For context about my own school experience, check out this post: Ways school made me depressed I once watched a TED Talk by the mother of one of the Columbine school shooters. It was pretty interesting, and I kept waiting for her to talk about school. It was a school shooting after all. But throughout the whole thing, school was very inconsequential in her talk. She mostly talked about mental illness, guns, how bad she felt about it, and how there are no easy answers and how nobody can possibly be sure why kids would shoot up a school. I was disappointed by ...
Category Archives: Trauma & Abuse
How I learned to tolerate kindness
I realized today that I like it when people are kind to me. That sounds weird, right? But, I used to be scared of people being kind to me. Partly because it gave me complicated feelings that I didn't want to deal with, and partly because it felt so alien and strange. I avoided "overly kind" people for a long time. When people were really kind to me I wanted to run away and hide to avoid breaking down crying. I gravitated towards people who were more critical or at least kind of emotionally walled off. They felt more familiar and safer. Somewhere ...
Ways school made me depressed
...as a neurodivergent non-binary lesbian I absolutely hated school with a fiery passion born in the depths of hell. Those were, by far, the worst years of my life. I am glad that I survived them, but there were a few moments where I almost didn't. If my circumstances had been slightly different, and I had access to guns... who knows what I might have done. So, here's a list of ways that school made me depressed and suicidal. My parents not giving a shit about my general well-being This is point #1 for a reason. If my parents had been even slightly emotionally ...
The Story of Jack
CW: Child abuse This is a true story, but I've changed the names. Once upon a time, there was a boy named Jack. His father, Rick, was a police officer, and his mother, Beth, worked an office job. Jack was 4 years old, full of energy and wanted to play a lot, like a normal healthy kid. I don't know why, but Jack's mother got angry with Jack a lot, and Jack would cry. This, for some reason, made his mother even more angry and she'd yell at him not to cry. Obviously, that would make him more upset, and he'd cry louder, ...
The 4F Trauma Responses
The author Pete Walker talks about 4 different trauma responses in his book and on his website. They are: Fight Flight Freeze Fawn Fight response is where the person uses anger and control in order to take their frustrations out on others, to feel more powerful and better than someone else in order to avoid the pain of feeling powerless. They believe that they can create a feeling of safety by having control over the people around them. A lot of narcissists and abusers are fight types. This is probably how a lot of kids turn into bullies. Flight response people strive ...
Narcissists – what they do, and how to avoid them
Things narcissists do There are different types of narcissists that might use different types of tactics. Some might be aggressive and domineering, some might play the victim to get people to feel sorry for them. These are just examples. There's no guarantee a particular narc will use all of them. They tell you what you want to hear, to make you feel good about them, so that they can get you to do something for them. They do favours for you and then hold it up as evidence that they're generous and helpful, to pressure you into doing something for them. ...
Internal Family Systems (IFS) – What it is and how it works
IFS is a trauma healing method developed by family therapist Richard Schwartz, PhD. According to Internal Family Systems, everyone has multiple 'personalities', referred to as 'parts', that live inside their psyche, and that have their own thoughts, feelings and needs. Let's imagine them like children passengers on a bus. There is also the Self, which is like the driver of the bus. In IFS, all parts are welcome and valid, and none are considered bad. This is because all of them are only trying to help in the best way they know how. Self-leadership "Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of ...
The benefits of very low contact with parents
I've been very low contact with my parents for quite some time now, several months. We're mostly limited to the occasional email. This has been so very helpful for my mental health! I have my email set up so that my parents emails get filtered into their own folder that doesn't get checked automatically when I check the rest of my mail, so I don't ever get notified about anything they send me, and I have to manually go in there to see what they've sent, if anything. This makes it very easy to ignore them entirely for as long as ...
Gray Rock
Certain people, particularly narcissists, feed off of your emotional reactions to things. The best way to not 'feed' them is to avoid them entirely, but that's not always possible. So, what do you do when you happen to be around one of these vampires? Be as boring as possible. Be a gray rock. I hate dishonesty, but in some cases, with certain people, it may actually be safer not to be honest. If expressing your true opinions and feelings around a person makes you feel unsafe in any way, avoid that person like the plague. If that's not possible (yet), then ...
Forgiveness
Have you ever tried to tell someone about an abusive person in your past, and they said you should forgive them and move on? How did that make you feel? I get angry when people suggest things like that, as if I can just flip a switch and forgive them and suddenly that makes everything okay. It does not. There's no off-switch for trauma. Wouldn't it be nice if there was? I'm going to go all analytical here about the concept of Forgiveness, starting with the dictionary definition of the word: Definition of forgive, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary: transitive verb to cease ...