Gentle Affirmations

Gentleness isn’t silence. Affirmations for grief, justice, and healing. For survivors, ND folks, and anyone still here. You're welcome to send asks.

[gentleaffirmations]

This space was created to share affirmations, reflections, and hard-won truths, first for my own healing, and then for anyone who needed a little more light in their day.

For a long time, I focused on gentle encouragement: reminders that you are enough, that you deserve rest, that it’s okay to take up space. You’ll still find many of those posts in the archive, and I stand by their truth.

But the world has changed, and so have I. Now, what I intend to offer here is still rooted in hope, but it’s a hope that makes room for grief, for justice, for complexity, for collective care. If that resonates with you, I’m glad you’re here.

I'm hoping to return to making image-based affirmations when I have the energy. When I don’t, you’ll find words shared simply in text. I'll when I’m able, not on a schedule. Please be gentle with your expectations, and I’ll do the same.

You’re welcome to ask questions. If something doesn’t speak to you, you’re free to scroll past. This is a human space, not a perfect one.

I’m a queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill trauma survivor doing my best to live with tenderness and clarity in a difficult world. I ask that you be kind, to me, and to others here.

Because of my limited capacity, I don’t respond to fundraiser requests.

[thepeacefulgarden]

[gentleaffirmations]

[gentleaffirmations]

Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality, it is complicity.

[rederiswrites]

History will remember you today, Minnesota. Well done.

[leebrontide]

IN NEGATIVE TWENTY DEGREES!!!!!

Please spread this around. Don't let ANYONE lie and say my community is anything but ASTONISHINGLY UNITED in rejection of ICE's behavior. This crosses generations, race lines, party lines, class lines. THAT is how bad ICE is. THAT is how bad we want them gone.

THAT is how loudly we are DEMANDING they leave!

Do you understand what a crowd like this means in a small city like Minneapolis??? In weather that hurts to breathe???

Can you imagine what that takes?

[ralfmaximus]

Bigger turnout than his inauguration!

[stevishabitat]

For my celcius friends...

Actual temp: -20°F = -28.9°C

Windchill: -35°F = -37.2°C

[gentleaffirmations]

I acknowledge the weight of the grief that I carry today, for lives lost, for communities in pain, for the truth that the pain is real and visible. I hold this sorrow gently, without needing to bury or fix it. And within this grief, my heart still remembers how to hope, not a shallow hope, but one rooted in shared humanity, care, and collective resistance. My grief is not weakness, it is witness, and it connects me to others who refuse to look away.

[gentleaffirmations]

You haven't been here for a while, I hope you're safe and doing well.

Just wanted to tell you your affirmations crossed my dash and helped me be more forgiving of myself and the abuse I went through.

Thank you for saving a stranger.

Wishing you the best!

I am safe but struggling.

I wish I had the capacity to continue what I was working on here, but for now I have to be especially gentle with myself.

I'm glad my words found you.

Thank you. I'm wishing you the best too.

[gentleaffirmations]

i just want to say thank you for all that you do. you seem like an incredibly kind, thoughtful person. i understand you dont want to bring politics into this blog, but from the little you have said i want you to know that even what you’re doing right here is important. its a hard world, we need all the love anyone can spare. thank you for being the person you are!

Thank you for your kind words. I wish I had the capacity to continue being present here the way I was in the past. For now, I'm just leaving this space as it is and hoping that I can return to it when I'm able.

[gentleaffirmations]

there's this thing been rummaging around for a very long time.

i am severely mentally ill, autistic and been through a lot of trauma. throughout my whole life i've been told that i am just overthinking/catastrophising/being dramatic ever since i was a child. even one time my mom blamed me for "my negativity" and now these terms like "overthinking" piss me off so much to the point that it triggers actual meltdowns and now i actually believe that these terms are ableist and should never be used ever again especially if it's used clinically. i tried to talk to someone else about it but then i got shut off and got accused of disallowing people who have anxiety/ocd/ptsd to have the word they need to describe their symptoms, even though i have OCD myself and it never helped me and just made everything worse. it might be 'helpful' to some people but i'm not one of them. these words were used against me and i just don’t want to live in a world where their use is normalized or unquestioned. i don’t trust these words to be used safely even in clinical settings.

I hear how hurt you are and how important and sensitive this topic is to you. Thank you for trusting this with me. I hope that I can answer it with the gentleness that you need. Please know that I'm just another traumatized and (probably) autistic person. My answer might not be right, or what you need.

I can relate so much to your experiences. My mom and my maternal aunts used to accuse me of "overthinking" and criticize me for "negativity" all the time when I was growing up and that had a really awful impact on me. "You're overthinking" was used to shut down my very real fears, needs, and trauma responses. So I understand what you mean when you say that this word was used against you and weaponized to the point of being triggering.

It sounds like you do recognize that the word is useful for other people, but it is still so emotionally loaded and triggering for you that it doesn't matter. That makes sense. That is completely understandable. This word was used to hurt you terribly and you don't trust that it won't be used to hurt you or other people. To you, it is weapon-shaped.

What I think we need to keep in mind is that everyone has the right to name and label their own internal mental experiences. People have the right to name their own experiences as overthinking, and to work with therapists in a clinical setting who help them identify their experiences as overthinking. It makes sense that this causes you distress.

You've been hurt by this and it's a trigger. It is okay to avoid triggers when they are too intense and we don't have the current capacity to deal with them. So it is reasonable for you to dip out of conversations about overthinking, or to block that word on social media, or to ask people who are close to you not to use it (especially in reference to you). And any therapist or clinician you're working with should respect the trauma you've been through and modify their language to avoid triggering you.

Your trigger is valid and your feelings about it are completely valid, but your expectation that everyone stop using the word is unreasonable. These two things are true: It is a normal word that is used in normal ways AND it was a word that was used to hurt you terribly.

[thepeacefulgarden]

[catsbeaversandducks]

Thank you distinguished sir. You are an inspiration.

Art by Annie Rémich

[gentleaffirmations]

Do you need visual memory for emdr?

No. If you land with a therapist who says you do, you can find a therapist with better training.

The words they use in EMDR go something like "what is the most disturbing part of the memory?" and for most people that is an image, but not everyone experiences memory or traumatic memory that way. It might be a sound, a smell, or a body sensation.

This is especially true for people with CPTSD. People with CPTSD don't have single-event trauma. It's like instead of a flood that washed everything away in a moment, we had a trickle of water that eroded things things over years. Either way, the damage is done. But it's harder to identify where that trickle of water started and say "That's the thing that did the damage". So sometimes the prep to do EMDR for CPTSD is more involved. There might not even be a single, clear memory to go to. But it's still possible.

[gentleaffirmations]

Has EMDR worked well for you? Any tips?

It has. it's been very hard and I feel like I'm going at a snails pace because of how often I need to take a break from it to focus on other things, but it really does make an enormous difference.

Something I wished I'd known at the beginning is that when your therapist asks you to "rate the distress" of the memory after you've processed it, saying that it's a zero doesn't mean that you're saying that looking at the memory is pleasant, or that what happened in the memory is okay. A distress rating of zero just means that looking at the memory doesn't make you feel that distress in your body anymore.

Even after a memory is processed, thinking about it still makes me think things like, "Oh my god, that was horrible! Things like that shouldn't happen to anyone!" But I don't panic or feel sick or have other intense trauma symptoms. Usually I just feel sad or angry, and that's normal when thinking about something awful that happened.

My other advice is to really spend the time building up your strengths and resources. Before you start processing the memories, you'll work on things like "container exercises" and "safe space" exercises. These might seem silly or pointless, but they are so important later. Practice them when you're feeling good. Practice them when you're mildly triggered. Practice them every day!

[gentleaffirmations]

Sorry to hear about your own experiences. I'm glad you survived ❤️

You are valid and loveable and appreciated 💖💖💖💖💖

Thank you ❤️

[gentleaffirmations]

Do you still have nightmares? Im okay 90-95% of the time now, but every year i get nightmares and wonder why and then i remember and i process it better now and the nightmares stop

I do still have nightmares. They're more symbolic than literal now, but they're still related to the trauma. I've been in trauma therapy for a couple of years now and it's helping. I'm doing EMDR.

[gentleaffirmations]

🫂 thanks

I was a "bad" survivor. I wasnt believed for a long time and still don't totally believe it myself. Sometimes i say "it was just a mistake" and regret how i acted afterwards, and other times I say "he knew what he was doing he took advantage of you" and i sitll feel ashamed of how i reacted because I could have handled it better and told him off and maybe he'd have learned better and been a better person and not repeated what he did to me to others.

I didnt know how to react to what had happened to me so I kinda lost it there for a little bit. I was in the hospital and even afterwards, was slow to come to my senses that things were going to be okay. Because people didn't believe me, I looked crazier when I warned others what his behavior was like. And then i was reminded of my trauma when those same people came back and told me what happened to them beat by beat same as my story. And I was cyberbullied by his friends for speaking out. It drove me mad so while I wasnt sure how to even recover from something like that, I also was constantly retriggered and harassed.

Its been 6 years and Im better now, but im often so ashamed about what happened in the first place and how i reacted afterwards,

I didnt think my story was valid or that i was loveable.

Thanks for the post affirming me as a survivor, despite not being believed and despite how I reacted. Sure, i could have done better, but I didn't know what to do at the time and I survived it and that's something. I got myself out of that situation and have prevented it from happening again.

Thank you for sharing your story with me and others. Your story is valid and worth telling.

I want you to know that you're not alone either. Your story is so similar to my own. I wasn't a "good survivor" and that contributed to people not believing me. When I talk to other survivors I know that they deserved to be believed no matter how they behaved or what they did, but I struggle to believe that the same is true for myself. I am trying to convince myself that I deserved to be believed too.

It's been over twenty years for me and I still struggle at times. You aren't alone in that either.

Your story is valid. You are lovable. You deserved to be believed.

[gentleaffirmations]

I hope you are doing well 🫂

Thanks for everything you do

Thank you.

To be honest, I'm really struggling to feel much positivity at the moment.

I haven't shared much here in the last few months because I'm still trying to figure out how to move forward. It feels inappropriate to post pastel positivity with what is happening in my country. I believe and survival is resistance and I want to encourage everyone to survive and find joy where they can. I'm just struggling to find my voice here. The thousands of you who followed me did not follow me to hear about politics, but it feels wrong to be a-political right now.