anticipating change

[thelawfulchaotic]

Hi! Two things: 1) I appreciate your nuance, and your willingness to talk the argument through, re the asks you’ve been getting on Israel/Palestine. Genuinely kind of refreshing, particularly around here. 2) I noted a post earlier that mentioned oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk more about that kind of issue? One of the things I do when I’m quiet at work (as you might’ve guessed, hi, I’m also a lawyer) is read English & Welsh family court judgments on BAILII (I don’t do family law, thank God) and there seems a bit of a trend for labelling kids with things like ODD. But also Intermittent Explosive Disorder, and labelling usually mothers with things like Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, and other things like that. I worry that these are labels we’re using for people whose main problem is ongoing trauma, and often also abuse and poverty. Obviously you can’t clinically speak to whether these are legitimate, and I don’t have any real question here, but it troubles me.

You do not know what kind of rant demon you are summoning by opening this subject, but I love you for it.

I think your instinct is right on.

A lot of us are now familiar with the potential psychiatric diagnosis of "complex PTSD." Where current definitions of post-traumatic stress disorder focus on a single event taking place to cause the symptoms, with complex PTSD the diagnosis would encompass multiple events, long-term situations, and cumulative stress.

There was a time when I found the DSM's resistance to a diagnosis of "complex PTSD" to be fairly puzzling. It seems pretty readily apparent that long-term exposure to trauma creates a different thing than PTSD. I think the book The Body Keeps the Score is also pretty troubled about this, because what the author uncovered in a whole lot of pathologized people was a whole fucking lot of child abuse.

(Literally this seems to even have been a problem with Sigmund Freud; a current prominent theory says that his whole Oedipal Complex thing was a way to deliberately disregard the evidence of his female patients' sexual abuse.) (Link is to Wikipedia article.)

I also see kids with these absolute parades of diagnoses. IED, ODD, BPD, ADHD, depression, anxiety. Label after label after label. Dig even slightly under the surface, and you find: that child is... being raised by their grandparents! Adopted and abused in the first two years of life! Father in prison! Mom in prison! A morsel of meat being shredded between two vengeful parents in a horrible divorce! Problems suddenly started after a series of suspicious happenings with an older cousin! Constantly on marijuana! Subject to constant verbal abuse by stepmom! Witnessed one parent beating another on the reg! Take your pick.

A truly astonishing amount of the time, I end up feeling very strongly that the child should be diagnosed with "having a completely understandable reaction to genuinely horrible shit." It's hard not to start thinking "wow this all seems fake" when you get a kid with yet another arm-length dissertation of alphabet diagnoses and ONCE AGAIN you find the heinously obvious reasons behind them.

(Same with my adult clients, who have essentially fossilized versions of the same disorders. More likely to see bipolar and borderline, more likely to see schizophrenic.)

Ah, you say, Ryann, but what about the whole neurotransmitter thing? Depression is caused by low neurotransmitters, we've got that kind of cracked.

Actually, there are "huge bodies of evidence" showing that low serotonin in particular has no causal link to depression and that the affect on serotonin might not be (probably isn't?) why antidepressants even fucking work! (Best evidence: SSRIs and SNRIs work on neurotransmitters immediately, but take weeks or months to kick in to be effective against depression. Why?)

For a long time, I hung my hat on schizophrenia, actually. It's like, genetic, right? Surely we know things about schizophrenia. Surely that is real science. Surely that isn't just a response to trauma!

Well, um. You can have genetic and environmental things that predispose you to schizophrenia, but actually, as my therapist informed me, it tends to actually show up when there's a history of trauma.

This has led to me feeling pretty strongly that the DSM's method of diagnosis is wrong from jump.

Metaphor with me for a moment about the DSM and its diagnostic methods.

Now we all know of the diagnosis of Stuffynose, correct? It's when your nose is stuffy. It's an ailment that's pretty common. Most adults experience Stuffynose several times in their lifetime. There are two main treatments for Stuffynose. The first is antihistamines; the second is decongestants. Doctors are very divided as to the uses of these two medications. Studies show that both of them are more effective than placebo in the treatment of Stuffynose. If antihistamines work, you might have to be on them for the rest of your life. If decongestants work, you're out of luck after a week or two, because they can be dangerous if taken too long. Hopefully that fixes the problem! What? What's a "cold"? What is "flu"? I've never heard of these things. Yes, Stuffynose can sometimes cause a sore throat or coughing. Stuffynose is related to fevers sometimes, but we think that's just an overactive bodily response... Yes, Stuffynose can sometimes be fatal. Listen, the insurance company doesn't cover "surgery" for a "deviated septum" or for "cancer." Likewise, "environmental allergens" aren't something we check for. Thank god we live in the modern world and we've taken care of a lot of the stigma surrounding Stuffynose!

Me. That's me, w/r/t diagnoses of depression and anxiety and frankly most everything else. It's like personality quizzes. If you divide people by any quality and then make that quality a Category, you've created an Identity, not (not just?) a diagnosis. If everyone who likes candy and reads a lot of books is a Sweetreader, you'll now have a whole lot of people identifying as a Sweetreader and being like "omg trying to pass by the Nerds gummy clusters without buying any... #SweetreaderLife" while the Meatjocks are out there having a cookout, typical #meatjock behavior! Obviously DSM diagnoses are much more specific than my Sweetreader/Meatjock dichotomy but I think the tendency is very much there. So here's the thing. I don't think the reluctance of the DSM to acknowledge complex PTSD is puzzling anymore. I think there might be some people there who, overtly or subconsciously, recognize that they are playing Barbies with fake words and fake diagnoses and fake concepts, and that if they add complex PTSD, the whole party is over.

The minute you add complex PTSD, you are acknowledging that it isn't the individual person that's sick. It's their circumstances. It's society.

It's not a defiant child, it's not an explosive child, it's not a child with baby bipolar disorder but we can't call it yet so we call it something else: it's a child with developmental challenges and unlearned skills (THANK you Ross Greene PhD and your book The Explosive Child), or it's child abuse.

And currently the whole goddamn burden of identifying and dealing with developmental challenges, unlearned skills, and child abuse is on our schools, which are equipped for like 30% of that list. I think there is an absolute epidemic of unnamed child abuse in this country, some of it based on the absolutely predictable results of the war on drugs constantly depriving children of their parents (either through being high, drug-seeking, going to ineffective rehabs, being jailed, or doing fucking terrible things because of the shit they're in up to their neck or how much brain damage they've inflicted on themselves). The rest is screens and devices being heinously bad for neurological development (children must be SPOKEN TO in order to turn into people in a developmentally appropriate way!!) and constant parental supervision taking away all opportunities to learn self-sufficiency, self-regulation, and problem-solving.

So of course we pay teachers handsomely to help us raise the next generation of good citizens with so many disadvahahahAHAHAHA AGHHHHHH

So I dream of a day that we have a different paradigm for diagnosing mental illness entirely. In the novel I work on occasionally, when I have time and brainspace, Martian culture in particular diagnoses by picking out areas of the brain that are under- and over-active and using direct stimulus (like a far more advanced version of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a process I have actually undergone myself to unbelievably cool results) they will help the brain strengthen itself.

There is also some good news about antidepressants: the way they work might be in enhancing neuroplasticity, giving the brain more flexibility to heal itself. That's really cool and interesting to me, because it's like -- humans found ways to unlock our own powers of building ourselves and our identities and it fucking?? works???

ok obligatory disclaimer: I am a lawyer not a psychologist and in this post I have done an absolutely abysmal job of staying in my lane. This is not based on any science of which I am an expert and is rife with speculation and frustration at our current paradigms, which are clearly just flat-out inadequate. Thank you so much for opening the doors for me to goosh out my thoughts and feelings.

[rose-in-a-fisted-glove]

Oh hey! Someone else knows that book!

The Explosive Child by Ross Greene saved my childhood, no joke.

I was in late elementary school when my social worker recommended it to my parents and the difference it fucking made!

All of a sudden, instead of punishing me, my parents were working with me? And we were coming up with plans and solutions together? And I wasn't being punished. And we retired the idea that being told "use my words" was productive or useful. It was amazing to feel like my parents were actually listening to me instead of insisting on the impossible.

Just, the difference that book made in my life was huge. I can not state it enough.

[thelawfulchaotic]

That is one of my small handful of absolute paradigm-shifting books. Children want to be good and they are good if they can be. It unlocked so many new ways of thinking about the things my clients were going through! I actually have a book my him in my small to-read stack right now about how kids fall through the cracks in the educational system, and I am looking very forward to it. I have also literally given it out to the parents of clients before.

I'm so glad that it worked for your family!! I love hearing about that kind of experience because it helps me tailor when I recommend it and how I talk about it to others.

[thelawfulchaotic]

What are your other paradigm-shifting books, other than The Explosive Child? What's the title of the book you mentioned about kids falling through the cracks of the educational system?

The school one is Lost At School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them, also by Ross W. Greene, PhD. (What's funny is I plucked this right off the shelf like it belonged to me all YASSSSS before realizing it was by the same guy.)

My paradigm shifters... hmm. Trying to figure out where I should draw the line, because I have a handful that are ones I've encountered during my legal career but some I hit before that. Some of these have become a lot more popular and a lot more commonly understood since then, so they aren't as cosmic.

Well, okay, I'll start with those.

The Body Keeps the Score: paradigm shift to understanding that parts of emotion are just physical, and must be processed physically. That the physical can and will overwhelm the intellectual and sometimes there isn't a damn thing your brain can do about it until you can put your trauma narrative together. That connecting you with your body is the scariest but most effective part of trauma treatment.

Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft: this is the real beginning to understanding what happens in genuine abuse. Followed by --

How He Gets Into Her Head by Don Hennessey. This was the beginning of me articulating the difference between the really manipulative offenders and the disorganized, often drug-addictd, unstable, and violent relationships where violence landed people in the court system. You can feel the difference when you're interacting with these, but it's so, so hard to fully articulate. And obviously it's not a binary, relationships can rocket back and forth on a spectrum of control and power.

My understanding of white power over Black & brown folks was something I mostly didn't gain from books, but I gotta drop in this:

The Color of Law: you see people talk about how systemic barriers are like different bars of a cage and being able to see just one is like. well just go around it? But nothing gave me a better picture of the many bars and how they came to be than this. Important to note though that I literally didn't even finish it, so I'm not sure how legit it is to count it here.

Regarding the War on Drugs:

Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari. This book tells you the full and complete history behind the war on drugs. And, holy fuck. The number of shocks I got while reading this even after like 8-9 years in the criminal justice system was pretty wild. Learning the absolute depth and breadth of violence and harm that the war on drugs -- not the drugs! the war! -- is responsible for is a lot of gut punches, over and over.

Regarding kids:

The Explosive Child by Ross Greene, PhD. Ross Greene says: children want to be good. Children are good if they can be. He shows a whole new way to think about child behavior problems, and he's fucking right.

The Explosive Child sent me a little further down the road towards thinking about problem-solving instead of punishment -- which is really what I was already doing on a daily basis, but it helped me start to sharpen and clarify why I was so against punishment.

The Secret History of Kindness: Learning from How Dogs Learn by Melissa Holbrook Pierson. I think this book is a little too overly intellectual at times, but it is a book that talks about learning, and reward, and reinforcement, negative and positive. And philosophy and humanity and animals and all kinds of things. I put it here because of one incredibly important insight: punishment is positively reinforcing to the punisher. She says: it feels good to punish, it releases anger and tension, it solves the problem in the short term, and because it feels good, it becomes a reinforcing behavior.

And down to my most recent revelations:

No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz. This is what I'm drawing on when I talk about communicating with yourself and learning from the lessons your emotions have to offer about you. It's the foundational book for the therapeutic modality Internal Family Systems, and it teaches you that there is a way forward that does not involve punishment and exclusion of parts of your self.

Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. This. This book. This book is about a way of speaking about yourself and your emotions that identifies causation without fault and takes responsibility for your own reactions. It teaches how to speak specifically about problems so that you can move to specificity about solutions. Above all, it is kind, forgiving, and open to hearing what others say.

and I haven't finished it yet, but Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman is going to be one of them. I'm a few chapters in and it's just hitting banger after banger. What a complicated, fraught topic! What a complex, nuanced, and kind way of looking at it!

I may be missing some, but I think that's the set that's really work-relevant and non-fiction. I hope this adds some interesting to-reads!

[depsidase]

[grumpypedant]

I think a lot of people have trouble understanding transgender issues because they try to see themselves as trans, but come at it from the wrong direction. e. g. a cis woman tries to understand transness by going, “what if I felt like/wanted to be a man” when she should be approaching it as “what if I, a woman, was so easily mistaken for a man that I had to pretend to be one”,

And I think this is something to keep in mind and to explain away when trying to get these matters across to people who’re new to the idea.

[thelawfulchaotic]

When I was 12, I was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder (because I was angry at my physically/emotionally abusive mother). One time my mom was tickling me, and I told her to stop three times but she didn't stop. I pushed my mom off of me. My mom went to my therapist and told her that I hit her without any context (and I was too embarrassed to tell my therapist anything).

My therapist almost sent me to a juvenile detention center. The only reason that she didn't was because having six months of therapy was a requirement before I could go to the center, and my mom and I moved away before the six months could be completed. What do you think could've happened to me if I went to a juvenile detention center? Would I have ever had access to a lawyer at any point in the process? 

And this is why Oppositional Defiant Disorder is fake fake fake!! It depends on reports from adults, and adults are eager to portray themselves as entirely reasonable and teenagers as just crazy idiots.

When the ODD label gets slapped on a child, parents have no responsibility apparently for when a child habitually responds badly to authoritarian control. Nor do teachers, or systems; disabilities are suddenly irrelevant or their very existence is doubted.

ODD: fuck that child, in particular, but like clinically.

Okay, if you were in America, your therapist could not have just sent you to a juvenile detention center. There are a couple things that could have been happening here that you misunderstood or that were not explained to you. (People also tend to stop explaining things to kids diagnosed with ODD.)

Your therapist could have been referring to a youth mental health facility. Some of these are locked and do look and feel a lot like juvenile detention centers, and the locked facilities also do a lot of work with kids that are involved with the juvenile justice system.

Your therapist could have been threatening/offering to file something in court that could have ended up with you in detention. This could either be criminal charges (how dare you assault your mother);

Or it could have been an alternative civil type of case that's very common but called many different things in many different states. The civil charge is basically "hello I would like a judge to help me parent my child" and historically involved determinations of "incorrigibility." Now it's usually something involving determining if the child is at risk or in need of services or something.

Youth Mental Health Facility: this would have been undoubtedly the potential worst and also the potential best of the three options, depending utterly on how garbage your mom was going to be and what facility you ended up in. Those mental health facilities are rife with horror and abuse, as you might expect from anywhere containing a whole population of people who are habitually not believed and who have extremely limited legal rights.

Depending entirely on who is staffing the place and how vigilant and focused they are, their leadership, their ability to set goals and keep the kids first, some of those facilities... actually... are pretty good. I actually think architecture might have an influence on this too: if it looks more like a prison, it's going to end up with the staff acting more like it's a prison. I toured one of our higher-security locked youth facilities before, and they were super eager to show me their classrooms, their counseling rooms, and then... a blank hallway painted friendly colors, with a room coming off of it that had padded walls. I was like "wtf is this" and they were like, this is actually the pacing hallway! If kids are having a meltdown, they can come here any time with a staff member and yell and punch the wall and have a talk about it!

Court Filing: If you got a criminal charge, you would have gotten someone like me (ideally; the access to decent lawyers for youth is. spotty at best) and (ideally) a guardian ad litem, an attorney to look out for your best interests. This would be because your parent was the "victim" of the charge and so might not be looking out for your best interests. I actually ask for a GAL to be appointed on any case where I suspect the parents might be doing some Fuckery.

If the case was criminal, you also possibly would have gone to detention very briefly on arrest but whether you stayed there would have depended on the jurisdiction, the judge, and the lawyers. My experience overwhelmingly would say: probably you would not be staying in detention for a push unless your mom refused to have you back at home.

If you got a civil case, you would have gotten an attorney who's not quite like me. As a public defender, I specialize in criminal defense and I have the backing of my office and lots of training. Attorneys for civil cases for kids (which can still end up with them in detention) vary wildly in experience, commitment, general intelligence, and whether I have ever low-key wanted to throttle them.

Either way, you probably would have gotten stuck going back to court pretty regularly for a while to prove that you could shape up and be better (TM). During this process, you would have to behave orders of magnitude better than, just for a random example, the President of the United States, under constant provocation, with no right to privacy or autonomy, and the penalty of detention if you failed.

For more general information, I actually super recommend John Oliver's Last Week Tonight about Juvenile Justice, which is on Youtube. He is correct about basically everything and it's so satisfying to see it laid out like that. In fact, for most of what he describes I've personally known cases where it's happened.

[thelawfulchaotic]

ok I will say (you know me I gotta add nuance) that sometimes this comes out with adopted kids who were severely abused or neglected in the first couple years of their life. TBI (traumatic brain injury) usually manifests a little differently.

But to focus in on the severe neglect in first two years of life: I have actually seen this a whole lot with children of drug abusing parents who are removed from their parents' custody. They can end up diagnosed with ODD later, usually accompanied by more alphabet soup like ADHD and problems with emotional regulation like Intermittent Explosive Disorder.

The tricky part can be that this can show up when the kid actually gets to a place with a good caretaker. Their difficulty bonding with caretakers at all suddenly becomes a huge problem, and they constantly test the bond by throwing essentially tantrums because they don't believe on a physical level that they're truly in a safe place and they feel the need to keep proving it over and over and over.

When it's problems in that two-year window of opportunity in an infant's life, it can be REALLY hard to help, and the therapeutic need can require some serious specialized intervention. Also: Foster/adoptive parents are human too and it becomes very hard to know how to react to a kid who is clinging to you then breaking all your shit then clinging to you again.

so

Yes it is usually indicative of child abuse (or of a different disability liked ADHD that is being mismanaged) (which tbh depending on severity of mismanagement can also be child abuse)

but

No the child abuse might not be coming from inside the current house (or current school or current daycare or w/e)

Also

More support and training for foster and adoptive families !!

And end the shame and exclusion of the war on drugs because I think that by ITSELF will have a noticeable impact on the kind of child abuse that I'm talking about here

Also I'm not a psychologist, I just see, notice, and read a lot.

Further Paradigm-Shifting Reading:

The Explosive Child by Ross Greene PhD

[axolotlofficial]

Child soldiers exist, war is not an adult topic.

Children die, death/murder is not an adult topic.

The Troubled Teen Industry exists, child trafficking is not an adult topic.

Children get raped, sexual assault is not an adult topic.

Children have alcoholic parents, addiction is not an adult topic.

Children get beat to the point of hospitalization at school, that level of violence is not an adult topic.

That when these things get into "kid friendly" media at all, they tend to be heavily censored is about protecting adult control over kids, not about protecting children.

[kitchenceiling63]

"Children have alcoholic parents, addiction is not an adult topic." also children can be addicts. i was a child back when i was an addict

[thelawfulchaotic]

This is specifically why, when I get into those topics with actually a fair amount of frequency on my tumblr, I expressly say that minors are good to go on interacting with me and on asking questions.

[thelawfulchaotic]

Have you read “Interact with Minors” by Devon Price? It's a very good read:

https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/interact-with-minors

Fantastic read! Attitude endorsed.

I also want to pick this out in particular:

A “minor” is not defined as a person who is young or uniquely pure, but as a person who cannot own anything, who cannot vote, who cannot decide where they live or whom they live with, who does not have the power to consent to medical procedures (or to revoke consent), who is the property of their parents when they are at home and the temporary property of the school when they are at school, who can be beaten by their “owners” and denied freedom of movement or food to a degree that is only otherwise permitted with the imprisoned or enslaved. Legally and socially, the similarities between a minor and a prisoner or a slave are almost absolute.

The fucked-up reality is this, completely this. Some kids grow up almost totally unaware of how little they have in terms of rights because they have great parents. Some kids are painfully aware because their life is the full opposite of that.

Whether a child is safe and thriving should not depend wholly on the whims of an adult caretaker.

And if we want more great adults, we need to show and tell kids what that means. Being the adult in the room means being an example and a guide.

I’ve also added my own “minors allowed” policy to my sticky post; here is an easy link.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.

[reasonablywittyatbest]

It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.

I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.

I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.

[sunspotpony]

Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”

Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

important

In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."

[thelawfulchaotic]

All victims are imperfect.

Every single one of them. There’s always something they did Wrong. There’s always a reason to doubt. There’s always something else they could have, should have done. When my clients admit things and their bodies and voices are full of shame, I tell them this. And then I explain their behavior back to them with emotion words instead of fault words.

Instead of doubting yourself, punishing yourself, relieve yourself of the burden of perfection. Ironically, this also makes it much easier to take responsibility for your role in things that go bad later on; if you aren’t perfect, failure is not a threat to your identity but just a process of growing and learning.

PTSD puts your body permanently in survival mode. One of those modes is FIGHT. It leads to violence all the time. Unbelievable numbers of my clients who have violent charges have some level of PTSD. They have to grapple with this part of themselves. I’m actually pretty used to talking people through it, I realize as I write this.

Doing harm does not make you an irredeemable villain, but it does place a burden on you to find out why and get yourself on a road to healing so you can stop it from happening more. The great news is you can start lifting that burden instead of the shame and anger any time — it is never too late.

[theweirdwideweb]

[rimonoroni2]

unfortunately very true. Doing Better does not always mean never being upset or never being triggered or never having trouble. often Doing Better means experiencing those things and being able to keep going/cope healthily/move on. if you’re in a bubble with no sensation, if you’re numbing yourself out, that’s not what recovering really is. it won’t help you have a happier life it’ll just make your world smaller and smaller until you can’t fit anywhere anymore. gotta learn to make peace with the hard stuff too, that’s the only way to keep going

[33v0]

[zagzie]

this is the best tag I’ve ever gotten in my notifs actually

[mortallycrispygardener]

[shiftingbonesofapoltergeist-dea]

I'm sorry WHAT

[smallerontheoutside]

'lazy people don't feel guilty about not doing anything' is insane to me and I have been trying to make my brain believe it for a long time, it shocked me to my core when I first heard it

[astropithecus]

An important corollary to "if you were faking your mental illness, you could stop whenever you wanted."

[2well2water]

no one cares that you shave your legs because of sensory issues shut the fuck up forever

[2well2water]

really galling amount of people misinterpreting this post so i'd like to clarify. i'm saying that when discussions about patriarchal beauty standards and the way women are heavily shamed and coerced into eschewing their own natural state of being (hairy) are occurring, it is unhelpful (AT BEST) to interrupt and say that the reason YOU remove the hair from your body is because of sensory issues. that's not what we're talking about. stop asking for validation for doing something that society at large wants you to do. stop derailing the conversation because you feel uncomfortable about being made aware that you, for whatever reason it is, adhere to harmful, unfair and ridiculous beauty standards. you're stepping into the middle of an important conversation that needs to be had and making it all about you. shut the fuck up forever.

[2well2water]

also quite frankly i think a lot less people would experience sensory issues if they let their hair grow out so that it isn't bristly and rough and irritating. and i cannot help but wonder why these sensory issues aren't as predominant in men. maybe you're uncomfortable with the hair on your body because you've been taught to be uncomfortable with it. just a thought.

[headspace-hotel]

Different strokes for different folks. But sensory issues are a main reason why I DON'T shave.

7 years of hairy leg and counting.

[lastoneout]

"I am not a vessel for your good intent" goes hard as a line from a disabled perspective. Abled people care so much more about being their idea of a good ally than they do actually being a good ally. They shove their good intent right down your throat and then act surprised when you tell them they're suffocating you.

[lastoneout]

[faggotvampires]

[ID: An image of a sign with a blue background and with a graphic of a stick figure in a wheelchair at the beginning, resembling disabled parking space signs. The text below the stick figure reads "I am not a vessel for your good intent." /ID]

[animentality]

[headspace-hotel]

I have to add that gender euphoria for cis people doesn't always come from like, conforming to your gender in a "stereotypical" way

I've always been very comfortable with my gender but I didn't Really Like being a woman until I cut my hair short and started dressing/presenting more "masculine."

When i realized that I could look "manly" as a woman I truly felt comfortable and really...more "like" a woman. I enjoy being masculine and it strengthens my connection to womanhood and it's just kinda cool

[emvnah]

witnessed this in real time after giving my then-3-year-old daughter a pixie cut. Once people started assuming she was a boy, because at the time she was neck deep in a spiderman phase, she started having symptoms of gender dysphoria. Both of her moms being under the trans umbrella, we could recognize it very easily. She started wearing exclusively pink and dresses after that and she's never looked back. She still loves short hair but opts for a bob instead.

[angel-derangement]

“we live in an uncaring universe” yeah dude and I live in an uncaring house. and I shit in an uncaring toilet. but do you touch an uncaring lover? do you comfort an uncaring child? do you guide to sleep each night a cold and uncaring self?

[angel-derangement]

please hurry up in reblogging this I wanna jorts it before someone puts it in one of those heartwarming tiktok slideshows

[ablubluh]

i was like 'what could jorts it possibly mean' but as with many things clicking the original post immediately clarified the situation

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[aetherograph]

And then get REAL good at obfuscating that you're doing this by learning how to Rationalise at a master level!!

[trellanyx]

Soon it will become muscle memory and you won’t even have to think about doing it, and will become convinced this is just your default state of being! 😃

[aetherograph]

AND that you actually AREN'T blaming yourself or hating yourself, because you have learned to phrase it as being about how you know other people/the world perceive you (bonus if you make it "people in my specific cross-section of demographics"!), whether that's accurate or not "it doesn't matter, that's just what people think and how I will be treated". Even therapists will not detect it after you get this good at it, because you'll have successfully turned the statement into one about your experiences as a minority that is so rare therapists YOU can access are never part of it, so they shy away from contradicting you and if they DO you can chalk it up to them being bigoted.

[trellanyx]

All the constant put-downs aren’t self-loathing, no no no, you’re just SO practical and realistic! You’ve got your expectations on LOCK they’re so reasonable, this way you can never be disappointed about anything ever and if you are, hey, more things to totally legitimately blame yourself for. Because you really should’ve known better. You’re SO self-aware.

[aetherograph]

Tbh I know we're like, joking around and all but today I actually did say out loud "actually, it doesn't matter WHAT I did, nobody deserves to [be treated the way my ex treated me particularly in regard to the murder attempts]" and honestly I would not have gotten there if I hadn't learned more about the prison and punitive justice system from a defence lawyer and in so doing decided I was against punitive justice so like. Starting by changing how you view other people is not a bad place to start undoing this stuff, bc the way you think society should treat the worst people is sometimes the path to treating yourself with basic compassion if you think YOU are among the worst people.

I don't think anybody, no matter what they've done, should be killed or tortured or enslaved about it. I'm "anybody" and I've certainly not done anything particularly awful to anyone even in my worst moments, so like... if I would give basic humanity to someone who has done much worse, why not me? Even if I'm as bad as I feel sometimes, I'm still a human person.

So yeah. Idk. ymmv but becoming an activist for prison abolition and restorative justice really did a lot to help me fix my relationship with myself. Joking about the bad habits I'm still stuck in is helping me break from them but so is learning that punishment doesn't work, punitive justice isn't the only kind of justice (and doesn't work), and how restorative justice works. The macrocosm is the microcosm and vice versa. If you can't start inside, start outside and work your way in.

[thelawfulchaotic]

This is so, so beautiful. This is so beautiful and you're so beautiful and I hope this stays in your bones forever because it's true.

Learning this is so hard and it's an everyday thing. Being a public defender caused me to cross this threshold slowly and painfully -- because what happened to me wasn't really abuse, and I'm just some privileged white bitch and what do I know? What do I have to say?

In a very real way, I found society's worst and least defensible people because if I could find them worth defending then I could find myself worth defending. My privilege was a barrier that I needed to learn to cross, but it also became a shield that I could use on my clients' behalf.

And your words and insights have broadened my life and my perspective as well, so thank you for being there. Truly.

[storyweavingspider]

If you are a white person in a racialized person’s life, especially as a partner or close friend, you should go out of your way to ask regularly “hey is there anything you have been holding on to that I did?” and critically both fix it and NOT DO ANYTHING TO PUNISH THEM FOR TELLING YOU.

As a white person raised in a white supremacist society, you’re gonna fuck up sometimes. That’s just a fact. But racialized people often aren’t able/comfortable speaking up when y’all do some shit because of the power imbalance/not feeling up to educating when you may be resistant/don’t think the “fight” will be Worth It.

Show initiative without making it A Struggle or playing the white guilt card. Show you actually care about them, their struggles, and the way you interact with them BEFORE they have to have a bigger Conversation with you, beyond when they need to yell about someone else being racist.

And for fucks sake if they’re making/showing you something from their culture fucking act like you realize the importance of that, that they’re showing you shows they grew up with or making you food they made with their families, that they’re letting you in and trusting you more than other whites in their life.

[mintendo96]

This would honestly be life changing for me. The idea came up because I feel so incapable of telling the people in my life when they do racist shit. And like furthermore, actually respond beyond just an I'm sorry. Like for the love of god actually internalize the shit the Black and Brown folks say to you.

[mintendo96]

I'm seeing a lot of tags from white people saying something along the lines of please tell me if I fuck up and like that really goes against the point of the post. Racialized people have to swallow so much racism on a daily basis and it's impossible to tell who is safe to confront.

Even close friends or partners are not necessarily safe. I have had partners dismiss accusations of racism just off hand, I have had partners treat me like a repository for knowledge on Muslim cultural practices despite the fact that *my family has been Christian since Jesus,* hell I have had a partner say I was overplaying my pain at the genocide to get sympathy.

Racialized people are constantly waiting for the other shoe to job. Constantly waiting for their "antiracist" white friend to decide they have learned all they need to. We need you to ask. We need you to care enough to be proactive literally at all. Stop asking us to trust you without doing any fucking work to prove you are trustworthy.

[storyweavingspider]

To emphasize

IF YOU ARE WHITE YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE FIRST STEP OR YOU ARE JUST PUTTING MORE LABOR AND DANGER ON YOUR RACIALIZED FRIENDS FOR YOUR FUCKING COMFORT

Fucking reblog this each time you see it so that it gets drilled into other whites heads