Welcome to my rant blog where I cry and Nothing Else

[furiousgoldfish]

me, typing into google: can a blog replace therapy

[howdoufunctionagain]

okay i need people to *assume competence* when they're dealing with me. i'll make fun of myself a little and you can join in that's fine but we all have to understand that at the end of the day i know what i'm doing. if i tell you a funny story and you get lost in telling me how to avoid an issue as if i don't know what i'm doing or, god forbid, ask "what did you do to make that happen" i'm going to lose it

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

People eventually get diagnosed BECAUSE they are already disabled and struggling. The symptoms don't appear AFTER the diagnosis. So don't expect everyone without a professional diagnosis to be basically fine. That makes no sense.

[howdoufunctionagain]

hoooooooly shit i miss them

[howdoufunctionagain]

at what stage of relationship do you call them when you're having ptsd episodes

genuine question

[tlirsgender]

Having your main anxiety response be Avoidance is crazy cause you'll think you're chillin and then one day you're like waitttt I've been paralyzed with fear this whole time. Damn

[tlirsgender]

Was anybody else playing dead the whole time they were teenagers or is that just a me problem. Like I'm 20 now and I'm like Oh shit I didn't do anything. Because I'm scared

[self-loving-vampire]

Problem #1 regarding child abuse is that a lot of people seem to struggle to imagine normal, respectable-looking parents and other authority figures ever doing it despite the statistics so instead they do the stranger danger panic and completely overlook some of the greatest threats.

Problem #2 is that even when people understand, even if in an abstract way, that parents can be abusive they just... don't seem to actually register that as something that can apply to real life. It's just hypothetical to them and doesn't actually guide their ideas of how to prevent child abuse.

Problem #3 is that even after overcoming the above biases a lot of people have a very narrow image of what abusive parenting is where they imagine like... people doing violent things basically out of sadism and without provocation. They don't seem to think it's "real" abuse if the victim did something that "justifies" punitive violence, like disobeying the parents.

In fact, most people think parents have a right to do a whole lot of awful things to their children beyond just hitting them, like violating their privacy, controlling their access to information, and deciding what/when/if they eat, among other things.

[mimeo-tan]

sometimes, really most of the time, it's even considered praiseworthy to have a well-disciplined child.

that hitting your child "just that one time when they really deserved it" was brave, because while it made them shut down and fear subsequent retaliation, it looks like it suddenly and magically improved their behaviour. your child didn't "stop throwing tantrums", they're fucking terrified that you'll hit them again.

It's kind of insane being there, listening to your parent talking to other parents about how they're abusing you, and hearing them all sing eachothers praises because you're so well behaved, when you have no say over anything you do and the hanging threat of a billion different punishments hanging over you.

i remember accidentally letting slip that i was terrified of my dad because i thought he would hit me again at any moment, or invade my room and take all my things, and when my parents heard about it all i got was a lecture from my mom about how much they loved me and that it was my fault my dad hit me that one time and it'd never happen again if i behaved. from people who considered themselves good, upstanding, and virtuous parents who were doing everything they could to help me.

[bl0w-m3]

[cruzfucker]

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

[skary-child]

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…

[xzienne]

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.”

[chronicreality]

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.

[inqorporeal]

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.

[lierdumoa]

#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]

[jemthecrystalgem]

Me fucking *every time* a class tells me to write from personal experience. You don’t need to know my life.

[specks-of-time]

[furiousgoldfish]

Living in long term abusive situation, the abusers will often require you to ‘act normal’, as if everything is fine and good, even if you don’t feel okay. They present it to you as necessary, polite, ‘don’t be rude to xyz’ or will straight-up belittle and humiliate you until acting 'normal’ will be the only safe option for you. It creates the illusion that everyone is secretly falling apart inside and suffering silently only to be polite.

Acting normal in every situation can become a compulsion, something you do automatically to protect yourself against possible or imagined backlash; you live as if you’re unphased by anything, because showing pain feels like showing weakness, and being hurt while you’re weak is worse. You additionally might feel that your feelings are too much, nobody would want to deal with them, you’re oversensitive, overdramatic, over-emotional disaster of a human and you keep it all in to save yourself rejection and embarassment.

The abusers will enforce the 'play normal’ rule even when the situation is desparate, when you’re seriously hurt, panicked and in need of help, you’ll find that you’re expected to extend any effort to 'act normal’ or else. They also use the fact that you’re able to 'play normal’ to prove that 'nothing is actually wrong and you were just dramatizing for attention or pretending to make them feel sorry for you.

After being gaslit like this for a while, you start to believe it. You start to think that if you can still play normal, then you’re clearly not suffering enough for it to be adressed. Even if you’re in such bad state you’re dissociated for the most of the time, you dismiss your own pain and fear just like the abusers do, it must be nothing, if you can still keep yourself from screaming, you must be okay. You wonder if everyone lives feeling like this, and envy their acting; you’re barely holding it together. You feel ashamed and pathetic for every second you’re not able to 'keep control of it’, or every little feeling that bleeds out thru your pretense. You feel like you’re weak and failing to control yourself, when everyone else does it so easy.

So let me relay some facts: Most people don’t act. They’re allowed to be upset, and don’t try to control their feelings at all. Most people aren’t exposed to the amount of trauma that would require them to control their feelings 24/7. Most of people were never told to 'keep it in’ or to 'act normal’ when everything is falling apart. The amount of effort people put into being polite is way below containing trauma. What you’re enduring is completely unimaginable pain to them. You’re keeping together what they never would, or could. You’re not weak for a moment of distress; anyone else in your situation would be fully freaking out, full time.

Even if it’s possible, by insane effort, to act okay when terrified and hurt, it doesn’t mean you’re 'okay enough’ to dismiss it. Your abusers lied. Being forced to keep horrible feeling unexpressed makes them that much worse; not only you’re in pain, but you’re in danger, unsafe to express distress, unable to call for help. It’s being trapped in a world where only 'acting okay’ is safe, but there’s a time limit to how long you can do it without breaking, and every time you break a little, you experience terror and shame. You don’t know how to keep it up, and you blame yourself for it. It’s a world where nobody cares what you’re going thru, and you can’t make anyone care.

This is what abusers do to gaslight, isolate and force the victims to hide the trauma and abuse that’s been caused. It’s a tactics to protect the abusers, at the immense cost to the victims. If you felt this, your abusers are monsters, and they lied to you; you’re not supposed to act okay. You were supposed to get a relief from pain, you were supposed to get help, comfort reassurance, to be taken seriously, to get protected, safe, understood, and your pain removed. They denied all of this to be able to abuse you some more. Your self control was never the problem. Their control of you was.

[fairycosmos]

parents are so crazy because they can say the most fucked up shit to you when your brain is forming and it sets the tone for your whole adult mind set and then they forget about it the next day

[hyenabogblog]

Please remember that you do the exact same thing. Let’s give each other some grace and hope that we can work to heal each other.

[fairycosmos]

i actually don't say fucked up shit to children

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

The most terrifying part of having memory issues is when you can feel something from 5 seconds ago be thrown out the window and there's an empty hole where it once was. You remember that you forgot something.

[valtsv]

[furiousgoldfish]

Everything abused children do as a cry for help is accused of being a reach for attention and shamed until the children are genuinely too ashamed and scared to ask for help when they need it, already knowing they'll be shunned just for needing any kind of care or attention in the first place. In what world do children not deserve basic attention.

[cptsdwillgraham-deactivated2019]

beep beep sometimes when you have been in survival mode for a long time the parts of you dedicated to Wanting Things atrophy and you forget how to envision a future that feels rewarding because you are busy with the business of staying alive, and it can seem like your life must be pointless because you can’t imagine any long term goals. sometimes even when you leave survival mode you can’t remember how to Want Things. that doesn’t mean you need to give up on having a good and fulfilling life, it just means that Wanting Things is a muscle you need to gradually strengthen. the part of you that has dreams and aspirations is still there, it just fell asleep, but if you wiggle it enough it can and will regain feeling. it’s okay to start small

[weaselle]

i’ve been in recovery from this for almost two years now… like, i stopped being super depressed but it didn’t mean i remembered how to feel joy or excitement etc. It’s a process, and sometimes it seems like you’re wiggling as much as you can and you’re not getting any feeling back, but keep at it.

find anything. does warm water feel good? stand in the shower and carefully hold that warm water feeling, feel as much of that feels good feeling as you can, memorize its face, remember it later, look forward to it next time. Anything, the sweetness of a peice of candy, the salty taste of a french fry, the softness of a fleece blanket, the relief from taking off shoes at the end of a long day..

anything that feels even a tiny bit good for even a second; try to cup that feeling in your hands, breathe into it like a tiny flame you are trying to catch back into a proper fire. Keep at it

[eljayetc]

“You lived through that, you will live through this too”

Yes, but how many things do I have to live through? How many times do I have to be grateful I made it out alive? When do I get to stop surviving and start thriving?