I don’t know if any of you had the same experience as me, but I tried therapy when I was a teenager living in an abusive household and thought it was a waste of time. Ultimately my biggest problems (dad) were beyond my control and no amount of coping would make them better. Now that I’m an adult with actual control over my life and don’t live with my dad anymore therapy is MUCH more helpful.
If any of you had bad experiences with therapy when you were younger it may be worth it to try again now.
THE SAME GOES FOR MEDICATION!! I tried meds as a teenager and they were powerless to help much due to my living situation being horrible. I thought that meant medication didn’t work for me. Now that I’m out of that situation and trying agajn I can really see a difference.
I can vouch for this.
Also important to know that the child/teenager body and brain are simply different. There’s a lot of things going on in there. Both medication and therapy is likely to be way different into adulthood, so if something failed during that time, consider giving it a try later on. This is especially because most children and teenagers have no control in their lives. Being asked to follow guidelines only further infringes on that. It’s hard.
Living in a crappy environment will also easily thwart therapy coping skills simply because you only go to therapy so often… but you livein the crappy environment 24/7. Therapy is typically also isolated in a sense. Going to a very calm office and learning coping skills there, those skills will be much harder to access when the inherent instability of home hits again.
During my first month with my therapist, I was given this worksheet to read and work on. She noticed that while I was talking with her, that my thoughts followed a lot of these. I wasn’t aware that my anxiety had brought me down paths of low self-worth and stinky thinking.
After a couple of weeks of talking with her, she gave me this worksheet to work on.
While, at first, I thought these weren’t going to work out, I was very surprised to see just how easy they were to use . My homework at that time was to identify which sort of thinking I used on the regular and which ones would best challenge them for me.
So, what do you think? Do any of the maladaptive thinking patterns sound like you? which ways would you like to untwist your thinking?
HEY guess who needs this? I do! And chances are some mutuals may like to see it as well.
Not ddlg k!nk shit. Just people who go into little space because it is so so misunderstood. It’s not about wanting to have s3x with child or an adult “pretending” to be a kid.
Some people were robbed of their childhood. Some people suffered traumatic events in their childhood, maybe even infancy. They never knew life or even childhood without trauma. In teenage years or adulthood it can be therapeutic to enjoy the things most kids do. They didn’t get to back then, so who are you to tell them now that they can’t? Everyone deserves the sweet feeling of innocence and joy.
(Maybe tw) For example, my first traumatic experience was at 2 years old. A dog attack that made me terrified of going outside. I didn’t get to play on playgrounds or sidewalk chalk like others did. I was inside too scared to go out and have fun. I experienced s3xual abuse from 3-6 years old. I never knew a life without trauma. I never knew childhood without trauma. Now I’m 20 and I honestly find so much enjoyment in toys, stuffies, playgrounds, crayons, etc. I’m always so embarrassed to admit it, I’m afraid to look immature or stupid or like I’m just k!nky. It’s not s3xual at all for me. It’s coping. It’s an escape from my normal self (who is anxious, depressed, paranoid). Instead I get to be playful, innocent, and imaginative.
That was my writing, these pictures are not mine but go along with the post:
Hi I don’t have the mental bandwidth or emotional energy at the moment to post about current issues the way I want to but I just wanted to say
If you’re anything like me your mind may be putting your whole body into MAJOR survival mode…fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode, etc.
And if so, these are moments when DEEP BREATHING truly helps. That’s not some woo woo thing it’s just a deeply known scientific fact about how brains work. (Your body’s inherent wisdom knows if you’re able to take a deep breath, you’re not ACTUALLY in literal survival mode.) There’s so much we can’t control. But we can control this.
Take a really slow, deep breath…love you guys.
This is distress tolerance 101 yall
For Temperature in PARTICULAR - if you fill a bowl with ice water and submerge your face as long as you can stand? It will reset your fear response along with thoughts. Patients who have panic disorders, addiction issues, and self-harm use that one in particular and it works MAGIC. Hell *I* use temperature - the ice bowl face dunk - for ME when shit is gets unbearable and it works a treat.
If you’re having a hard time, distress tolerance is the buzz phrase to look up.
Take care of yourself out there guys
Here’s some gifs to help focus on your breathing exercises:
Hey everyone! I had a curious thought about ‘Feel-Good’ movies after a discussion with someone on a hotline that I volunteer with. The link to the survey is here: https://forms.gle/zs9t64CpPvcNca7i8
I do want to add a disclaimer that I may publish the results in an infographic on my website (see the survey for a link). I don’t stand to make any money or profit from this ( ) so hopefully, there are no conflicts of interest! Still, if the disclaimer makes you uncomfortable, then I wouldn’t recommend taking the survey.
With everything going on in the world right now, normal life seems to be lost. We can’t go see our friends, family, or leave our house for non-essential reasons. It’s a lot, and I personally have been having a hard time as well. I hope that by me sharing my own struggles with all of this change, you feel free to feel how you feel and process at your own speed. Take care of yourself, stay home, and stay safe. xoxo
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.
Here’s a #DBT skill that can calm you down FAST. It’s a good skill to use when you’re experiencing an extreme emotion like anger, despair, panic, etc. It can even help prevent the use of a target behavior. Swipe through to learn more about #TIPP and get some examples of how to use it.
