Adulthood means looking behind you and thinking, “Holy fuck, who would treat a child like THAT?!”
Tag: abuse tw
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.
one of the more valuable things I’ve learned in life as a survivor of a mentally unstable parent is that it is likely that no one has thought through it as much as you have.
no, your friend probably has not noticed they cut you off four times in this conversation.
no, your brother didn’t realize his music was that loud while you were studying.
no, your bff or S.O. doesn’t remember that you’re on a tight deadline right now.
no, no one else is paying attention to the four power dynamics at play in your friend group right now.
a habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight….it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age.
Here’s the thing: most people don’t do that. I’m not saying everyone else is oblivious, I’m saying the over analysis of minor nuances is a habit of abuse.
I have a rule: I do not respond to subtext. This includes guilt tripping, silent treatments, passive aggressive behavior, etc. I see it. I notice it. I even sometimes have to analyze it and take a deep breath and CHOOSE not to respond. Because whether it’s really there or just me over-reading things that actually don’t mean anything, the habit of lending credence to the part of me that sees danger in the wrong shift of body weight…that’s toxic for me. And dangerous to my relationships.
The best thing I ever did for myself and my relationships was insist upon frank communication and a categorical denial of subtext. For some people this is a moral stance. For survivors of mentally unstable parents this is a requirement of recovery.
Sacajawea: If Not For Her, We Could Be Saluting the British Flag
Few women in U.S. history have had more influence on the nation’s history than the young Lemhi Shoshone woman, Sacajawea. It’s very likely that Lewis and Clark would never have reached the Pacific Ocean had it not been for her help. White settlement would have been different. Indian wars throughout the western half of the country would have been altered. We might even be saluting the British flag rather than the American flag. Sacajawea’s role was gigantic.
MY GIRL. She is of our tribe and we are so proud of her out in Inyo County. The Lewis and Clark thing was just a small part of her epic life.
She was actually born with the name Poi Naipi (Little Grass Maiden). She and two of her friends (Nai Nukkwi, Patsu Naipi) were kidnapped by a hostile band of Hidatsa, who had a strange practice of replacing their own dead children with the children of other tribes.
Poi Naipi’s “adopted” parents didn’t like her much so instead of sending her home they freaking sold her to a drunken French guy named Charbonneau. This man was bastard incarnate. To put this into perspective: He had once been stabbed in the face in Manitoba when he was caught raping a young girl there. At this time, being forced to marry him, Poi Naipi was about 9 years old. And, he already had one other child bride.
He was very abusive, he drank a lot, and at some point Poi Naipi started calling herself Tsaikka Tsa Wea. It means in our language, “One Who Carries a Burden.” You see how this got corrupted to Sacajawea over time.
At one point on the L&C expedition Clark caught Charbonneau beating Tsaikka Tsa Wea and her newborn son. Well, Clark and Lewis beat the crap out of Charbonneau and told him to knock it off. Later, after the expedition, Clark paid for Tsaikka Tsa Wea’s son to go to school and live in his home.
That’s not even the cool part though. As an older woman Tsaikka Tsa Wea said “To hell with this, I’m going home.” This was a pretty big thing to do, understand that she had practically been raised by her abusive scumbag husband and it is very hard for women who have been systematically abused since childhood to learn to stand up for themselves, especially against their aggressors. But, she did it. Traveling all by herself, she found the Northern Shoshone encampment on Wind River, where Chief Wusik-He was with some Eastern Shoshone (and some Western at the time) (this would later go on to be the permanent Eastern settlement, those guys are still out there today). She was reunited with her brother, who by that point had been named Daigwani of the Northern Shoshone. Everybody welcomed her home, her friends, her family, and she broke down crying to hear them call her their “Lost Woman” (Wadze Waipu). For her resilience and cunning she was appointed the personal advisor to Wusik-He. As a very old woman was buried with the name “Chief Woman,” later her son and her nephew were buried on either side of her. Those graves are still there on Wind River today.
Poi Naipi and the Wide Ridge Clan, never forget you, your story is always being told. Miikwa katukan, tunna wunupuhantu tung’atiwan naangwunupuhantu
Controversial opinion, apparently: Don’t hit children.
- It teaches them to obey out of fear, instead of for good behavior’s sake.
- Even then, it has mixed results and often makes defiant children.
- It causes long-lasting psychological issues that follow them to adulthood.
- It ruins your relationship with that child because they will not trust you.
[As someone who’s had parents threaten to (and almost) hit them, I wholeheartedly agree]
5. It ingrains in kids the mentality that violence is always the answer and helps you get what you want
6. The children will eventually grow up and start beating their own kids too because they see nothing wrong with it.
7. They don’t LEARN anything from getting hit. It just makes them scared of you and nine times out of ten they’ll start thinking that it’s THEIR fault, that they deserved it, and this is a horrible mindset that can lead to self-destructive tendencies like self harm.
8. The child is literally powerless in the situation and cannot run away or defend themselves; because you’re the parent, you call the shots, and apparently you know best. If you think abusing this power is okay, without considering that your children are human beings with feelings and that what you are doing can and will affect them, I think that’s disgusting
kesha literally got put through some terrible fucking abuse and violence, a lengthy public trial, rehab, and slew of people constantly tearing her career down for being a “slut” or an lgbt+ supporter and she returned from hiatus and put out rainbow which is inspiring and raw and incredibly uplifting and talks about strength through self-acceptance of the good and bad inside of her.
taylor swift tried to manipulate and lie to destroy not one, not two, but THREE (3) people’s careers, got caught in a lie and publicly dragged, and she returned from hiatus and put out an overproduced song with trash lyrics talking about how she can’t let go of the smallest slight against her…
if that doesn’t tell you who’s really a good person at heart, i don’t know what does.
In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.
There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.
I realized what happened after about two seconds.
The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.
For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.
I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.
This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.
Can we talk about this scene
for a minute? Because I tear up literally every damn time I watch it.After losing his son, Iroh
fought tirelessly to save his nephew from Ozai’s brainwashing, no matter how
hard Zuko tried to push him away. But even after years of sticking by him
through every dead end and reckless gambit, Zuko still goes back to his awful father. Once
again, Iroh couldn’t save his son and it just kills him.Then the kid shows up with team Avatar, because it turns out
some of those proverbs got through to him after all.But the part that really gets me is Zuko’s perspective.
Sitting outside that tent,
he’s so damn scared. He’s so convinced Iroh hates him, he won’t even go in
without a pep talk from Katara. Everyone else can see that Iroh will be proud
of what his nephew has done since they last met, but Zuko can’t. When Zuko goes
in to see the family he disappointed, he’s braced for yelling and fire and rage
because that’s what he’s been raised to expect when he screws up. Pissing off
his father got him disgraced, burned, tossed in the street, told he didn’t
deserve to be alive, and shot at with lightening. A lifetime of experience says
he should be
scared. He doesn’t expect to be forgiven, he just wants Iroh to know he’s
sorry.And then Iroh’s not even mad. NOT EVEN MAD.
Mercy and compassion are so alien to Zuko that immediate forgiveness wasn’t
even a remote possibility. He’s so utterly confused, but at the same time, so,
so relieved. He hasn’t lost his only family. The only person who stayed by him
all those years in exile. The only father who loved him.They both thought they’d lost
the only family they had left. Instead, they find themselves closer than
they’ve ever been. And I tear up every damn time.Not to mention, Zuko was burned and disowned just because he spoke out of turn. He betrayed Iroh, the person who was there for him and loved him when no one else did, and when Zuko goes to face his uncle he was probably just as terrified as he was during the Agni Kai with his father, only this time he feels he truly deserves whatever Iroh has to say–or do.
Uncle’s forgiveness–the fact that he wasn’t even angry–speaks volumes to just what love truly looks like. What family means. And Zuko is shocked that he’s been extended this kind of thing because it’s so unfamiliar to him. This scene is simultaneously happy and sad, beautiful and heartbreaking, because it reflects the abuse Zuko’s endured and the love he’s moving into.
Avatar keeps proving again and again that it is leagues above the rest in storytelling
old wounds
Straight men who infantilize women’s friendships have no fucking survival instinct. Like my uncle is always making fun of and rolling his eyes at my aunt’s friend lunches and telephone dates with her lady friends, teasing her like she’s a gossipy teenage girl in high school drama. And my aunt just laughs about it but I know for a fact that if it wasn’t for her best friend K, she would have probably set him on fire by now.
Like straight men are capable of maybe a quarter of the indepth emotional labor and support women do for each other. Like men can literally have one friend named Bob that they go fishing with once a year and still be content for life. Then they think it’s cute and girlish that their wives have these long term, integrated, emotionally intense relationships with women but like…LOL, it’s not because men don’t need those kinds of relationships, it’s just that they get it all from their wives while offering peanuts in return. PEANUTS.
Like if your woman is on the phone for 2 hours with her friend and you think that’s childish of her, just know that she spent half of that time getting the support that you should be giving her (but are incapable of) and the rest lamenting what a giant fucking baby manchild you are.
This is how homophobia and misogyny hurts men: it makes these kinds of in-depth, deeply emotionally invested friendships a feminine thing to do, and therefore unmanly (and un-straight) for men to do. Men are brought up to shy away from cultivating these kinds of deep and platonic friendships with other men. Because, you know, if you talk to your male friends all the time and hang out with them and cry in front of them and hug all the time and lean on each other (emotionally and physically) when you need support, it makes you gay and womanly. Which is, apparently, the worst thing you can be.
I’ve read articles and personal stories about and by men, talking about experiences they’ve had that have shown them how painfully out of touch they are with their own emotions and their own ability to open up and connect with people, including themselves.
I worry about men a lot. I worry about the number of men who find themselves incapable of providing emotional support for their friends, their significant others, and themselves, all because of how they’ve been raised to bury and ignore their more vulnerable emotions and tactile tendencies because they’ve been taught that this kind of closeness has to be stamped out at all costs.
!!!!!
So important.So so so important
Studies have shown that this sort of emotional shallowness is a leading factor in why men are more likely to be violent, to drown their sorrows in drug and alcohol abuse, and to successfully commit suicide.
They throw all their eggs in one basket with a significant other, or at times a parent, and when problems arise in that relationship, because they have no other relationships to speak of, they quickly turn to destruction.
This is why I often give out advice that people need to expand on their relationships. You literally CAN’T have it all hinge on a single person, it is a horrific idea and it will destroy you and the things and people you love. You HAVE to have relationships with other people.
Anyone with any mental health issue can tell you that the inability to talk it out, the lack of having someone to turn to, makes things go careening downhill, faster than we can catch them back.
Somehow this is considered an acceptable way of being for men, and their lashing out is “just how men are”. It’s more masculine to shoot yourself than to take medication. It’s more masculine to beat your partners than to have a conversation with them. It’s more masculine to bottle everything up until it erupts and people die, than it is to simply ask for help.
And people want to blame women and feminism for it, for “making men afraid”, or simply try to list the likelihood of surviving suicide and avoiding drug abuse as “female privilege” or something that is a nature-given trick of “biological sex”, rather than address the very serious issue of toxic masculinity and extreme, self-destructive hatred of being perceived as anything like women.
– mod BP
i remember in my intro psych class years ago, we were learning about the importance of long term relationships such as friends and family in adulthood and you need at least 3 really close people in your life the maintain a healthy support system, and we were told to guess how many men have after the age of 25. and the national average is zero. zero. like thats sad
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