When it comes to being a traumatized young adult and doing adult things like doing the dishes for the first time I think the most counterproductive advice you can give someone like that is to "step out of their comfort zone." There's a point where discomfort required for the learning zone easily gets pushed into the danger zone especially for someone who was punished using chores.
I see a lot of people make fun of "that one roomate who doesn't do dishes" which I get why it's annoying and I unfortunately was one of those roomates when I moved out of my parent's house and was learning how to live like a human being for the first time. Obviously I've grown since then and can do the dishes without a struggle, but never once was "stepping out of my comfort zone" a part of that growth.
Asking someone to just plainly be uncomfortable when their discomfort to a situation makes them feel shame, abject terror or threatens to make them spiral is bad advise from an unempathetic lense. It doesn't factor in that the discomfort isn't just typical dislike for chores but it's a deeply psychological struggle.
But of course the dishes still need to get done so what's there to do?
What worked for me personally was interrogating exactly what it was that made me avoidant and learning how to untangle those complex feelings as well as accomodate for the unavoidable. I ruled out the screaming and the violence and constant emotional abuse, as my parents were no longer in my life to inflict it but there were still a lot of things that needed examination.
For example, a thing that made me avoid doing the dishes was the cereal that would get stuck to the bowls. It wasn't just a sensory problem for me so much as an emotional hurdle. I was expected to ge the dishes done without complaint and if I left a difficult dish to soak and accidentally forgot about it my parents would scream at me or hurt me for being lazy, so often when there was cereal stuck to a bowl I would have to resort to scraping it off with my fingernails, which often led to my nails tearing or getting hard bits of food jammed up into my nail bed regularly.
As I was beginning my first steps into adulthood I started asking questions about the process. Why was soaking a bowl such a bad thing? Why didn't my parents just buy steel wool? Why was I just expected to power through difficult chores rather than come up with an obvious solution? Why did they expect me to just hurt myself every time I did the dishes and why did they get violent if I cried because I was in pain?
It wasn't the tasks of doing dishes that bothered me so much, it was uncovering all the little daily ways my parents would communicate that they didn't love me. They could have gotten steel wool from the dollar store but they didn't because my bloody nails were inconsequential to them.
So no, stepping out of my comfort zone did not fix my avoidance to doing the dishes, but interrogating my trauma and getting to the bottom of the issue helped me realize that I was in control now and I was more than capable of making simple accommodations and standing up for myself. Taking control over my life and fighting for myself made it so when I do need to step out of my comfort zone it feels like a mild irritation rather than a life or death scenario.
So now I do the dishes and it's almost completely stress free, it's faster and it takes way less elbow grease because I love myself enough to spend a couple of bucks on steel wool.
So if you're a young 18-20 something, take control, fight for yourself, but please do the dishes.
amandla
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass
gummygunk
pixelskylines
gracieabrams
dailybridgerton
