s-arar - Tumblr blog

[s-arar]

Eric Lee-Johnson Hokianga Blackberries January 1958

[s-arar]

from complex ptsd: from surviving to thriving by pete walker

[s-arar]

me: i’m just working at a gas station :( im not doing anything w my life :(

my foremothers bc i’m not working in a field or pregnant:

[s-arar]

the assurance "nobody is judging you" is straight up false... people ARE judging you and you have to find a way to be ok w it

[s-arar]

When a person with ADHD complains of severe anxiety, I recommend that the clinician not immediately accept the patient’s label for her emotional experience. A clinician should say, “Tell me more about your baseless, apprehensive fear,” which is the definition of anxiety. More times than not, a person with ADHD hyperarousal will give a quizzical look and respond, “I never said I was afraid.” If the patient can drop the label long enough to describe what the feeling is like, a clinician will likely hear, “I am always tense; I can’t relax enough to sit and watch a movie or TV program. I always feel like I have to go do something.” The patients are describing the inner experience of hyperactivity when it is not being expressed physically.

At the same time, people with ADHD also have fears that are based on real events in their lives. People with ADHD nervous systems are consistently inconsistent. The person is never sure that her abilities and intellect will show up when they are needed. Not being able to measure up at the job or at school, or in social circles is humiliating. It is understandable that people with ADHD live with persistent fear. These fears are real, so they do not indicate an anxiety disorder.

holy SHIT

[s-arar]

[s-arar]

[s-arar]

HOW TO BEGIN HEALING

ACKNOWLEDGE THE PAIN AND DAMAGE. Others will try frequently to avoid these feelings and the thought that they’re hurt or hurting. However, it is a massive roadblock to starting your journey. 

You have to truly confront yourself. Journal, vent to someone, draw or however you feel is best to truly express how you feel, you do. 

EXTRACT TRIGGERS. Don’t let your physical environment encourage triggers that resurface your hurt self or continue to hurt you. E.g. friends, social media, family, bad habits etc. 

DAILY REFLECTION. You have to start to confront your feelings and experiences, but I know, it’s scary and we don’t want to revisit bad times. Please try to do some self-reflection daily about personal feelings and experiences, as it gets easier when it’s so frequent. 

ESTABLISH ORDER & ROUTINES. Start putting in good habits in your life and slowly improve your mental and physical well-being. Healing is going to be all over the place and messy. So when we have a routine to fall back on when needed, it just makes us feel better. 

ACTUAL SELF-CARE. Everything showers and face masks are nice and all, but they are not the only aspects of self-care. Self-care is doing the things that are good for you, disregarding how you currently feel. E.g. cooking and eating a healthy breakfast instead of eating takeout. 

BE PATIENT AND PERSISTENT. Healing is going to be hard regardless of what hurt you. There will be days when you feel like giving up. However, I encourage you to fight those feelings of hopelessness and continue. 

REMOVE SHAME FROM YOUR MIND. Another roadblock, it limits you from all the help and lessons you get in life. It isolates you, from everybody else who does care about you and wants to help. Asking for anything is not embarrassing. 

RECONNECT WITH YOURSELF. Start doing hobbies that you love, learning about things you’ve been curious about, and reading books on your favourite topics. Reconnection is so important because it brings emotional and mental prosperity. 

[s-arar]

[s-arar]

that james baldwin quote where he says, “it took many years of vomiting up all the filth i’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before i was able to walk on the earth as though i had a right to be here.”

[s-arar]

[s-arar]

In neoliberal ideology, the self has replaced the group, the community, or wider society as the site for reform and change. This emphasis on the individual has seen the depoliticisation of social and economic inequalities to the point where, in the words of Ulrich Beck, they have been redefined "in terms of an individualization of social risks." Most pertinent to our understanding of the psy-professions in neoliberal society is that "social problems are increasingly perceived in terms of psychological dispositions: as personal inadequacies, guilt feelings, anxieties, conflicts, and neuroses". In this "risk society," "expert" groups such as psychiatrists and psychologists become increasingly important to capitalism in their attempts to scientifically speak to the "risky" behaviour of the individual. This rise of "expert knowledge and expert opinion" in neoliberal society, remarks Turner, means that such discourse is "highly politicized." Thus, as the social state has fallen away with the expansion of neoliberal ideology, the psy-disciplines have come to play a key role in promoting and perpetuating the focus on the risky subject, increasing their moral authority into new areas of jurisdiction, with every individual within a population redefined under a hegemonic psychiatric discourse as "in a permanent condition of vulnerability" to "mental illness."

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

[s-arar]

[s-arar]

[“Ah, there it was. For the first time without the help of hallucinogens: unconditional self-love.

I didn’t feel peaceful walking out of that meditation place, but I felt a new determination—like I had a duty to take better care of myself emotionally. For the rest of the day, I collected things I liked about myself, and it was easy, because it felt like assembling a book of compliments for a friend. But the best reward from that meditation center was a familiar face I could access every time I sat down to meditate.

For a couple of minutes, I basked in the sun and breathed, and then I summoned an older version of myself, a year into the future. I imagined she was sitting behind me, enveloping me in a big-spoon hug. She had a few more wrinkles. A couple more freckles. She was wearing baggy, soft clothing. “Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

“I’m sad today,” I admitted.

“It’s okay to be sad. You won’t be sad a week from now. I love you, and you are doing your best,” she said, and I knew she was right. I leaned back into her belly. I could almost feel it pushing back against me, a solid pressure, telling me I was not alone. She silenced my mother’s voice in my head. Excised her not just in body but in mind. She did it because, as my third parent, that is her right.”]

Stephanie Foo, from What My Bones Know: Healing From Complex Trauma

[s-arar]

Antipsychiatry must include prison abolition as a guiding value. I'm tired of seeing people organize around antipsychiatry while throwing other incarcerated people under the bus. Criticizing psych wards for "treating us like criminals while we haven't broken to law" ignores the real problem: that the tools of restraint, strip searches, solitary confinement, and incarceration are violent no matter who they are forced upon. No one should be treated that way, no matter what form of incarceration you're surviving, whether that's in a prison, a psych ward, or any other institutions of total control. We are not inherently morally better than people incarcerated in prisons, and we have to build intentional solidarity to ensure we don't just replace one cage with another.

[s-arar]

[“In order to move from shame toward accountability and healing, we need to believe that safety, connection, and dignity are possible. If we know or believe that our physical, sexual, or material safety will be violated if we disclose either the harm that was done to us or the harm we have caused, then concealing these things is an understandable and fundamentally adaptive way to maintain our safety. If we experience social rejection, ostracism, and isolation by disclosing our experiences of harm (whether surviving harm, causing harm, or both), then concealing, minimizing, and denying these experiences are logical and fundamentally life-affirming strategies (albeit with huge costs).

If we cannot reveal what we have done or what was done to us without being seen as inferior, damaged, tainted, broken, monstrous, irreparable, and so on, then, out of a core human drive toward dignity, we will not do it. Therapist and author Harriet Lerner writes: “If identity—who you are—is equated with your worst behaviors, you will not accept responsibility or access genuine feelings of sorrow—because to do so would invite feelings of worthlessness. How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?”]

Nathan Shara, Facing Shame: From Saying Sorry to Doing Sorry, from Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From The Transformative Justice Movement

[s-arar]

“It occurs to me as I fight so hard with myself that these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself. And that, perhaps, it is possible to close an inner door and shut out voices that are not mine. In the last light of a long day, I sit on a chair on my porch and watch the sky drain colors down and out and I realize I want to hear my voice and only mine. Not the voice of my voice within a cacophony of old pains. Just mine, now.”

— Jenny Slate, Little Weirds