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royal-dread · 3 years

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Why I, a former age regressor, do not support age regression as it is shown in media

On social media there’s this video that’s going around of an age regressor that I’ve had many issues with. If you go in the comments of these posts you’ll have three types of people: the ones who make fun of it, the ones who try to defend it, and the ones that tell the ones who defend it how harmful these actions are.

In all of these posts, you know what I find? People who say “it’s a trauma response” “most people don’t have control over it” and yet also say “it’s a coping mechanism and dressing up is soothing” despite that being a completely different thing, and will go on about how “doctors recommend it” despite that making no sense

Let me clear one thing up: dressing up in baby clothing, coloring in coloring books, drinking out of sippy cups are all dress up games.

ACTUAL age regression is your body doing childlike things or sending yourself into a child like state to better handle your trauma

Let’s take me for example. I naturally did it from actual trauma. When I was about 6 mo, my mom stopped me from sucking on my fingers. But I was raised in a very abusive household and you know what I did? As I turned 2yo I started sucking on my fingers again and every night I slept with my baby blanket(the blanket that came with my crib). I would suck on my fingers originally at night, but then it got worse to the point where I was constantly doing it.

I didn’t stop doing this until I was 17 (last summer). I would wear long sleeves and hide my hand in it while I did it at school because I was constantly stressed out. You know how when you take away a baby’s binky, It’ll start crying and getting fussy or even throw a tantrum? That’s what I did. If we were doing a lot of activities that required your hands I would get overwhelmed and start to cry because I couldn’t calm down and the emotions over flooded my brain. You couldn’t hold a conversation with me because when this happened I would snap at others and say hateful things.

And not only this, but when this happened my mind would “shut down” as we said, and I couldn’t think. I couldn’t form any coherent thoughts because all I could think of was how I was feeling. There was no reasoning with me, all I could think of was me wanting to soothe myself, I couldn’t do my work, I couldn’t have long conversations with people, etc. I couldn’t tell people when there was something wrong, I would just sit there and cry because that’s all I could handle.

Now note: there was no dress up. There was no “coloring” or drinking out of sippy cups. These were habits that I had when I was young that I started again because my brain couldn’t handle the trauma.

Now, I recently went through tf-cbt (trauma focused- cognitive behavioral therapy) where I was told these were horrible habits to do and I should steer far away from them. My counselor told me that it was a clear sign of child abuse/child trauma and I had PTSD, and helped me get the diagnosis for places like school and work. She told me that age regression is a defense mechanism that your body takes so that you can handle what’s going on around you. Your body and mind regresses to points where you were at your calmest and use those habits/actions to give you a better control on yourself, but they make you unstable when you can’t do these actions and you end up doing way more harm to yourself than good.

Not only this but my habit deformed my mouth severely. I finally got approved for braces and when they did the X-rays and measured everything they told me I had about an INCH of space between by bottom and top row of teeth. I couldn’t eat in public because I had to bite with the side of my mouth. I couldn’t form words properly and constantly fumbled. It was embarrassing how awful they were and I ended up having the teeth behind my canines pulled because there wasn’t enough room to pull everything back. 2.5 years later and I’m STILL in braces because of how hard it is to fix this. And my middle and index finger are deformed too, they’re bent at awkward angles and I can’t hold them straight because of the 15 years of constantly being pushed that way.

Age regression is now a TRIGGER for me because it gets my blood pumping and makes me feel sick and I get so unreasonably angry at these people for not even knowing what they’re talking about. My head gets light and I can feel all the blood rush from it and I feel like I’m gonna fall over if I stand because of how many times I’ve tried to explain to people my situation and they’ve told me “fuck off if you don’t actually age regress or are a little youre an ableist fuck and there’s a special place in hell for people like you” when I’m the one who has an actual PTSD diagnosis and has gone through the whole speal of getting help.

Age regression is not okay. It’s not heathy. Your mind can’t properly handle the things that are going on around you and it shuts down and brings you back into a state of mind that your body knows it can handle. It’s unhealthy because you never actually face what’s going on and the issues only build and build until you burst because everything has been suppressed, not coped with. These habits can destroy your life and you can lose all your relationships (like with me) due to it.

If you “age regress” because it’s FUN you’re just playing dress up and are MOCKING people with an actual issue. Go fuck yourself if you really think that, because that’s like me saying “oh I pretend to have war flash backs because I think being a soldier is cool”

So for those of you who support this and say doctors recommend it: you’re lying. You’re literally lying right to our faces and are trying to justify you having playtime and not wanting to grow up when there’s actual people who do this because of trauma and get suppressed because they’re “not real agere. I HATE the term “little” because it’s making a FOOL of me, I’m not a “little”, I didn’t age regress because I had a choice, it was my body’s way of coping and it was HORRIBLE, and the way that media has made it into “oh yes look at this decorative binky I got and this new children’s coloring book” sickens me.

So yeah, I have a DNI. And that DNI says “age regressors” because I’m sick and tired of being grouped in a category of people who are using the term wrong and take away from people who do this because of actual issues in their life

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