The Shenanigans of a Penguin

31 yo | she/her | bi | asexual gaming, doodling, scribbling, and just trying to get better; see my art tag #penguinart for my rare creative endeavours, also my sideblog @sigegifu or twitter @scribblingbird

[gin-juice-tonic]

I used to be a proficient googler who never wasted a word but since Google is near useless no matter how good you are at it now I have reverted to just typing in entire questions like an old person

[making-friendos]

One must imagine Sisyphus happy

[byjove]

As much as I love mocking Anglo-Saxons, they did have some banger names.

[byjove]

that fucking rocks

[shadeykris]

the friend shaped foe ⚔️🌕✨

[zzoupz]

I drew these emo cats

[nyaa]

[yurimartyr]

Collection

[eddwardtheseventhstardrawnwizard]

Gotta have a griller in your collection

[unyieldingsilence]

‎ ‎

[tigirl-and-co]

[shinyhappygoth]

The Least Specific Movie Night Ever

The Thing

The Stuff

The Substance

The Entity

It

The Others

[feefal]

Copper evolution line! Your daily blend of educational and fictional art content

[only-cat-memes]

[the-punforgiven]

Honestly the fact that you even can kill Soulsborne bosses at all is funny to me. Like, nice job ripping holes in spacetime and channeling deep-space cosmic radiation into a beam attack, unfortunately for you however I have uhhhhhhhh sharp piece of metal

[thememedaddy]

[gingersnapwolves]

had a long discussion at our compliance committee meeting this morning about the growing use of AI "resources" like chatGPT in medicine and medical documentation, and may I just say, from the bottom of my heart ... yikes

[gingersnapwolves]

our VP of clinical: I mean, I don't see what's wrong with the providers using those resources to ask questions about diagnoses/interventions/et c

me: except for the fact that chatGPT doesn't actually look for a real answer, just makes up what sounds good based on what's been fed into it, and will give an incorrect answer 10% of the time?

our VP of IT: I don't agree with that percentage me: okay, well -

our VP of IT: it's much worse than that

[jackkdaniels]

stupid thing about me is I don’t cut corners but I also have no work ethic. if I do something it WILL be done right. no telling whether I’ll actually fucking do it tho

[electricpentacle]

Ah, the fatal combination of having pride in my work but fuckall executive functioning.

[ilovetodrinkwater]

Im fucking addicted to blanket

[creature-wizard]

Folks have got to understand that they probably aren’t messed up by some Secret Big Trauma that they just can’t remember; but rather by a million tiny microtraumas that they do mostly remember but don’t even register as traumatic because nobody actually understood that these things would cause trauma, much less stack on each other over the years.

[xpxssxm]

Whether you’re carrying one big rock or a big ol’ bucket of sand, it’s going to weigh on you just as much.

[ramshacklefey]

This is why psychologists have started taking more of an interest in CPTSD in the last 10-15 years. What most people know as PTSD is a response to a single, intensely traumatic event (or even a series of events). However, CPTSD (chronic post-traumatic stress disorder) is caused by living for years in a situation where your nervous system cannot catch a break. Even if nothing huge ever happened to you, you always had to be on guard for a thousand little things that could and did happen.

After years and years of this, your nervous system gets “stuck” in an activated threat response. It never really lets you rest, and if this started when you were a kid, you may not develop a lot of neural pathways that you should have, because your brain was too focused on keeping you safe to bother with little things like “genuine human connection” and “interpersonal attachment.”

[naamahdarling]

No lie, Complex PTSD/CPTSD is HUGE.

If you are disabled, if you are queer, if you are chronically ill, if you are the survivor of a toxic but not abusive relationship, if you grew up or lived under the threat of harm but no “actual” harm (or “very little” harm) was done, you may have CPTSD that isn’t getting caught because CPTSD looks different from PTSD.

[thenookienostradamus]

At the risk of falling into a trivialization trap, a lot of things you may not perceive as traumatic actually are. I was embarrassed for a long time in both group and individual therapy to say anything in my childhood was traumatic, because I was sitting with people who had suffered horrible physical or sexual abuse. But here are some things that are, in fact, traumatic and - when they occur over a long period - can set you on a course of maladaptive coping for decades if not addressed:

Being told or shown that your emotions are not valid, that you have no safe place to express them

Parents or caregivers oversharing graphic trauma from their past with you

Threats of physical violence, even if not carried out

Being told or shown that affection or approval is contingent on competency or academic success

Prejudice from inside OR outside the family (homophobia, racism, body shame)

Mocking or dismissal of things that are meaningful to you

If you constantly feel unworthy, afraid, ashamed, or even flat and emotionless, it’s worth exploring why. And, because you’ve been so consistently undermined and minimized, you may feel like a fraud for being upset or functioning poorly. You’re not a fraud; it’s years of conditioning telling you “I should be able to handle this” or “lots of people are worse off than I am so I shouldn’t complain.” Your conditioned brain is lying to you; you won’t be able to open yourself to the joy of trusting relationships with others OR do meaningful things to help those who are worse off until you do the work to melt the block of ice surrounding you. All my love to you, friends.

[lunahorizon]

Pete Walker is a therapist that’s been on the cutting edge of this for many years, and he has a website here with plenty of free resources. (Just straight PDFs of parts of his books!)

Also, his books are not that expensive, well-written, and truly helped me process a lot of my trauma. I did a ton of it alone because I couldn’t find a therapist for years, and those books (complex ptsd: from surviving to thriving & the tao of fully feeling) really changed the trajectory of my life.

He talks about grieving, about changing our internal dialogue to one that’s positive instead of negative, talks about SEVERAL trauma typologies, and more.

As someone who has been diagnosed with the big trauma PTSD but most of their problems were coming from the little stuff that was CONSTANT and made me run on 2000% all day every day, this guy is a lifesaver. I’m so different from how I was before, especially with the help of some in-person therapy. Finding the right person makes all the difference, truly.

You can pick up his books on the website, but if you’re looking for resources on this and you have the space and support to be able to do some of your own work (please don’t do it completely alone unless you must) check out the sidebar over at pete-walker.com. He made this incredible resource that not everyone knows about and I try to share it where this comes up.

Thank you for informing people about this.

[creature-wizard]

Reblogging for the additional info and resources, and to emphasize that the C does indeed stand for “complex,” not “chronic.” (Understandable that people would get mixed up, though.)

[alycat150]

Hi, I want to add a little story a very silly trigger I’ve got. Because for real, it was due to the most minor ~trauma~ possible, but it still had very clear aftereffects. I hope that hearing this helps someone know that whatever their own thing is, no matter how trivial sounding even to yourself, it still counts as “bad enough”, whatever that means, for them to get help.

The sound of Velcro opening feels worse to hear than nails on a chalkboard. I genuinely thought everyone felt this way and was putting up with it in coats/shoes/etc for convenience, and the reason it wasn’t a saying is because it was a space age material, much younger than literal chalk, so why would it be used when we already had a literary device for this feeling? Turns out that was a trigger for me and literally no one else thinks of it like that!

Took a few months after we realized that I was perceiving the world differently than everyone on the planet for my mom to be the one who figured out why.

Some times, very rarely, as an infant my mother couldn’t get to me “fast enough” to comfort me. That’s it! That’s literally it! And the reason? She’s disabled, and wears hand braces at night to help support her wrists. But they also mean she can’t really use her hands, and when I was little her braces had like a thousand rows of velcro: so as an infant, all I knew was that the only times I cried out and was “ignored” were accompanied by the sound of my mother opening up her braces so she could come pick me up.

Seriously, you can have the best parents and childhood in the world and still come out with random trauma because of it! And guess what? Doesn’t matter how minor it was, it still registered as trauma to my tiny brain, and talking about it in therapy was so bizarre, like, worst crying I’ve ever done in therapy?? But it helped, and the sound of velcro is still nothing I like, but it’s way more tolerable now.

However small you think “it” was for you, whatever “it” is, or even if you have no idea what “it” could possibly be!, that was still enough and you should have support.

[breelandwalker]

There is nowhere NEAR enough discussion about how damaging constant/chronic lecturing, invalidation, mocking, dismissal, bodyshaming, and overblown expectations are to a kid, even when it’s low-level, even when it’s “for their own good,” even when it’s not accompanied by physical violence. That’s still emotional abuse. It’s a heart wound by a thousand tiny cuts and it still leaves scars. And it’s made all the worse by the perception that because things weren’t as bad as they COULD have been, that person has no grounds to be upset or have trauma from the events.

There’s shit my family has said to me that’s stuck in my head FOREVER and it pops up like a jumpscare whenever conditions are right to recall it. Things that make me doubt myself, things that make me doubt my competency and question my interactions with others. And it NEVER goes away. But they’ve forgotten about it. Doesn’t even register. Because to them, it was a throwaway comment about my appearance or my interests or my intelligence, while to me, it was like getting hit with a brick.

[beguilingcorpse]

[gauntletqueen]

[my-random--thoughts-deactivated]