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.
#why do they do this though ~ @inqorporeal
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.
[link to the whole article]
basically, there’s a big damn difference between choosing to confide in someone you trust and being pressured to make a public spectacle of your trauma
THIS JUST IN: Forced Public Recalling of Trauma Not As Helpful As Voluntarily Processing Trauma In A Safe Space
