Do you have any suggestions for combating species dysphoria? I saw your recent post about it, but the thing is there's someone I'm very close to who longs to physically be her kintype, and I think those things would make her more sad, those are the things she wants, she just wants to experience them in a centaur body. And I dont know how to help her, it's really affecting her.
The core of the matter is to find what you enjoy that wouldn’t be available to you if you had your kin body, and using that as your anchor, to bring your experience of this body up to be something you can live with, something you can enjoy. We can all do that. We can all find something we enjoy, or some convenience, to our current forms, that we can grasp on to, that we can focus on.
But the thing is, you’ll have to want to feel better as well.
If we go out of our way to shoot down everything that might make us feel better, looking for reasons to make them something that makes us feel worse, then we’re invested in feeling terrible.
And that’s something that can happen.
If you’re invested in feeling terrible then you’ve made that feeling a part of your persona, of your sense of self, and while you don’t enjoy feeling terrible, you’re resistent to changing that, you’re resistent to happiness, because you don’t know who you are if you aren’t that person that feels terrible.
It’s something I’ve seen in the kin community, in the lgbt community and in the disability community, so it’s not something that’s terribly uncommon actually.
“Who am I without suffering?” isn’t a conscious question, or a chosen reason to resist change, but it’s there.
And if literally nothing helps, if every attempt at feeling better gets turned on it’s head and reimagined, reworded, ripped apart and turned into a reason to feel worse, then odds are, that’s what’s at play.
And I have no advice on how to fix that for someone else, because none of us can, none of us can change this for someone else. Heck, even when it comes to you, if you, who are reading this, feels this hits a bit close to home and you recognize that this is what you might be doing, I can’t tell you exactly how to fix that, how to stop that.
Realizing that we’re doing it can help…. but having someone suggest we’re doing it might hurt, might make us feel worse, as though we’re being told we only feel bad because we want to, and that is not the truth.
We feel terrible because we’re used to it, because it’s who we are at this moment, and we are afraid to change that, because we’re not sure who we are without that feeling.
And no matter how much it hurts, we won’t change until we’re ready. We won’t change this until we genuinely want to.
Just like we don’t go looking for the help we need, until we’re ready and willing to accept it, no matter how long we may have needed it.
I’m speaking from experience.
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