slow & oh so sweet @dancingintheflowerssss - Tumblr Blog

loopodeloop

lvndscpe

Banff, Canada | by Neil Rosenstech

harikuladeee

The Grand Canyon shot by my Grandmother in the 70′s

sugar cravings

show me what sweetness feels like.

i have forgotten

the feel

of a human

whose essence

is honey

#wanting #:/

windwardstar

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.

windwardstar

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.

the-real-seebs

So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.

jumpingjacktrash

after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.

these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.

but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.

triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:

- if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.

- if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.

smokescreens-n-otherillusio-blog

Triggers are a case of classical conditioning, where association between a stimulus (In these cases, forms of trauma) and a neutral stimuli (such as the garage door or scent of bath products) becomes so interlinked that you associate them as one. This happens a lot to those going through chemotherapy, where the nausea they feel from chemo medication becomes linked with everything they interact with while feeling nauseous (it doesn’t help that this sort of conditioning is super strong when linked with nausea) so even after all chemo treatment is done, they can’t stand to eat what they ate at the time, can’t look at the doctor, or a white room, or smell cleaning products without feeling extreme nausea.

Triggers are subconscious, and we haven’t really got control of them. Even if you go through therapy for them, because they’ve now become learnt, they will still be there and mess with people. Don’t make assumptions about triggers, and try to be accommodating.

weltenwellen

“September approaching…I feel I owe myself a brief respite of leisure and no rushing around. I can’t face the dead reality. I want rainy days, lanterns and a hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing yet inside my head.”

— Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Aurelia Plath written c. August 1951

lovergroves

yourbigsisnissi

Yeah Just as a general note You should eliminate any thought that there is an expectation that you do anything by any age You don’t have to be married with kids by 25 It’s ok to be 16 and never been kissed There’s nothing wrong with you if you haven’t graduated from college by 22 You’re not a failure because you don’t have your dream job at 30 There are no rules to life. You don’t get special points for achieving certain things by a deadline. Just go at your own speed. It’s not a race.

yekkes

Woman: *attempts to set a boundary*

Man: Woowww :( so you like, hate me? You’re mad at me? Can’t you like, compromise your comfort a little bit for my convenience? I honestly think you’re being a little too sensitive here! Maybe you should look inward and consider why you’re so cold and heartless 😔

dancingintheflowerssss

hashtag date women