victim: I was busy.

Abuser: Oh?! What were you so busy doing that you couldn’t take five minutes loading the dish washer?!

Victim: Homework.

Abuser: Oh, so you couldn’t have just done it after?!

Victim: I forgot.

Abuser: You forgot?! I bet you just did it to piss me off! You’re always acting so damn ungrateful! I ask you to do one fucking thing!

Victim: Okay.

Abuser: Fuck you! Go fill the dishwasher right now before I (insert death threat)!

Victim: Okay.

Abuser: UGH!!! *Storms out*

*EXAMPLE OVER*

Obviously this written example doesn’t have the tone of voices to fully show off grey rocking so if you want to see a video example, synful_ on tiktok has some on a narcissist romantic partner and a couple more dealing with parents so you can get the full idea.

What’s the point???

“So what’s the point of grey rocking? It sounds so isolating :(, bestie!” These are more personal points than using actual research, but for me, grey rocking:

Allowed me to plan an exit strategy without getting emotionally confused

Allowed me to create an distance between myself and my abusers

Allowed me to conserve at least a little more energy instead of wasting it during on sided arguments

Allowed me to create my own safe haven due where it was nearly impossible for my abusers to access because of how much I stopped telling them

Allowed me to have my own personality outside of the abuse

And, finally, gained confidence in my own ability to stop relying on them for both financial, physical and emotional needs

The biggest point was allowing myself to plan an exit strategy. I’ve seen some comments saying that grey rocking doesn’t work but when asked about it more, they’re saying their relationship is getting worse. YES, THE RELATIONSHIP WILL GET WORSE! IF YOU ARE READING THIS POST TO “FIX” YOUR RELATIONSHIP, THEN THIS POST IS NOT FOR YOU! SO PLEASE DO NOT USE THE GREY ROCK METHOD AS A LONG TERM WAY TO MAKE YOUR RELATIONSHIP BETTER! IT IS VERY DANGEROUS!

For me, the grey rock method worked for about 2 and a half years before I was able to leave, and even then my abusers freaked out and found out about my plan to escape. It was only luck (and a ton of lying) that bought me more time to have a place to move to so I wouldn’t get kicked out on the streets without any resources. Yes, abusers can get more violent with this method. Yes, abusers can get more tense with this method. That’s why it’s only short term like with a future exit strategy or during meetings with them every once in a while.

Personal stuff that makes grey rocking easier

I’m not gonna lie, grey rocking is hard, especially when you’re first starting out. You really do want to defend yourself and prove everything that they’re saying is wrong. That you’re not cheating or that you are grateful for the roof over your head. Because, in the end, you probably still love them and want to let them know that you’re not as vindictive and heartless as they’re making you out to be. It’s a long process that gets easier with time because of the emotional detachment you eventually end up with.

So, when I first started out, I was a young 16 year old just surviving from a fresh suicide attempt and wanting to get out but not knowing how. So one of my alters, Arson, hit me with this: “everything they say is a lie”. What does that mean? Exactly what it says. They say you’re ungrateful? Don’t believe in it. They say you’re a fat ass? Don’t believe in it. They say they’re there for you whenever you need them? Don’t believe in it. This is obviously a big extreme, but at a time where I was just too emotionally drained, it was just easier to stop believing in them entirely.

Give up any hope of a relationship. For me, it had been 16 years and nothing changed despite so much hope. Think of it like this. You haven’t stuck your hand in a fire because you know it’ll burn, and to find that out, you might’ve burned your hand years ago. I’ve stuck my hand out in that fire again and again hoping it wouldn’t burn. But fire is fire, it’ll always burn. Stop hoping it’ll turn to water.

Recording the abuse helps the last point. Even if it’s not legal, you don’t need to use it as evidence in a courtroom. You can just use it as evidence for yourself. If you ever find yourself faltering, listen to those recordings and remember the reason why. You can argue it just retraumatizes you, but it personally got my head out of my ass every time my mind went back to “but they’re family! They’re just having a hard time!” If you’re too nervous to record or just don’t have access to any recording device, then journaling about it in the moment also helps, although I’ve never tested that out.

Do not give them any personal information. “But Andromeda? Like credit card information???” No. Stop talking about your day. If they ask, just say good. Do not take initiative to start a conversation. If they’re the ones who start a conversation, don’t go in depth. Just give them simple answers. Don’t talk about things you enjoy, or about your friends or your hobbies. THEY WILL ALL BE USED AGAINST YOU AND WILL MAKE GREY ROCKING EVEN HARDER EMOTIONALLY.

Plus, it is kinda funny to watch them grasp at ways to manipulate you. When you’re months out and you’ve changed as a person, you’ll just start to watch them try to manipulate the old version of you and realize how stupid they actually are because they rely on information based on you from you. You’ll see what I mean one day lmao.

Long-term affects

I can’t say for sure that it’ll 100% affect you long term, but I’ll use myself as a warning that grey rocking MIGHT affect how you interact with people. I ended up less talkative in general, especially with strangers. Even if a stranger does try and talk to me, my tone of voice is always very flat and I give one or two words answers. Sometimes I’m not interested in the conversation, sometimes I just don’t have that much to say to someone I don’t trust. I found that it was just easier to navigate my life that way since I used to live with my abusers daily. My voice is more lively with people I know more closely, such as my therapist, 2 friends and alters.

The way I speak is actually the reason why I got diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, which the diagnostics include “odd speech”. Odd speech also relates to autism and most likely other disorders so keep in kind that during a session where you’re getting diagnosed with something, they’ll note that down so please don’t be too shocked. I can’t say it’ll affect everyone this badly. You might be completely fine and have no after effects.

———————————

Anyway, I think that’s it! I’m pretty sure I covered everything, but please don’t be shy to ask questions since I might’ve missed some things. Right now, it’s midnight and I’m getting pretty tired so I’m pretty sure I missed some points but hopefully I got what I wanted all down. I really hope this helps someone out there in some way since, despite the after effects, this really did help me in my situation. Night, y’all!

[until-the-brahmin-come-home]

another thing: the fact that the default depiction of courier six has them head to toe covered by the ranger armor inherently gives them just a little bit more nonbinary swag than the other protagonists, imo

[superspunkus]

fallout protagonist lasses

[p2ii]

I feel like there's something to be said about the way fandom will treat characters who's trauma they can personally relate to Vs characters who they cant

[darling-leech]

It's said War. War never changes. Men do, through the roads they walk....

[gravedigest]

Gonna answer this over here, hope you don’t mind.

Oops it’s gonna be rambling I am so sorry

A lot of my writing winds up being freestyle, and getting something going takes four or five tries to stick the opener, like pulling the cord on an engine to get it to start. I have like three 2k word versions of how I wanted Doing Something to go, and one of them actually has Sanford in Hank’s place and Sanford’s more like a refrigerator than a runaway lawnmower. It wasn’t as fun to write, so I shucked it into the “neat concept, I’ll fuck with it later” bin.

Which is fine, I can have as many half-formed ideas as I want because I have the storage space for it.

From there I kinda write out little scene chunklets that I can rearrange or swap out with eachother, I’ll be thinking about the next scene I wanna do while I’m writing a different chunk, or thinking about an old chunk while writing a new one that I can slot in between that’ll make the overall story more coherent. So like, giving Doc a motive for specifically using Deimos to pilot Hank? I didn’t have one for a really fucking long time, then I was writing I think, like, Deimos’ meltdown and was like “Okay actually Deimos is going to be Doom. You can run Doom on anything.”

Then once I get my chunklets in a row I can go back over and add in more shit, and it makes it really easy to change details. Hank in the restaurant, how did he get to the restaurant? Fuck it. He was holed up in the tower this whole time and it was right next door. I’ll mention Deimos smells something burnt up in that other scene, weeeeee~

I kinda got this whole method from just writing vignettes? HNMT is a pretty obvious example of shoving a bunch of little scenes together to make something longer. I was using the research notes in that to kind of give hard stops so I didn’t need to stitch everything together as much. Because I’m lazy. And being lazy means you come up with fun ways to cut corners like that.

Tis how the first livestreaming video was invented. People didn’t wanna go stand up to see if the coffee was done, so they just hooked up a camera to a network and forced it to stream the video. I think I remember that right, take it with a shaker of salt, I ain’t remember shit good.

I highly recommend just doing a shitload of self indulgent vignettes though, just a bunch of scenes you want to read that don’t have to be connected to each other that you don’t have to do anything with. Eventually you might wind up connecting some of them together and extrapolating on a concept, and you can snowball from there.

Or just make a fun little oneshot, Workday is from a 30k document of what amounts to practicing each character individually in a bunch of scenarios, kind of just getting a feel of how I can have people interact and differentiate them from one another. It also just has a lot of stupid dialogue.

I fucking love writing dialogue. It’s really bad. But also neat when you can figure out how to give characters enough voice to where you don’t get confused about who’s saying what without having to say “he said, they said, x explained” yadda yadda. I use that thing as a reference for how I write each character to kind of gage consistency, and I’m not the best at it but I sure am getting better.

So, yeah. I get distracted really easily and this all sort of helps direct me being distracted into getting more work done than I would’ve if I had to follow a real outline, playing with legos instead of worrying about brick and mortar.

TLDR: Mostly freestyle, then editing in the plot beats that form naturally from that.

@ya-killin-me-smalls

[milimeters-morales]

Miguel: a teenager will find me in every universe to beat my ass six ways to Sunday and disappear mysteriously before i can get my hits in

Miles, Gwen, and Hobie: and it’s our turn

Miguel: i don’t suppose you’d leave me alone for a scooby snack -_-

[generic-sonic-fan]

"Team Violence" is what happens whenever you throw Shadow and Rouge into the mix, by the way. (Shadow thought the name was funny so they kept it.)

[jonberry555]

Fighting a Mogu at its Boundary Limit #starwarsjedisurvivor #starwars

Fighting a Mogu using its Boundary Limit to my tactical advantage.

[sanktalucrezias]

cassandra cain saved my life.

[hotsugarbyglassanimals]

oops almost considered talking with mom about the way she tells me my short comings and how that impacts me, forgetting she told me she’s not interested in changing

[espectres]

in need of writing more abt Shou's mental health cuz uh

[dragynkeep]

honestly repeatedly calling csa survivors pedophiles should be considered an act of targeted violence. just, putting that out there lol

[spiderkillerwarrior666]

Ray Price-Crazy Arms