Tag: actually cptsd
Hot adulting tip: make a “responsibilitysona” and roleplay them when you have chores to do
#this is Neurotypical Karen and she enjoys having good sleep hygeine & returning phone calls (via @deadpanwalking)
I find that if I’m wearing Real Adult Business Clothes my worksona can do things like call people and check my inbox, whereas pajamas hellen mostly wants to shovel hamburgers into her face and set things on fire.
The problem I have with this is while pyjamas Ruth has to work hard to focus at all and feels bad when she doesn’t get shit done and occasionally has to take a valium, gets-shit-done Ruth is a five alarm fire of anxiety that can’t sit down.
brain hole
noun. The several-hour-long state of (typically ADHD-induced) hyperfocus, in which it feels like no time is passing but suddenly it’s 10pm and you haven’t made dinner yet.
Example, “Its 7pm. We should decide what time we want to do dinner before we fall down another…. brain hole.”
“if somebody becomes panicked when you accuse them of lying theyre obviously not telling the truth” shut up ugly im a survivor who got punished for shit i never did all the time of fucking course im gonna panic when im blamed for something i didnt do
since this post is actually getting attention rn i really want to emphasize this-
many of the “tells” of lying are traits commonly found in abuse survivors and mentally ill/disabled people.
stuttering, averting eye contact, panicking, raising your volume, fidgeting, and other similar traits are actions performed commonly by these groups, especially in situations of heavy stress- such as being accused of doing something we didnt do, especially if we are afraid of being punished for doing nothing.
im honestly begging people to think critically when accusing somebody of lying for small traits like these.
And some people are expert manipulators who can easily lie with a straight face.
So assuming that body language can detect lying causes you to wrongly accuse people of lying while also not protecting yourself from being lied to.
Just stop.
This is a thing that, though I love police procedurals and mysteries, as an abuse survivor and neurodivergent person I wish this trope would fuck off and die, because whenever it surfaces, it reinforces that I am a ‘liar’ in the eyes of anyone watching. It makes me fear what would happen if I ever had to deal with the police, even though I never do anything remotely sketchy.
My mind is like an internet browser. 17 tabs are open, 4 of them are frozen and I don’t know where the music is coming from.
do you ever tire of how, like, dramatic anxiety is?? it’s like. bitch. bitch. it’s not that serious. we’ll live. it’ll probably be a pain in the ass, but we’ll live. so stop making me feel like i’m actively dying.
I have been saying for years that neurotypical people have NO IDEA HOW BORING anxiety and depression are. It’s not so much, ‘OMG, the world is ending, how will I cope????’ but ‘Seriously? Again? Bitch, I GOT SHIT TO DO. Outside. You know, the place I’m having a panic attack at thinking about going. FFS, GET IT TOGETHER.’
Okay, new rule.
No more doubting myself.
No more doubt. Nope. Not doing it.
I KNOW that the abuse was That Bad. I know this. I have told people I trust who are SENSIBLE about it and gotten a lot of horrified and unimpressed looks when I reflexively try to justify it with “But it didn’t happen that often” or “But I did X first”.
Even two fucking years after I got out of that house.
“She only grabbed my hair and slammed my head against the floor because-”
No. Not doing it. NO. (Also, I was THREE. And five. And seven. And twelve. And it was ongoing. What the hell. WHO DOES THAT?)
“I said I couldn’t breathe and she said if I couldn’t breathe I wouldn’t be talking, and I mean it’s not like I DIED, so -”
No.
No more.
“I was having a temper tantrum, so she-”
No.
I was having a MELTDOWN, because I was a neurodivergent child who was being abused from at least age 2 onward, and I was in an intolerable situation.
I know that the abuse really was That Bad. Period.
No more doubt.
i got out a while back – still do this, trying to stop. my friends are still horrified every time i dredge a New Bad up from the memory hole.
it was that bad. let’s have 2018 be the year we stop prevaricating on behalf of people that hurt us.
“every time I dredge a New Bad up from the memory hole” is a very good and visceral description of what it feels like.
I very much agree! Let’s have 2018 be the year we stop prevaricating on behalf of people that hurt us.
The Memory Hole is a good analogy, but I know sometimes I’ve just casually mentioned something and stopped because the reactions of the people I’m talking to tells me this is Not Normal Childhood. I’m thirty six, and the last major time this happened was three years ago. I casually mentioned how the dynamic between myself and my mother operated when I was a preteen onward till I left home, and the person I was talking to was someone I’d been close friends with since I was thirteen, and she looked shocked. I’d told her all kinds of details of the shit my dad did to me decades ago, so it wasn’t like I was springing on her the fact that I’d been abused. She looked furious and very clearly told me that what went on between me and my mother was flat out abusive and wrong. And that wasn’t some discovered memory, or something I knew was bad that I was disclosing for the first time – that was something I’d never talked about because I never thought there was anything to talk about. My baseline, yet again, was established as way, way wrong – and with the parent no one had ever labelled the abusive one. So I’m dealing with the exhaustion, anger and bitterness I thought I’d left behind in my teenage years, in my thirties, for the OTHER parent. And while I’m yet again living with her.
FYI home stuff
The person who was coming, wo makes me feel unsafe, migt be staying somewhere else. But I’ll believe it when it actually happens, and not a moment before. In the mean time, I’ll be over here, struggling not to dissociate, chewing my nails down, and walking 6kms a day to deal with the mental health bullshit this stirred up.
Oh, yeah, I’m walking again, because i need to, and because it’s finally starting to cool down. Gosh I miss walking in Hill End. Walking in Sydney is the worst.
i hate when the teacher’s like “write about a bad time in your life” like i ain’t tryna get a social worker up my ass, thanks tho fam
This ain’t no joke I had to write a essay about what your scared of so I did it (I was scared of growing up and where my life was going) it was great got a 100 but then I got sent to councilors office and was sent to therapy cause they thought I was suicidal and on the verge of breaking…Apparently they ment like spiders or some shit…
Also like, not everyone finds that at all useful or cathartic.
“Write about some difficulty you’ve experienced personally.”
“Aight fam let me just break down into tears and skip the rest of my classes.”Yes! I had a psych professor ask us to discuss outloud the hardest thing that ever happened to us literally two days ago and I said “you realize the position you’re putting us in? I feel obligated to lie to not only save my peers the awkwardness but also because I will find no relief in answering honestly but rather anxiety. The hardest thing in my life is having people repeatedly tell me I should find some sort of catharsis in reliving my trauma so someone else can feel pity for me!”
The whole class backed me up because they didn’t want to either! Those kind of exercises are only helpful for people who don’t have any real past/current issues– which is no one btw.
On par with this are those fucking self-assessments where they want to to be optimistic and positive about the future. You’re sitting there drowning in college stress and anxiety so bad you can’t look another human in the eye, fighting depression so that you can eventually achieve a piece of paper that might get you a better job if the economy doesn’t tank itself (guess what, it did), and the most optimistic thing you can think of is that the class ends in 20 minutes.
OH! I KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS!
There’s a WIRED article that explains the history behind this practice.
Basically, this guy named Jeffrey Mitchell had a traumatic experience, then after months of PTSD, he told a confidant about the event that traumatized him. Retelling the event to a confidant was so cathartic for Mitchell that his PTSD went away after. He did a bunch of research to see if his personal experience of catharsis and relief could be replicated in other people suffering from PTSD. Years later he published a paper proposing a formalized psychiatric treatment revolving around this idea that expressing a traumatic experience helps relieve it. The paper was so influential that the whole psychiatric community adopted “critical incident stress debriefing” (CISD) as a standard treatment for PTSD.
Unfortunately … it’s bullshit.
Not only does the CISD treatment program Mitchell came up with not help the majority of patients who try it, but it actually makes PTSD worse in the majority of patients who try it.
The WIRED article explains why:
CISD misapprehends how memory works…. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.
None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant.
…the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge.
Basically, Mitchell waited until he had some emotional distance before trying to recall the memory, and he had full control of the situation. It was fully his decision. Nobody was pressuring him to talk about it. So he felt safe. Thinking about the memory from a place of safety allowed his brain to re-contextualize the memory as harmless.
Conversely, pressuring a patient to recall a traumatic memory, particularly when it’s still fresh in their minds, makes the patient feel very unsafe. Recalling a bad memory in this unsafe context only serves to re-traumatize the patient.
The importance of Autoboyography – a personal perspective
I’m from the position where I didn’t grow up in Provo or a town like it, I grew up in Australia, where Mormons are a Christian minority, but that separateness still dictates everything. Everything is about us and them and the line between. I don’t think I had a single teacher that my mother didn’t make me give Books of Mormon to. Every friend that visited my home, my mother pressured me to bring to church. LDS members buy from other members, hire other members, socialise with other members, and glory in that isolation. But at the same time, there’s the incredibly toxic fishbowl of church culture. If your parents separate, for example, shunning is a very real thing. I had mothers refuse to let me touch their babies, as though family dysfunction was catching. And I was a child at the time.
Nothing was secret, either. I was abused, and all my school teachers were quietly informed, so that I was given an easier time of things. All but one. Why? He was a church member, and my mother knew that if he knew, his wife knew, and if his wife knew, the ward and even the stake knew. Anything told to the bishop was told to his wife and circulated through the congregation. Women, in particular, were ruthlessly policed, not only by the men but by each other. Anyone who couldn’t keep up with church callings, work, home and family while keeping a permanent smile pasted in place was obviously sinning somehow. All you had to do was trust in God, and that was easy, right? I read somewhere that Mormon states in the US have the highest per capita anti-depressant use. I don’t know how legit it is, but I believe it. I was medicated by sixteen, and no matter how hard I tried, I was never enough. We had one pregnancy in my high school in my age group, out of 150 kids. Our young women’s group, 25 girls aged 12-18, had about a 50% teen pregnancy rate. Hypocrites and liars and smile, smile, always smile.
And that isn’t even touching on the unspoken spectre of what would happen if you were anything but cishet/straight. In Australia, there wasn’t Evergreen, but there was always the understanding that kids who were wrong went somewhere to be fixed. I read Saving Alex last year, and all I could think was that this was what the new face of cure culture was. I knew someone online years ago who’d been through Evergreen. Out of the dozen or so who were there at the same time, he was the only one who hadn’t yet killed himself.
I read Josh and Lolly Weed’s divorce post today, and there was a part where he said,
“For me, though, it all came down to the people I met with–the actual human beings who were coming to my office. They would come and sit down with me, and they would tell me their stories. These were good people, former pastors, youth leaders, relief society presidents, missionaries, bishops, Elder’s Quorum presidents, and they were … there’s no other way to say this. They were dying. They were dying before my eyes. And they would weep in desperation—after years, decades, of trying to do just as they had been instructed: be obedient, live in faith, have hope. They would weep with me, and ask where the Lord was. They would sob. They would wonder where joy was. As a practitioner, it became increasingly obvious: the way the church handled this issue was not just inconvenient. It didn’t make things hard for LGBTQIA people. It became more and more clear to me that it was actually hurting them. It was killing them.”
And yes, that’s what Church policy is meant to do, it’s what it’s always been meant to do. It’s meant to kill us. If we die, then we’re a sad story, designed to spread a message. We were weak, God meant for it to be, and isn’t it better this way?
The only way to win is to stay alive. Eat your anger and let it burn in your belly. Stand in that field without walls and scream long and loud, and don’t smile for anyone else’s comfort. Wear rainbows like armour and love like you’re throwing grenades. Survive, and seek happiness, and prove the bastards wrong. And that, that is why this book is so important. It’s a story so normal, so sweet and simple, about two people finding love and finding themselves, and the happy ending isn’t the one the church says is the only way. There are many roads to happiness. You might have to look long and hard to find them, but it isn’t one-size-fits-all. It isn’t predetermined. It’s individual, and unique, and beautifully, wonderfully average. That’s what the church doesn’t want queer kids to know. That’s what this book reveals, so beautifully. And I’m just so blown away that it exists, in my lifetime, and that I got to read it. It’s wonderful.
knitting in the dark 