You may have heard that Boris Johnson has recently become the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, and, as such, the Prime Minister. This wasn’t an election open to the general public; party leaders are elected by the members of that party, and it’s no real surprise that the Conservative Party members like conservative candidates.
This isn’t a post about that, per se; there are plenty of other people detailing all of his failings and horrifying attitudes and behaviours. It’s just an illustration of how the political situation in this country is devolving faster and faster. I started talking about this in 2014, just a couple of years after I first got on tumblr at all, and I’ve been talking about it ever since, whenever I have the mental fortitude to do so - which, right now, isn’t often.
But, hey, what’s another list of my deepest fears?
I wrote a post a year or two ago with some of the things that we’re facing here, in the UK. I’ll link the entire post, but here is the most important paragraph:
Because why shouldn’t people later in life have a scene phase?
This may seem like a joke post, and I’ve headlined it in the most deliberately provocative way I could think of, but I’m completely serious.
We as a society seem to have decided that adults over about 30 are just Not Allowed to experiment with their identity or their personal presentation at all. If you come into work or a party suddenly looking considerably different, a lot of the time, people get upset about it - especially if you try something that does not “work”, in other people’s opinions.
At least some of this is directly tied to the fact that certain styles are considered “too young” for a certain phase of somebody’s life, and that it’s automatically “cringe” to not continuously broadcast awareness of the stage of the aging process you’re in (and, by extension, your waning relevance as an agent of social change, and your own proximity to your impending death).
And while there are certainly some elements of maturity that absolutely should be expected of adults (mostly related to not being an asshole or manipulating people significantly younger than oneself), harmlessly experimenting with personal presentation shouldn’t be one of those things.
So we’ve backed ourselves into a corner where you need a Profound Reason to decide to change things up in anything beyond a subtle way. It has gotten to the point where Halloween costume parties are basically our only relief valves on this particular societal pressure (and even those are considered somewhat immature), and where makeover reality TV shows exist specifically to lend structure to something people normally just can’t do.
It gets worse. You know what group of people really, really need the freedom to experiment with their personal presentation with as little judgment as possible?
Transgender people.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people say about late transitioners, “I’d respect them more if they actually dressed their age”. And while I think it absolutely is possible to go to a place with that that’s genuinely creepy (i.e., actual predatory behavior), I think there’s an element of that criticism that’s inherently unfair, because we as a society have decided that experimenting with your presentation is something you’re expected to have finished when you’re an adolescent. And in the case of transgender people, that’s doubly unfair because they often just completely missed that window when they actually were that age.
Also like, autistic people often have idiosyncratic senses of fashion, and sometimes people just (for example) have a hobby doing period costuming.
There are lots of perfectly valid reasons to loosen these expectations, and I think we’re genuinely making life more miserable for everybody by not doing so.
Lately, I’ve noticed it… ableism. “What the fuck, Adrien,” you say. “I am a perfect, angelic flower face from outer space,” but I am here to tell you that you are not. This is a simple no-nonsense, comprehensive guide to triggers and what happens when someone is triggered/you trigger them.
This guide speaks specifically to OOC reactions, but if you want to use it as a guide for IC, you could use it that way, too.
A reporter recently asked me about what harm I may have caused as a pain management physician who prescribes opioids. As I reflected on my last 10 years in this field, my response was that the harms I may have caused were because I underprescribed these drugs, not overprescribed them.
I thought of a 25-year-old patient, I’ll call him John, whose sciatic nerve was crushed in a motor vehicle accident, causing excruciating pain in his leg. We knew this would be a life-long injury, and that he would likely have to live with chronic pain. We tried everything I could think of — nerve medications, mindfulness techniques, desensitization, rehabilitation techniques, cognitive therapy, nerve blocks, and spinal cord stimulation — except opioids. John continued to suffer immensely from the debilitating pain, and eventually died by suicide.
Did he die because I undertreated his pain due to my own fear of prescribing chronic, potentially high-dose opioids in a young patient? I cannot know, but I worry and fear that this may be true.
In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published prescribing guidelines for opioids. Though intended to encourage best practices in opioid prescribing, these guidelines fueled providers’ fears of opioids and led to many clinicians abandoning patients who relied on opioids for pain relief. Although even pain specialists like me share fears and doubts about what role these medications play in managing chronic pain, so-called legacy patients are not the same as those who have never taken opioids before, as a colleague and I explained in The New England Journal of Medicine. (Read more at link)
Teaches you hypervigilance (ex “search for these personality traits in people to avoid being abused”)
Wants you to center your recovery around your abuser, their emotions/thoughts, and why they abused you rather than focus on coping mechanisms, learning about how your trauma changed you, and learning how to manage day-to-day life
Claims that your abuse makes you a special person and only other special people in that group will understand you / care about you
Encourages you to seek out abusers and engage in discourse with them
Encourages you to seek out abusers and hurt them first before they can hurt you
Teaches you that certain emotions/thoughts/symptoms (jealousy, low empathy, poor self esteem regulation, anger, etc) are abuser red flags rather than certain actions (disrespecting your boundaries, putting you down, refusing to respond to jealous & anger in a healthy way)
And last but not least: tries to get you to armchair diagnose your abuser with a disability or illness & place all the blame on the communities of those disabilities and illnesses!
Then please run far away from that recovery group. It’s not a recovery group.
Is there a specific cult you have in mind here because framed in this way and bearing what little I know of the BITE model in mind this all sounds… very cult-like
I actually had a certain themed support group in mind, which is narcissistic abuse / empath groups on Facebook, quora, and reddit.
I used to stay away from those types of groups because I thought they were kind of niche, but over the last couple of years they’ve been getting more aggressive with getting people to join them. I see their rhetoric on twitter, on Facebook, and even people in my life have started talking like they do. They’ve even started going into NPD recovery/healing groups to try to argue with us about what it’s like to have our disorder. People in our groups have started discussing being abused, and empaths will rush in and try to say as many buzzwords as possible to convince us that they have all the answers to why they were abused (not realizing it was the pwNPD who were abused).
^^ Message sent to someone after they made a post about being cheated on in an NPD support group (meaning support group for those with NPD to get help & cope). They also,, defined cognitive dissonance wrong? Cognitive dissonance you have two opposing opinions.
I’ve been collecting screenshots from these kinds of group for awhile now so I’m going to go sort through them and find an example for everything I listed on the original post (after I do some errands).
people should be able to talk about symptoms that society has deemed “gross” or “weird”. disabled + chronically ill people deserve to be able to share their experiences and get support without judgement from able-bodied people.
Why have I only just found out about this. I knew about the British Government’s debates over if people doing creative courses (Art, theatre, ect) should even be eligible for loans, which was bad enough, but this? If someone fails their Maths and/or English GCSE once, they can never apply for a loan? Even if they resit that exam and get an A? Even if they get As in everything else? Possibly never in their life are they going to be able to go to uni, because of this. Wtf. “Weed out low quality courses”. This is the most clasist and ableist thing they could have possibly done. I’m not even surprised.
Also, before there was a petition to stop this. The government rejected it.
You might not want to hear this but people with anger issues and/or violent impulses need social accommodations. And no by accommodation I don’t mean walking on eggshells around them, actual accommodations for people with these issues comes down to giving them a space away from what’s triggering them to process their emotions and calm themselves down same as what kind of accommodations people who get sensory overload or just any kind of overwhelmed. There is no moral value to having anger issues or violent impulses, people with them are deserving of accommodation the same as everyone else.
I had severe anger issues growing up, and the only way I was ever taught to deal with them was deep breathing. For some reason, deep breathing just triggers me to get angrier. But it’s the only coping skill I ever got taught for it. Here’s a few better ones.
Go and exercise. Get all of that energy out and away from the people you love.
Get a hang of when you’re winding up to a rage and learn to tell people that you need to step away. I will warn you that the first time that someone refuses to let you go once you learn this skill will spook the hell out of you if you don’t have a backup skill, so figure out ahead of time what you’re gonna do if they won’t let you leave.
Learn to set boundaries. One of the best things I ever did for my anger issues was tell people that I can’t deal with people stealing food off my plate. Second best was when I’m mad, telling people not to touch me. I spook easily when I’m already angry.
Get a pack of pencils and if nothing is working, break one. Sometimes you really do need to break something in order to feel better, and pencils are cheap.
Don’t cook with a knife when you’re mad. If you get too much adrenaline, the knife can slip and hurt you.
If you have anger issues that pop up without any seeming reason and frighten you, I would strongly recommend going over the situation and over your mental health. If there’s anything consistent with a mental health condition or with something particular happening to trigger it, seek to eliminate the trigger or treat the issue. Depression, anxiety, trauma, you name it, it can probably present as anger issues under the right circumstances.
Some quick notes for people without anger issues that want to help someone who has anger issues:
Fear transmutes into anger really, really well if someone’s fear response is “fight”. One of my guesses for why so many men have anger issues is that we’re told we’re not men if we have any other response to fear. However, this issue is far from exclusive to men.
Don’t box people in when you’re arguing with them or soothing them. If someone is backed up against a wall and upset, then getting closer to them without permission is a bad call for your safety and for their soothing, because that removes the ability to get away from you. Ask before getting close. This goes double if someone is injured or otherwise vulnerable.
Teaching angry people that are distressed about being angry the pencil trick on the spot is really easy and works more often than you can think.
Respect people’s requests and boundaries. A lot of people think that some of the boundaries I set up are silly or that once we’re pals, they can ignore them. No, because a lot of my boundaries are related to trauma, and crossing them will trigger me and bring up my anger.
All of this goes for children with anger issues as well. I was a child with anger issues, and a lot of disrespect for my boundaries and needs was because my anger was dismissed because I was a child. Respect children’s anger.
Walking on eggshells is not and will never be a good way to treat anger issues. Recognizing that people with anger issues deserve to have their boundaries respected and to be treated like human beings is.
An end note: Anger issues are not the same thing as being abusive, because emotions are not abusive. Someone with anger issues can become abusive if they take them out on people, but so can someone with suicidal thoughts who takes them out on people. The issue is targeting another person in order to feel better, not having a mental health issue.
An end note for people with anger issues: It really can get better. You can find coping skills and perhaps meds that help cool you down and settle you. You can find people that will accept that doing that one weird thing spooks the fuck out of you, and will let you leave if you’re scaring yourself. You can gain control of yourself without shutting down emotionally. It’s achievable.
Hot Take: the moral panic over transgenderism is but the merest foretaste of the out-and-out mass hysteria that will grip much of the world once we finally get transhumanism up and running.
Conservatives:“Trans people will destroy gender norms to create a new species–part human and part machine!”
Well-meaning Liberals: “That’s literally an insane argument.”
Me, a trans woman: “You know what are cool? Cyborgs.”
This is a good look into disabled people’s lives. Like if you have a major disability with assistive anything you probably have a lot in common with trans people seeking medical transition. The rhetoric in the medical system as a reflection of that moral panic is real lol. My grandmother had to fight to get a power chair that she could rarely leave from because a series of doctors wanted her to try more painful but more normal looking assistive things for mobility because “the world doesn’t like electronic assistance, it makes them think about the fears of the computer age and end of humanity too much” that was in like 1997 or 98 or whatever.
in the wake of the Depp/Heard trial’s presence becoming a nearly inescapable anywhere on the internet, please try extra hard to be kind to yourself. if you know that it’s bad for you to keep reading, please keep scrolling & block any tags people are using for this garbage. i’ll be leaving this here then disengaging too.
last night i reached a breaking point after accidentally getting into a conversation with my roommates about what purpose it serves as a publicized event. people either seem to be taking sides in what they see as a soap opera or taking the “mature, detached” approach of denouncing any real-world effect. this isn’t just celebrity drama. this is something that will deeply effect the way we look at both domestic violence and mental health. after years of academic research on personality disorders & years of following the personal experiences of people with personality disorders, as well as learning to manage my own bpd symptoms, reading the misinformation that’s being reported is so heartbreaking
here’s what happened & why it’s scary:
•mental illness has once again been used in a court of law to not only support abuse accusations, but also to delegitimize the opponent’s testimony
•the specific mental illnesses in question are all Cluster B personality disorders (BPD & HPD for Amber, NPD for Johnny), some of the most historically misunderstood & stigmatized disorders in the entire field of psychology
•it’s already very difficult to find professional help that isn’t dehumanizing - it just got harder (therapists often flat out refuse to treat people diagnosed or suspected of having a personality disorder)
•this is many people’s first time hearing these terms - abusiveness is now an inherent connotation
things to remember:
•throwing around the words “borderlines” or “narcissists” instead of “people with BPD/NPD” reduces a person to a diagnosis & reinforces stereotypes
•turning psychiatric terms into adjectives & using them in phrases like “narcissistic/borderline abuse” is the same as describing someone’s behavior as “bipolar” or “schizo” when it negatively affects you - it’s demonizing & ableist
•linking a particular style of abuse to a mental disorder allows anyone to look at an abuser and diagnose them with a mental disorder
•it also allows anyone to look at someone with a mental disorder and assign them the status of an abuser
•people (not diagnoses) are responsible for their actions & the effects of those actions
•diagnoses do not dictate personal ethics
•no one is a bad person because of their diagnosis or a good person despite it
•any type of abuse can be perpetrated by anyone, neurodivergent or neurotypical
•every person is different - celebrities in a disturbing legal battle are NOT the faces of personality disorders or really anything else that the general population should relate to
•this will continue to be an incredibly triggering topic for some people with a history of abuse, people with a personality disorder, & especially people with both
•people with personality disorders are much more likely to be abused than neurotypical people (certain symptoms + neurodivergence in general put us at greater risk) - not all of us are victims of abuse, but the majority are (sources below)
•please be sensitive & respectful - we’re humans too & feeling like our existence is being criminalized is really upsetting
•please educate yourself before you speak on the experiences of neurodivergency - bias is nearly unavoidable but it’s also pretty easy to detect even if academic resources are too dense for you
fatphobia and ableism are inextricable from one another and we really need to talk about it.
when someone is fat and disabled, people are suddenly obsessed with finding out whether they’re fat because they’re disabled or they’re disabled because they’re fat (and usually conclude the latter). when a fat person uses mobility aids like wheelchairs and scooters or gets caught wearing diapers, they get mocked for it.
this extends to mental disabilities and chronic conditions too–if you’re autistic, have memory issues or chronic pain/fatigue, suffer from crohns or IBS, etc. people will blame that on you being fat, which is often shorthand for “lazy.”
don’t even get me started on how socially acceptable it is to mock and degrade fat people for having poor hygiene.
there’s just so many ways in which the two overlap, it’s overwhelming to even try and list them all.
“Disability rights activists have…highlighted the fact that focusing on ensuring equal access to workplaces does not address the fact that not everyone can work. Some people cannot handle a part-time job, much less a forty-hour workweek. But by tying social standing and economic citizenship so closely to the ability to work, American social welfare policy leaves little space for those who are not able to labor.”
— Sarah F. Rose, No Right to be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s(viairwonder)
The gunpla collector knows that every pixel of their body in the photo is a pixel not being used to show off the fruits of their labor.
*sighs* The irony is, there isn’t a single identifiable photo of me on the public internet.
Can we please, please stop saying “narcissist” when we mean “self-centered asshole?” And maybe, if folks are feeling generous, stop casually accepting it from others?
