Help Exists functions to help survivors build community together. Our community guidelines function to help protect the special needs of survivors who are still trying to leave their inborn and still active abuse conditions, and to protect survivors from being forced to demonstrate their disablement, lack of agency, or lack of cultural familiarity. The only customs and traditions that we have are shared agreements to practice kindness with each other.

 

No solicitation. During survivors’ egression from active organized abuse conditions, and in protection of their lacking agency, privacy is nonnegotiable. To maintain everybody’s safety, do not solicit for public testimony inside this community.

 

No self-promotion. Do not advertise or market research for products, services, or media content. Do not share links to social media. At this time, indefinitely, we are refraining from posting links to social media content.

 

No assumptions about identity. Some survivors were born into conditions of organized abuse, and from infancy onward had lives and identities formed by extreme harm. We never assume that these conditions ended or lessened, just because the body grew older. Some survivors are here as people who have no outside identity, other than being a survivor, trying to survive a day at a time. Some survivors only experience identities defined entirely by submission and roles imposed by abusers with no internalized sense of who they are, what choices they may have, what rights they may have, what aspirations they could have, and what may be possible for them.

 

No assumptions about shared culture. Some survivors were born in captivity or inside of environments engineered by abusers. For this reason, survivors can be disabled from experiencing shared culture with others. Some survivors experience exponentially harmful effects deliberately created by their abusers to ensure that what is co-regulating and comforting for the general population can be especially painful and gaslighting for these survivors.

 

Emergencies. Some survivors exist in a fixed state of emergency. States of emergency are valid and real even if survivors remain unable to know this about themselves, especially when it is not demonstrable to or noticed by outside people; and it is not reflected to survivors as even urgent or severe––let alone realized as an emergency. Emergency states may make it inappropriate for others to depend on us during their own non-negated emergencies.

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Entirely disabled. Some survivors have been disabled by abuse in ways that remain indescribable, and by default, private. Some survivors are deliberately disabled from communicating about what was done to them, and what kind of support they require for healing. We always hold awareness for the needs of accommodations/modifications for our own and others’ disablement.

 

Lack of agency. Some survivors are raised to serve others in submission and without agency or choices. Some survivors are disabled from meeting their own needs and interests, including interacting with their own resources, and may not be able to say “yes” or “no” from a place of agency. We always hold this awareness for each other. Regardless of whatever functional presentation may be forced out, states of being totally agencyless and totally disabled must be held as existent and real.

 

Media and technology. Some survivors are primed in childhood to interact with media and political events differently than the general population. Cultural artifacts such as religion, politics, celebrity, media, and technology used to socially engineer the population can interfere with meeting the unmet needs of disabled survivors. It is on topic to process how media and technology affect us, but not for the sake of small-talk or co-regulating based on assumptions of shared culture.

 

Compare and despair. Rather than measuring our own pain and suffering against the pain and suffering of others, we just respond directly by helping to meet unmet needs. Comparison leads to despair by functioning to disconnect us from our needs and replace our actual needs with competition for worth. This creates guilt and shame and turns survival into a trial rather than a right. In reality being loved and valued does not necessitate others being harmed. Part of recovery is discovering that love actually exists and you are actually worthy of love. We are learning together that having love does not require sacrifice and that nobody is replaceable because everybody is worth more than the harm their body can take and the harm their body can inflict. The only route out is to love ourselves and each other to freedom.