Musings and Inspiration

Fancy names for procrastination. This is an adult space. If you're under 18, look after yourself and get off my lawn.

[shadow27]

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

When I was in therapist school one of my profs said, "A lot of trauma needs 10 or 20 years before it's really ready to be worked through. Maybe longer." And at the time I was like: Oh Shit. I planned to be over my trauma and all better by the time I graduated!

Anyway, that was 10 or 20 years ago and jesus fuck, she was right.

[star-anise]

A brief explanation:

One of the most popular theories of trauma says there are three steps.

Escape the trauma and find safety.

Process the trauma.

Consolidate the trauma.

Sometimes this can be a relatively quick process. If you get into a car accident while turning left in a busy city street, you might get trauma symptoms that cause feelings of fear and anxiety when you're driving your car, or travelling by car through a busy city.

"Finding safety" would mean learning to handle your anxiety and fearfulness by re-training your body to seek calm, even when reminded of the trauma. This might include things like breathing or muscle relaxation exercises that actually affect an anxious brain and help you stay centred, as well as slow exposure to situations that are stressful and traumatic so you learn to tolerate them again.

"Processing the trauma" means to look back at what happened that has given you significant psychological symptoms, and re-process those memories and the lessons you took from them so they are less damaging or hurtful. That might be revisiting your memories of the accident until they aren't so painful to think about, or it might be working to be more comfortable with driving again.

"Consolidating the trauma" means that when you've settled those memories, you take your new, healthier understanding of yourself forward into your life. That might make you a more cautious driver, or cause you to be more mindful and value every moment because you've seen how quickly your life can change. It is what you make of it.

When you try to do these steps out of order, that's more of a problem. If you want to dive straight into revisiting your memories of something that happened, but you have no defense against the panic attacks and nightmares that remembering causes you, you're not safe, not so far as your brain thinks. Your brain experiences raw memories of trauma as though it were still happening all around you. You can end up even more traumatized than before, so that even seeing a picture of a car makes you feel like you're back on that street waiting to turn left.

If a trauma is particularly old, complex, or strong, it can take a long, long time before you actually feel safe enough to go back into the memories that haunt you most. That's especially true if you're still in a situation that feels threatening, like if it's your job to drive around downtown. Or in other situations, if your abusive parent is still alive and in your life, or if you're still a member of the group or club you were abused in.

Even with our best therapies, like EMDR and DBT, it can still take years to reach that place of safety. Like my prof said, sometimes it's a decade. Sometimes more. I'm almost 40, and this week I finally felt safe enough to open up a file of memories that happened when I was 4. But until you reach that place, it's really hard to unpack the trauma and look at more complicated questions like, "Are the assumptions I made back when that happened accurate or useful?" or "Is it beneficial to me to keep being afraid of this kind of situation in the future?"

[star-anise]

Also, about this process of finding safety, and how it can take so long. There's this bit from a Cheryl Strayed/Dear Sugar article that I have been living by ever since I discovered it maybe a decade ago, where she recounts having to give advice to a teenage girl at the school she works for, after they've learned that none of the government services that could get her out of her deeply shitty life have the budget or inclination to help her. It's brisk and a bit raw, but for me, it has been the permission I needed to fight like hell.

I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

Just because I wasn't deconstructing the shit that happened to me when I was 4 for the past couple decades, it doesn't mean I wasn't working on my own healing. I did all the work that got me to here and now.

Also this bit from Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold:

You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them.

[napoleononthebellerophon]

the amount of lawsuits these exploited children are going to be filing 20 years from now is going to be crazy and im all for it

[intactics-deactivated20250505]

tactics to remain intact ❔

keep a part of yourself reserved for yourself alone and build a relationship with the silence at the heart of your solitude. who you are before that silence is the closest thing you can get to an unobstructed view of yourself. the noisier it is in your head, the further away you are from the middle. take medication if it helps keep the volume down. remain in your body and listen to it. whatever the day disintegrates within you, make some attempt to reintegrate it each night. whatever emotion is shaking you like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog, go limp and wait for the dog to finish before you take action or speak rashly. keep all promises to yourself. eat and sleep and drink as well as you can. figure out what makes the integity of your self worse and quit doing it. show up every day to the job of taking care of yourself. forge close personal bonds with your peers, if you can locate some peers. dance.

[xenogears]

Shout out to the (many) times I got called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that the only real way to fully understand a work of fiction is to experience it firsthand and that summaries and reviews are not a replacement for that

[the-lincyclopedia]

Me, reading the first 80% of the post: What do you mean, "experience it firsthand"? How am I supposed to join the Hunger Games or go on the Odyssey?

Me, reading the final clause of the post: Oh, you literally meant that people have to read the book/listen to the audiobook in order to fully understand it. And people got mad. Oh dear.

[marisatomay]

To quote what a friend of mine said after she watched Jerry Maguire (1996) for the first time, having thought she knew what it was about because of its cultural ubiquity: “you miss a lot of a movie when you don’t watch it”

[datsderbunnyblog]

This comment was left on a post about making the most of the Libby app. "Excessive use of generous lending policies" is the most absurd phrase I've ever seen anyone use to discuss libraries.

[catboycommunist]

evergreen

[desolendate]

im literally in tears what the fuck

[leviathan-supersystem]

90% of arguments about media could just be solved by saying “different people like different things in their stories” and leaving it at that

[fakeosphere]

this person probably humanizes cops/racists, rape, child abuse, incest etc as long as its fictional lol

[judygemstone]

this is a good and normal leap in logic to make from this post!

[wetwareproblem]

I certainly hope they do, and not just when it’s fictional. Humanizing them is an important step in stopping the actual real-world harm.

If you recognize that they’re human, then you can understand it’s an issue of rationale and perspective, not Inherent Evil - and you can learn to think like an adversary. This is the first step in developing a good security mindset. That mindset, in turn, is the first tool you need to build functional safety measures and protections for your community.

There’s an added bonus, too - if you recognize that they’re people, you’ll notice that not many people are villains in their own narratives. They aren’t choosing to be evil, they’re rationalizing their harmful choices. And you start asking questions.

If you recognize that cops are people, you learn to ask yourself “Am I being reactionary, authoritarian, and needlessly violent?”

If you recognize that racists are people, you learn to recognize and unpack the racist lessons you were taught.

If you learn that rapists are people, you learn to actively verify consent.

By recognizing that terrible people are not Inherently Bad, but choosing to do terrible things for reasons they think justify them, you get better at protecting yourself from them - and protecting everyone around you from your worst tendencies. It’s a difficult and ongoing process, but it’ll protect you far better than any list of specific Bad Things to watch out for.

[wetwareproblem]

There’s a flipside to this, of course, and it’s important:

Anyone who tells you that your enemies are inhuman monsters is using you.

Either they’re trying to convince you that they couldn’t possibly be an Enemy because they’re a normal person… or they’re trying to keep you from noticing the little rationalizations. To convince you that atrocity is okay when you do it.

Don’t fall for either lie.

[somenoneelse]

That last point there is really important. How often do people get away with truly atrocious shit, because everyone around them thinks that inhuman monster thing?

Of course my friend can’t be a rapist. They’re my friend, not some inhuman monster!

Of course my sibling doesn’t hit and gaslight their spouse. They’re my sibling, not some inhuman monster!

etc etc etc

So all the little and big things that point to [fill in blank] doing [thing] are rationalized and explained away. Because [fill in blank] is a person and not some inhuman monster, so they’d never!

By dehumanizing people who commit atrocities, we blind ourselves to the ability to do that shit in people we first and foremost see as people already (friends, family, co-workers, etc.) and in ourselves.

[thebadchoicemachine]

Reminds me of the cautious: People don’t want a democracy, they want a dictatorship they agree with. The problem with that, of course, is when a dictator changes you don’t get a say.

[jacobwren]

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

[lakevida]

trying to communicate ideas through language and it doesnt suffice so you turn to the abstract image and then people want to be talking to you about the images NO!!!!!! ! ! ! ! ! !

[lakevida]

precisely

[teathattast]

[huariqueje]

Tea - Jeffrey Ripple , 1922.

American , b. 1962 -

Oil on linen , 9 x 12 in. 23 x 31 cm.

[kaijufluffs]

She's being so big and brave.

[kaijufluffs]

The long awaited sequel.

[teaboot]

Jumping from child care to private security really messes with you. I keep saying "oopsie daisy" and encouraging drunk folks to "go home, drink some water and take a nap, and let's try again in 24 hours, okay?" Best part by far is that it's working. Guy went like he was going to fight me the other day and his buddy said "you leave the nice lady alone"

[noping-out-deactivated20241117]

[ID: Comment by @emilyshka “INCREDIBLE, good for you. I went from being a nanny to bartending and accidentally put a whole bachelorette party in time-out. 100% recommend it was great.”]

[aprilthe0th]

As someone very vocal about youth liberation, I'm always saying we should treat children more like adults, but we should also treat adults more like children. But in a kind way, not a "ignore their opinions and abuse them" way.

[blignick]

[rose-of-pollux]

[valentinetheeviljester]

Maybe lean out

[valentinetheeviljester]

[darkaviarymc]

Tragedy alignment chart. Feel free to use, but please reblog if you do.

[mikkeneko]

And of course the second part of the tragedy, which is: which quadrant did you think you were in vs. which one you were really in

[mynameisrocks]