#I was reliving some real unresolved issues through that dream

[therabbitthatpostthings]

I fully convinced myself for 5 mins after waking up that in my dream, PJ Duncan from Good Luck Charlie had a boyfriend.

This blonde dude was in an off-brand Olive Garden with his parents and brother and if you answered trivia questions you would win a crown and the workers would sing. PJ (pretending to be a waiter) came to the table and asked the family the most basic question but asked the blonde boy harder ones to make him look smart (the blonde boy was a nerd but his brother was like a Harvard student so PJ wanted to make him look even smarter).

In the end the blonde nerd wins the crown and the restaurant does their little song for him and he’s so happy. He goes into hug PJ (who is out of the disguise???) and PJ hugs him back. While they’re hugging PJ asked if he’s happy. He says yes but PJ looks a little disappointed (he looked starstruck to me) and the guys is like “what?” And PJ is like “oh well I was just hoping for something else.” And the blonde guy is like “what could possibly be more.”

And PJ leans in and kisses him! And the Disney “oohhhh” track plays. Like it felt like this was a big moment the show had been building towards for a couple episodes and now we the audience and get ring the payoff. And this wasn’t like a little peck on the cheek, PJ has his arms draped over this man’s shoulders giving him a Troy and Gabriella after they repaired their relationship for the third time kiss.

I was convinced that this imaginary epsiode of a show I haven’t thought about since it was ended a decade ago existed so much, that I GOOGLED “PJ GET BOYFRIEND” IN A COLD SWEAT AFTER WAKING UP!

He doesn’t- of course he doesn’t, this is Disney- but for 5 minutes that was the reality I wanted to live in! Mind you, there were much more extreme things happening in that dream- do I remember them? Nope! But I remember PJ Duncan’s imaginary blonde buzzcut nerdy boyfriend.

This wasn’t like a little blonde twink either. This guy was like 2 inches shorter than PJ, but was wide. He had the vibe of that ROTC kid who looks like a jock but is the geekiest guy you’ve ever met. Full buzzcut and glasses, wearing a button up shirt. Lowkey looked like a really young Anthony Rapp’s Mark Cohen from RENT.

[jane-aineien]

Uh

So I kind of went off the rails, this an art inspo blog but fuck it. analysis time. I loved @jackrrabbit’s homeowner’s association so much I had to get it out of my system somehow 😤

Dabi here is far and away the most self-sabotaging sap to ever exist. To him, reader is not only someone he loves, they’re the last remaining embodiment of his past, his childhood long-dead feelings of love, joy and hope for a better life. I’d go so far as to say that Dabi’s dreams aren’t simply dreams, but a future he actually used to imagine when he was still Touya kicking it on the streets with the reader before the LoV.

Dabi has a habit of ignoring his emotional baggage and coping with distractions. He runs away from his abusive home, he leaves the streets (after reader leaves him, I’d like to think) and now he leaves the reader sleeping next to him in exchange for a fantasy version of them. Every single issue he’s encountered, he’s solved by running away, but he can’t bring himself to run away completely this time. Not when the reader symbolizes and reminds him of quite possibly the happiest part of his life. So every night, Dabi chooses to remain in limbo (aka his personal hell)- unable to face his waking problems and unable to abandon them the way he used to. Had he not met the reader again, Dabi probably would have been more than content with his chosen distraction, wreaking havoc w/ the LOV. But meeting reader was a trigger unearthing his long-forgotten, torturous feelings of hope. Because unlike young, impressionable Touya, Dabi now knows that his dream of a domestic suburban life with his first love is wholly unattainable.

“On some level it doesn’t feel right to dream about you when you’re right there next to him, but he can’t help it. Maybe because the person he’s dreaming about isn’t really you—at least, it’s not the version of you sleeping in his bed”

God, my god. To anyone who’s gone through high school English, this is the exact type of stuff Gatsby would say had he actually lived, ended up with Daisy and was 5 years into his scam life. I am not Nick Carrotop, and I do not find this romantic. Heartbreakingly masochistic, maybe :(. This beginning is SO well-written because it reveals Dabi’s guilt about dreaming what he does and daring to enjoy them. You can almost taste the poetic justice of the situation. Dabi backed HIMSELF into the moral corner he is currently stuck in and faces the brunt of his actions, akin to a child holding their favorite toy too tightly, breaking it, and then crying about it instead of trying to fix it.

“You look different here. Healthier. The shadows are gone from under your eyes and your cheeks aren’t as hollow and you’re smiling, although the expression is a little vague—when he wakes up he’ll realize it’s because he can’t really remember what you look like smiling.”

This whole dream sequence hits hard!! Dabi doesn’t just dream about past-reader, or present-reader, he’s created what is a whole nother entity- a version of the reader that never existed and never will. And the funny thing is, he’s also cooked up another, better version of himself, whether he’s aware of it or not. Because let’s be real, the Dabi that manipulated, blackmailed, and kidnapped reader is NOT the same dream-Dabi that cooks dinner, mows the lawn on Sundays and can never refuse his darling wife. Dabi’s dream, once again I’m convinced, is essentially kid-Touya’s future plans that he used to naively daydream about, which explains his recollection of the tiniest, carefully crafted details.

“And you have a raised soil bed, a garden like the one he asked his father to plant in his childhood home once a very long time ago.”

This line BROKE MY HEART! You get a glimpse of child-Dabi and his sweet lil’ mindset, but you’re hit with the realization that he was only able to ask once because he was probably refused strongly enough to never bring it up again.

“This is the kind of thing Dabi concerns himself with when he dreams about you: lawn height and homeowners associations and a yellow that only reminds him of sunlight because you told him it did. That sticks out to him. It’s something you really would’ve said. Back then.”

This is the part that made me start thinking of this dream as a tour of Touya/ kid-Dabi’s imagination- the disconnect between his understanding of suburban life and the pure naivete that went into this utopian world. There’s something so clearly innocent and carefree about these issues and the fact that you can see pessimistic, present-Dabi snapping himself into reality with “back then”? It turns the desolate factor all the way up to 11 because now you can clearly see that Dabi still holds onto the hopes and dreams he made up as a child. While he manages to avoid them during the day, it’s impossible to stop his subconscious from indulging at night.

“Dabi’s always going to take care of his kids. He’s different from his father too, in that way.”

Dabi tries SO HARD to erase traces of Endeavor. In dream world, Dabi erases all the trashy parts of his family -his father’s neglect and unknown hatred of gardening- and opts to paint over those memories with imaginary children and the reader’s supposed love of gardening. And yet, he can’t seem to completely detach himself from his past, as he dreams of a life where he’s still close to Fuyumi, and reminiscences his own role as an older brother. Only in his dream is he able to pick and choose which parts of his past he wants to relive. In other words, this dreams definitely aren’t about reader, but a coping mechanism that developed with the reader as an involuntary main character.

“They take after you too, and every day Dabi’s grateful that unlike him, they didn’t get a goddamn thing from their father. Only their eyes, really, and when he gets past that it doesn’t bother him nearly as much as he thought it would.”

It’s heartbreaking when you think that Dabi used to hate himself because of how much he resembled his father.  Dabi continuously tries desperately hard to smooth over things that remind him of Endeavor in this dream, and this is another example. Here, the cold blue that used to hurt him is now the same blue that looks up at him in wonder.

“And he if asks, he knows you would—you would want more. In his dream, you would want more kids.”

This killed me, because the way it’s worded makes it seem like Dabi, even dream-Dabi, is trying to convince HIMSELF rather than anyone else that the reader would be open to more kids. It’s the repetition, the pure uneasiness the statement starts off with, and finally reaching the conclusion that maybe only dream-reader would say yes just does it for me.  

“He’s gotten used to this over the past few months, the fading images of your easy domestic life together, the memory of the way your laughter sounds slowly sinking into nothing; the aftertaste of pure sugar souring on his tongue, bittersweet.”

Stop, I’m already dead !!! The fact that Dabi still holds onto all of these emotions, and the fact that he’s gotten used to the feeling of everything fading away is the most devastating way to end this :((( You get the impression that these dreams are quite common, most likely beginning right after Dabi realized that living with the reader doesn’t necessarily translate into a resolution of all his unresolved trauma. Because to Dabi, the reader symbolizes happiness and domestic joy. And unfortunately, it seems only the audience comes to the crushing understanding that the reader character is only a broken human and thus leaves Dabi nothing but frustrated, guilty, and lost

[tifarobles]

Examples of Anxiety in Disney & PIXAR films

I’ve been talking a lot about the importance of mental health awareness. Along with this comes the importance of education, especially for the next generation. Disney and PIXAR have helped by showing realistic depictions of mental health issues in ways that kids can easily learn, understand, and relate to.

I feel like it’s very important to teach our children how to talk about their emotions at a young age. They are capable of feeling sadness and we should help them be able to express these feelings, talk about bad feelings, and understand how sadness, anger, and fear affect them. This includes not always forcing them to act happy.

Today, I’m going to explore how Disney and PIXAR do a fantastic job depicting anxiety. For each example, I am choosing one character in the story to focus on. Most of these movies do a great job of displaying other types of mental health issues too. These movies have and will continue to help me teach X what emotions are and how to communicate what he is feeling in a healthy, productive way.

Inside Out - Riley:

Being a pre-teen girl is hard. Moving across the country to a new place where you don’t know anybody is scary. Combine these two things for a truly trying time. We see Riley go through these emotions in a very real way. Joy tried to keep sadness from interfering with Riley’s life. Joy was channeling Riley’s anxiety, wanting to be happy. Riley was afraid to worry her parents and just wanted to keep feeling happy, so Joy tried to force happiness by keeping sadness and all the depressing feelings in the back of her mind (literally). This response isn’t healthy and doesn’t work to relieve the issues of depression causing sad feelings of helplessness and anxiety that makes your body freeze. Riley needed to discuss her feelings in order to get any better. She needed to face her sadness head on and let Sadness take the wheel.

Riley believed that being joyful was equal to being happy. She didn’t understand that happiness and joy are different. Think about how “happiness” is represented on social media, television shows, and in movies. You don’t see a lot of the realities of life that are hard to face. The truth is, you won’t always feel happy, and that’s okay.

You can still be happy when you are feeling sad. Other times you need to feel sadness in order to get help. Sadness is a mechanism that kicks in to push us to ask for help from loved ones and friends who can support us. Riley needed the support from her parents, but was anxious about telling them. This anxiety is relatable for many people. The idea of leaving home, not wanting to worry your parents, wanting to run away from your problems, fear of not fitting in. All of these topics can cause great anxiety for many people and showing Riley in a relatable, stressful time for children makes the feeling of anxiety recognizable.

If children can learn to understand their emotions that early on, imagine how soon they can start learning coping mechanisms that work for them if they do struggle with anxiety, depression, or PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

Finding Nemo - Marlin:

Marlin clearly suffers from anxiety and PTSD, with a side of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). He won’t even let Nemo leave the house without doing a ritual. Marlin also has separation anxiety. As soon as Nemo is out of his sight, Marlin’s anxiety makes him believe that the worst will happen.  Meanwhile, his PTSD makes him relive the worst thing that ever happened to him. At this point, his anxiety makes Marlin believe that Nemo is in danger and could die. Marlin’s body kicks into fight or flight mode, ready to do anything for his son, even facing his fears.

Throughout the movie, we see Marlin’s anxiety come into play. He is anxious about open spaces due to his PTSD. I can relate to this, having anxiety in cars after multiple car accidents. However, Marlin’s anxiety is so bad that it keeps him from leaving his home to venture out into the world. It keeps him from letting Nemo grow up with some independence. Marlin’s anxiety runs his entire life.

Marlin also has a hard time letting go of control and listening to Dory. He shows this many times as well, not believing she can read, not believing she can speak whale, and not trusting her when she says they need to go through the cavern below the jellyfish. His anxiety and fear of the unknown keeps Marlin from letting Dory help. This story arc shows how bad anxiety can affect your life and that you need to face your fears in order to enjoy life, trusting your friends to guide you.

Frozen - Elsa:

Conceal, don’t feel - not exactly a motto I’d recommend living by. (“What’s a motto?” “What’s a motto with you?” Thanks, Lion King). Elsa’s parents taught her to control her emotions by not feeling them in order to control and repress her powers. First of all, controlling your emotions doesn’t look the same as not feeling emotions.

Hiding your emotions can lead to depression, anxiety, repression, and more as it bottles up, unresolved and waiting to explode. Instead of exploding, Elsa isolated herself for years, fearful that she could hurt someone with her out of control powers. Not facing her fears only made them worse, which made it harder to relax, breathe, and focus on her feelings, which she needed to do in order to deal with them.

Much like Riley, Elsa needed to face her fears (emotions/powers in this case) in order to learn what she was capable of. Elsa’s anxiety led to years of isolation through a formative time of her life, which led to depression. This depression took away any motivation Elsa had for getting better. She kept these struggles secret from her sister out of fear of the unknown. Depression made Elsa think that it was easier to live alone.

Elsa learns how to take care of herself and manage her anxiety before she is capable of helping someone else. This is an important lesson we all have to learn. Elsa and Anna are both on similar paths to learning how to be independent in very different ways. Anna is afraid of being alone and channels that into romance (a different topic for discussion), while Elsa is learning how to live without anxiety being the only emotion she can feel.

Showing Elsa being true to herself by embracing her powers teaches children not to be afraid of something inside themselves that is different, even if it is scary. Elsa accepted her powers, as we should all embrace and celebrate our differences. The ending shows that love can help conquer depression and anxiety. In this case, love melts away the eternal ice, but in real life, love can help you to heal. Elsa needed to stop being afraid of letting Anna in to help her. Anna was the help Elsa needed all along.

Toy Story - Jessie:

Jessie has an intense fear of isolation, abandonment, and claustrophobia due to her PTSD. Her PTSD gives her uncontrollable anxiety. Any time Jessie thinks she is going into a box, she has a panic attack. The viewer sees her rapid breathing, her desire to curl up into a ball, and her flight response kick in as she wants nothing more than to get away from the situation. The way anxiety is showed is so powerful that it makes it easy to explain to a child what anxiety looks and feels like.

In Toy Story of Terror (on Netflix), Jessie’s anxiety is the main focal point of the story. In the end, you see her overcoming these fears to help someone she cares about. Jessie has to overcome a panic attack in a very realistic way. It isn’t easy, but with encouragement from friends, she is able to do it. This shows that anxiety can be addressed, but that it takes effort and support.

Tangled - Rapunzel:

Rapunzel’s anxiety is a different beast. Rapunzel has a very happy attitude, perhaps too happy given that she has been locked in a tower for 18 years with no connection to the outside world. Throughout the movie, the viewer experiences Rapunzel coming to terms with her life by finally getting to interact with people and realizing that she is the lost princess with two loving parents waiting for her to come home.

Her anxiety comes from valid fears - she has no idea what to expect. We watch her have a breakdown that mixes these anxious feelings with mania for finally being outside, paired with feelings of guilt for betraying the only human she has any connection with. We see the back and forth struggle. As someone with experience with bipolar disorder, I appreciated this realistic depiction of mania. Mania is rarely explored and when it is, you often don’t see the positive sides of mania. Mania makes you feel happy and often leads to people with bipolar disorder not seeking help because they don’t want to lose that happiness. Mania can also lead to rash, dangerous decisions.

Side note: Bipolar disorder to vastly misunderstood as someone with mood swings, when that isn’t the case. Someone with bipolar disorder generally has months of manic episodes and then months of depression. It doesn’t happen back and forth on the same day. Mood swings in bipolar disorder are more likely caused by the anxiety that accompanies mania and depression.

Rapunzel’s anxiety is attempting to save her from her mania, but her mania pushes her forward to follow her dreams. With time and treatment, Rapunzel will likely live a mostly normal, happy life, but she will need to learn how to cope with the PTSD of her childhood and learn how to manage her mania and anxiety in healthy ways.

These are the examples that I can relate to the most when it comes to anxiety in Disney and PIXAR films. There are MANY mental disorders that could be explored from this lens for (maybe?) every Disney and PIXAR film. What important depictions do you enjoy seeing in children’s movies?

[capitalideachaps]

A Conversation with My “Rapist” - Part 1, A History

Two days ago, I had a very interesting experience. TW: abuse, trauma and rape

I want to share it with you all and process it - brace yourself for a long, very personal, pretty heavy read... in multiple parts 

 I came to uni  3 years ago, at age 19,  with an open heart and open mind, thankful to have escaped from the home town where I suffered a great deal of abuse, neglect, bullying and harassment. I was feeling hopeful - I could use this fresh start and change of environment and pace to change things and myself. I was also very vulnerable - having missed out on so much development and many of the experiences that a normal child growing into an adult would face. 

I knew I was damaged from my past, I was scared of simple things - like being hugged. This held me back in connecting to people  (and still does now in more complex ways) - the thing I wanted most, and I tried to work on this everyday. I attempted to slowly confront my fears and relearn how people are.(As it stands, I can now hug people without being scared so yay me!) 

During this time, I find someone who I really like and am immediately intensely attracted to. They are charming, fun and somewhat mysterious. Truth be told, I could still write a thousand sonnets about the experience of “falling in love” (albeit superficially) with them. This was maybe the 3rd time in my life I’d had a real life (as opposed to online) crush return the interest - the first and only genuinely wholesome time being when I was 14. (side bar: Dear Penguin Boy, you will always hold a special place in my heart, you adorable nerd. I am so sorry I dumped you out of the blue, I wasn’t aware of splitting back then or my shitty disordered attachment style. PS. How’s your egg doing? ) The second was when I was 18, and in retrospect was probably (read: definitely) being manipulated by this older Dutch man who had a thing for taking advantage of inexperienced younger girls. (Which my virgin ass surely was.) The trauma of that experience is a story for another time. 

This was only made better by the fact this time it was a fucking girl. A fellow woman? Showing interest in ME? LORD BE PRAISED - MY GAY DREAMS ARE COMING TRUE. I could barely believe it was even happening. 

We hook up and eventually begin to date. The relationship is incredibly tumultuous - our flaws and unresolved past baggage ravage the other’s. We both like each other, but over the year and a half of stop and starts we hurt each other frequently. 

I know I’ve made mistakes in the relationship - applying pressure for it to be more serious than she wanted (FWB to actually dating) being the main one. And beyond that, pushing for things to go to fast and trying to rush the emotional connection that I was craving. We start on poor footing due to this, but she doesn’t protest strongly or make it clear when things progress further that we’ve gone beyond what she wants. In retrospect, it was still wrong of me to pursue to relationship in the first place.

 I  wish we’d just dated super casually instead - less sex and private hang outs (where if you don’t talk, there’s not much to do but fuck) and more public dates until we knew each other better or didn’t want to pursue it further. I also wish we’d deeply and bluntly discussed our understanding of what was happening, where things were going and relationships in general. Pro-tip: always confirm definitions - people mean totally different things with the same words.  It would have made things a whole lot less confusing. 

As we date, certain things become clear.

She doesn’t understand consent. She knows that if someone says no you stop - but beyond this, she cannot see the grey areas that exist and that it’s most important to get a yes.

I live in the grey areas, unwillingly, which is why I try to communicate so bluntly and be so straight forward. I’m already so complex - I don’t need or want to add any extra grey. Being complicated isn’t something fun I chose to do to be mysterious - it’s something I had forced upon me by circumstance - fighting to survive and get my needs met as a child. How I’ve adapted to cope with that. It’s something I’ve spent and will spend years in therapy trying to rectify. 

When I try to talk to her about this - she wants me to teach her about BDSM, so I try to start with the most important part, the foundation, consent and communication - she gets angry with me. She considers herself the victim and does not take criticism or questioning well - but it takes me years to realise this. 

I try desperately to understand her, but with no communication to go on, I am lost. She hates when I probe and needs to open up in her own time. She doesn’t share much of anything at all  -  from the small details about her day up to how she feels in the moment. I am sometimes given stories from her past, and left to extrapolate the rest. I hate the unknown - I am scared, so I push- for anything.

I have idolised her and refuse to blame her for her flaws. I buy into the victim narrative she believes not realising it. I am unable to explain her behaviour through insight into her past or present emotional state/experiences due to lack of data, but I try desperately anyway. Lacking context, I settle on believing her actions are always my fault, a lie I’ve been fed by abusers in the past. She’ll give me what I want and need when I deserve it by being perfect.

I become increasingly scared, self-loathing and insecure. I berate myself for every small thing I see as being done wrong, and whenever I take issue or am hurt by something she does or doesn’t do (usually communicate with me more), I find a way to make it my fault. I waste hours of my alone time on this, tearing myself down. 

I believe I am abusive and toxic, I am the perpetrator and she believes she is the victim of things in life and I suppose that she rarely does anything wrong. I deny my own reality and accept hers. She doesn’t need to manipulate me, no one would, I do it to myself.

 In my defence, my reality was/is pretty fucking abysmal and you might want to deny it in my place too. Despite the misplaced shame and guilt, it’s easier to be an abusive person than admit you’ve been so chronically abused and continue to relive it. One is a position of power... and the other is a complete lack of it. If I’m being abusive, then I can change. If I’m being mistreated, there’s not much I can do, it’s in the other person’s hands to cut it out or step up. And if there is anything that will trigger a victim of childhood neglect and abuse it's feeling helpless / powerless. 

To others, it looks like she is manipulating me to believe this about myself, but in fact I am filling  the gaps in our relationship with past experiences. I am reliving and recreating the trauma of my past abuse. She shares the victim mentality (and unfortunately enough, the height and build and gender expression of, priming me for this response) with a past online lover of mine who I was emotionally abused by and sexually pressured by for a year at 17.

It is easy to see how rape occurs within this dynamic. And, as a big surprise to no one, it did

 In a way, it was predestined by the circumstance and flaws of each of us. It was almost inevitable, unless either I realised what was happening and dealt with my past trauma or she worked through her issues with the victim mentality and then went on the learn more about consent and communication. We were both 19. This wasn’t going to happen without some outside intervention. 

Here’s the interesting part though - the level of insight, understanding and processing I have now would not have been reached had I not sat down to talk with her multiple times. It wasn’t easy and it definitely wasn’t pleasant for either of us - but I know it was ultimately beneficial. Or, at least... the most recent go at it (only a few days ago) was. And that’s what I would like to explore next.