#psychological perspectives

[cyber-soul-smartz]

Embracing the In-Between: Overcoming Loneliness in Self-Discovery

Embrace loneliness during self-discovery; it's a path to deeper understanding. It feels isolating but also peaceful. Remember, this solitude is a gateway to your true self. You're not alone in this journey. #selfdiscovery #personalgrowth #resilience

[turiyatitta]

The Pursuit of Absolute Nothingness

A Journey Towards Enlightened Emptiness Introduction: In the dynamic, incessant stream of thoughts, preferences, and subjective biases that characterize the human experience, the concept of attaining a state of Absolute Nothingness captivates imaginations. Is it possible to achieve a mental and emotional vacuum where thoughts, biases, judgments, and self cease to exist? Understanding Absolute…

[courtingwonder]

Treat Emotions Like Visitors Who Are Just Passing Through

[liberatingreality]

What we see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field, the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the coloring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.

John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live in

[pratchettquotes]

That was the thing about witches. They were, according to Granny Weatherwax, "people what looks up." She didn't explain. She seldom explained. She didn't mean people who looked at the sky; everyone did that. She probably meant that they looked up above the everyday chores and wondered, "What's all this about? How does it work? What should I do? What am I for?" And possibly even: "Is there anything worn under the kilt?"

Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

[rorah]

The mentally stable Dimitri Fire emblem 3 hopes.

It surprises me that there's still ppl claiming so, but then I remember we're talking about 3h interpretations and I have to make peace with it.

But that doesn't stop me from venting a little bit in this little space I have lol. Actually, it dries me and makes me feel bad to bring this up because I will have to talk bad about Dedue, and I don't want to talk Bad about Dedue. He's a genuinely good boy. But "Human" nonetheless, which means Flaws. I like Felix too but he's become some sort of a clown that doesn't make me feel too bad. I like Felix tho, In a different way.

Mostly talking about these two because the take that "Dimitri has better support system" baffles me because, technically, these two are his support system in HopesVerse. The persons who Dimitri relays on and seek solace/advice/support. The rest doesn't really tackle any of his personal struggles (aside from the Mage!Mitri frustrated dream, but that's out of the bad equation in our 'mentally unwell' set of pixels, and Shez only has a glimpse). Contrary, to Houses verse where the whole blue lions cast knew about his shit, didn't know what to do, but didn't leave either.

I tackled this topic with other person on Twitter who was (or still is) on board with this take and the phrase they used was They contained him better, which of course I agree and remarked that was exactly the problem. Contain him is gonna be contra productive. I used a water dam analogy, where the structure of such dam is damaged, and the pressure of water keeps accumulating. Causing a foreseeable damage for the dam itself and the surroundings. You don't need to be a genius to understand it, you need experience or knowledge for mental ill topics tho.

I really don't want to extend so much on here because it's mostly just, rant format more than a proper analysis so I just want to point out these two things in their support conversations.

First, Dedue. Encourage him to keep on the vengeful path. Which we know was the final goal of Azure Moon and if you payed attention to 3 houses message. The whole Vengeful argument was something Bad, to keep it simple. Despite Dimitri actively looking for answers/guidance for something that, in a rational state he can see clearly like vengeance will consume his life (also Shez and Felix called out this behavior). Dedue answer only encourage him to keep on that path, because he would do that 💔. Presenting 2 oposite views is a great formula for confusion and disorientation. Now, Dedue's role is primary SUPPORT, not guidance nor orientation. He will support his shit no matter what, and we are quite aware of that if played Houses.

Second, Felix. Felix is a special case. He is smart but also an idiot lacks A LOT of soft skills to actually be of help. He's the only one who knows in this verse about Dimitri having a mental issue. In their A support to say the least, so they don't close or solve anything. What makes it more worrisome is the fact that Felix conceals the issue as a secret.

"So try to keep that whole "removing their heads" thing in check, yeah? We can just call it our little secret."

this extract here makes me feel so unwell 😭help

The whole burden falls over him and his lack of skills and wisdom on the matter will be too much for him later on. He at least, will be able to recognize that the problem is beyond of his capabilities and will look for help. Felix himself has his own issues and journey where he needs to learn. He's forced to get pass beyond some of his angry teen behavior but hasn't completely get over it.

There is a lot more to tackle, but that requires more work and time. What are the topics some of you think is important to cover around understanding the Hopes verse resolution? Dimitri's route? something? Do you think the route without Byleth is better? With that being said, I would like to delve deeper into character analysis, and the role each played for the Lords too. That also requires to talk about the Byleth and needs a whole analysis on their own, which requires time (which i don't have much lol) To end this vent, I would like to encourage people to do a little research for the terminology they're using like "Support System". Who makes it up and how it operates successfully. The fact that ppl saying "he has better support system" only because he didn't go feral on the run alone is not entirely valid. A reminder that people can feel alone with or without people around them. And containing the issue within doesn't solve any problem. At best, it's presented later. At worse, it gets worse.

[medicalunprofessional]

flood

~♫

[sideprince]

I've seen the same post a hundred times now. Sometimes it's a few days old, sometimes it's from years ago, but it's always the same. Some anti posts about how they don't understand how anyone can like Snape because he was so awful, and then there's a long reply that goes something like, "imagine this happens to you, and then this, and then this" to describe Snape's experience. Sometimes there's some James Potter hate thrown in.

Look. You can go through describing a character's entire experience but you don't really need to. Here's the thing that antis don't understand:

For all her faults (and they're big, bigoted ones) Rowling understood a really integral part of the human experience and conveyed it through Snape. Everyone needs love and to feel accepted. It's that simple. Snape became a Death Eater to seek acceptance (Rowling has confirmed this, though I can't remember the source - whoever wants to add it please do), because it was the only way he could find any.

Snape's understanding of morality, like everyone's, is subjective. Some readers understand this and some don't. When faced against a morality that says there is good and bad in the world, everyone makes choices based on their personal experience. Context is everything. Someone who experiences pain and suffering will not see the person inflicting it on them as moral. That's it. 'How can this person be good when they caused me so much suffering?' = human psychology. Most of the people who think 'I'm a bad person and deserve this' have been gaslit and abused into thinking so, because it's not a natural reaction - it's one that has to often be socialized into someone at a young age, exactly because it's not natural. Everyone is the hero of their own story; no one sees themselves as a villain, because they see the valid aspects of their own perspective.

You can write essays on how vulnerable people needing acceptance is what cults and fascists exploit to recruit vulnerable people, or on how the standard anti's un-nuanced reading of Snape both ignores canon and displays a disturbing lack of empathy or compassion, but at its core it just boils down to context. From Snape's perspective he experienced cruelty, therefore the people inflicting it must be cruel. Again, it's that simple. He was a person, like any other, except he was fictional so he wasn't even real. On the flip side is James Potter, who, for all his faults, didn't get to live long enough to get a chance to change and grow unlike Snape, and I think the Snapedom also needs to acknowledge that.

They're fictional characters representing things an author wants to say, not sports teams, not martyrs, and not all good or all bad emblems that define your identity depending on how you feel about them. It's depressing how much time is wasted arguing with bullies and trolls whether from the Marauders fandom or just random antis. I literally can't find more than three blogs to follow without this argument coming across my feed daily. I know the Snapedom is Not OK™ and that's kind why we're all here, and I know that my take is super unpopular but like Snape, I don't care what others think: this fandom has been having the exact same argument for years and nothing has changed. There's fanart and meta and fic and so much content out there appreciating this character, you're not going to change an anti's mind who's deliberately trolling in the tags, so why are you trying? What are you getting out of it? What does it give you? It's exhausting just scrolling past it.

[clowndensation]

there’s a question to be asked i think about to what extent “getting out” can be conflated with “being saved” in this show, and what freedom actually means to any of these characters.

like you can argue that shiv saved ken by voting against him on gojo, but what if your intent behind saving someone is to inflict a worse punishment than if you’d just left them trapped? can a child weaned on poison survive on milk, or are you just sentencing them to a death by inches, starved of the only thing they know? and if you save someone specifically because you know that being saved is the worst thing that can happen to them, is that kindness or cruelty? at what point does a good thing become a malicious act?

and you can say that roman is finally free, but what exactly is he free from? the company? his father? does unlocking a cage mean saving a dog, or are you allowing him out on the street knowing there’s a kill shelter nearby? if the driving anxiety behind roman is that he’s an idiot and a failure—that he’ll never amount to anything, and trying will only lead to pain—and he’s finally cut loose once all of those anxieties have crystallized into cold hard fact in his mind, what has he actually escaped from? if the cage is in your mind, is it even possible for somebody else to unlock it?

the fundamental truth of a tragedy is that even being saved can be a death sentence, if the characters are incapable of escaping the thing doing them the most harm (themselves and their childhoods)

[undiscovered-horizon]

because of medication shortage, today is my first day off slow-release ADHD medication and it made me realize a thing or two:

You mean to tell me I've been feeling like this my whole life and only two years ago I realized that this state is less than ideal??? I'm honor citizen of delulu island bc what is this

(thankfully I do have regular/instant-release medication, so I can effectively study for finals)

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Tumblr isn't letting me find again @fictionadventurer's and my own posts on epistolary novels, but I have been thinking about it again, because I fell down a Goodreads review rabbit hall and I have thoughts again.

So many people dislike the style, and honestly, I don't blame them, because it's so often done... not well. It is in some aspects, a deceptively easy one, and in others, deceptively hard. And because I'm trying to write a novel with this format myself, I have been thinking about what makes or breaks an epistolary novel.

I talked yesterday about TGLPPS, because it is an interesting case to analyze. I have thought many times about it, and cannot think of a single non-merely-aesthetic reason for it to be told in an epistolary style. A lot of it depends on -British- people who have survived some terrible war conditions willingly opening up to a stranger about their experiences, and that's made... even more difficult if the medium is letters? typically writers will appeal to tropes like making the reserved character drunk, or have them share an extreme experience in isolation with the stranger to create sudden intimacy. None of this is possible in writing; if anything, one is much more self-conscious about the things one writes than the things one says; verba volant, scripta manent.

It seems to me the story would have flowed much more naturally if Juliet had been stranded on Guernsey for some reason -like the first author herself!- suddenly Dawsey commenting that he got a book from her library makes so much more sense! Yes, certainly, if you met a stranger out there, and they introduce themselves and you realize you have a book that once belonged to them, you would tell them so! And it is in this way that the epistolary format does violence to a story that would otherwise sound much less contrived.

Another problem is the large cast of characters and multiple settings. For all I complain about Dracula, Stoker manages this pretty well (of course he has the model of The Woman in White, but TWiW has fewer povs), at least on the first half, because structurally the storylines of the characters are converging, and that does a lot to guide the reader in the understanding of the character's relationships. TGLPPS's relationship structure is more of a multidirectional flow chart, and that becomes confusing really fast.

Another novel I read reviews for recently is one set in WWI, composed of back and forth letters between two lovers torn apart by war, and one common complaint was... that the climactic scenes, the times they meet, etc all happen... off-camera. It is a fair complaint, but also one I cannot really blame the author for, because that's what usually happens with real life compilations of letters of that kind. Sure, usually the editor/compiler will fill in the blanks sometimes and add an epilogue of sorts explaining what happened afterwards, and that is possible if you are writing it fictionally too, but some may think it spoils the effect of immediacy and whatnot, which, fair too.

But it makes me think of how aware Jean Webster was of these difficulties, and how deftly she managed them in both Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Both novels have aged badly in terms of content and message, but they are very interesting stylistically.

DLL is a bildungsroman with a dash of romance; through Judy's letters to daddy long-legs we can see how she grows as a person, gaining independence intellectually and economically, and as a writer, as her grammar and vocabulary change and grow. Between making Judy an orphan who hates the orphanage where she has lived her whole life, and one where she lived past the usual age of being thrown into the world, Webster does away with the need for letters between Judy and her friends and family: all her friends and family are her college roommates and her benefactor, who is the person she writes to. The benefactor scheme also makes it so that she doesn't have to write dll's replies, which in turns makes it much more natural and acceptable for the reader when Judy writes him the ending's love letter describing the feelings and impressions of their finally meeting in person and in truth; Judy has become a writer, and she is so used to write to him as another person all the time, that it just makes sense for her to write to him one more letter at the point where her benefactor and her lover become one and the same person. She has written a novel where the core is the correspondence between lovers AND managed to include as well all the moments of their meetings that we would otherwise miss.

Dear Enemy is a similar, but longer and more ambitious story. Instead of one relationship-connection (Judy and Daddy's), we have Sallie as a nod of connections: she's Judy's friend, Jarvis' "employee", the boss of several characters, has a tense colleague-boss relationship with the visiting doctor, a boyfriend of sorts in Washington, and a family we have met before. It is, in that way, a similar setup to TGLPPS: a urban girl of means becomes a fish out of water in a different setting till she ends up assimilating to it, and settling definitely through marriage. But Webster does a few things differently to make it click.

For starters, it is clear to her that this is the story of Sallie's maturation -I have sometimes talked of Dear Enemy as a novel where a Mary Crawford-like character undergoes a transformation arc. The happenings and stories she meets and tells Judy about along the way serve this arc, besides standing on their own as case studies to illustrate the problems, ideology and solutions proposed to the secondary themes of the story (education and social reform). I feel like TGLPPS is much more interested in Guernsey's survival through the war, in which case Juliet's story is already a frame, which, again, makes the epistolary format cumbersome rather than complementary.

Dear Enemy adds more correspondents, but it is very austere/economical with them, and narrows the letters we see to only those Sallie sends. YMMV regarding if it was too much cutting or not, but the undeniable effect is structural soundness; you are never confused by what is happening or who is writing to whom. We can guess the Honorable Cyrus Wykoff probably wrote some indignant letters to Jervis, and those would be funny to read, but... would they be worth the break in the flow of the narrative? I don't think so. To this effect, just having Sallie write a line to the effect of "I expect at this point you have at hand an irate letter from the Hon. Cyrus" is enough to paint a picture for the reader. Perhaps a letter or two from Dr. MacRae would have helped develop his character more -definitely a first read of the story obscures how much misdirection there is in Sallie's narration to Judy, which in turns tends to create an impression of suddenness to the closing letter that doesn't come across well to the reader.

The choice of Sallie mainly writing to Judy is, IMO, a really good one too. It not only establishes a connection with DLL, but it also allows for the intimacy that makes disclosure believable (something TGLPPS struggles with, as I mentioned above). When you add a few letters to the doctor and Gordon and Jervis, you also get a better perspective of Sallie's personality, how she deals not only with a friend, but with acquaintances, romantic partners and coworkers.

From all this it is pretty evident that for Webster the main function of epistolarity as format is aiding in showing psychological and moral development. But that's not the only thing the format can be really good for: perspective is another, and Austen uses it to great effect in both Lady Susan and Lesley Castle.

Both stories deal with mainly static characters, but who have very strong perspectives of the same situation, and it is this singularity of setting and story that anchors the narrative to avoid confusion, while the variety of perspective brings interest. In Lady Susan, we are dealing mainly with the marrying off of Frederica and seduction of Mrs. Vernon's brother, Reginald. There where Lady Susan paints Frederica as an undisciplined, irrational and ungrateful daughter, her sister in law, Mrs. Vernon, paints her as a sweet girl and a victim of her mother's ruthlessness and lack of love. Both agree that Reginald is being seduced, but, of course, with opposite goals: Lady Susan wants him to succumb, Mrs. Vernon, to escape, and this is a delicious struggle for the reader to follow!*

Lesley Castle being an earlier effort, and unfinished, does show some of the defects I have mentioned before (mainly, the relative confusion of having several correspondents in separate storylines), but illustrates well this same perspective effect: Margaret writes to Charlotte about the new Lady Lesley, and the new Lady Lesley writes to Charlotte about about Margaret and her sister... and in these contrasts lies the main interest of the narrative.

Some conclusions to these musings, then:

Not every story is suited to the epistolary format.

The epistolary format seems to work the best when it is used for either A) showcase psychological and moral development B) to play with perspective on people and/or events.

One of the main difficulties of the format is finding a narrative element to anchor and structure the letters around.

It must have a core couple of correspondents, or at most, two. More than that will make it confusing (unless, perhaps, the story is very short and about a single event or two).

A delicate balance must be found so that the secondary correspondence doesn't cut the flow of the main one, and if possible it must feed into it.

*It is interesting how Love and Friendship, being such a delightful -and I sustain one of the best ever- Austen adaptation, is by force of the perspective switch towards a more impersonal third person, more about a love story between Frederica and Reginald than a struggle between Lady Susan and Mrs. Vernon. Which isn't dissimilar to how adaptations of DLL end up being more about the romance between the leads than Judy's coming of age in college; tropes aside, I feel like if the epistolary format is well embedded in the story, it's going to be nearly impossible to reproduce the effect in adaptation.

[fangirltothefullest]

Went to a new doctor today. She's skinny. Of course she saw me and diagnosed me fat immediately. Mentioned cholesterol and diabetes and thyroid issues three times and ordered same day blood work. And on top of that she looked into my mouth and just decided to tell me that I should look into seeing a dentist. Like EXCUSE me??? You are not q dentist you have no right to shame me when my teeth are fine??? I don't understand why she felt the need to make me self conscious over something she has ABSOLUTELY NO EXPERTISE IN.

This is why I hate doctors but ESPECIALLY skinny doctors. They don't give two shits about you, they don't care how healthy you are they see weight that isn't stick figure, diagnose you with fat and won't hear any other problems you might have without telling you to lose weight first which is BULLSHIT and all the studies now are saying we have been thinking about weight wrong and the healthiness of your body is not weight-controlled.

Anyways I'm switching to a heavier doctor that my sister has whose nice and actually cares, but I spent an already anxiety-filled time at the doctor masking my fucking heart out and getting my blood drawn and having to on top of that come out feeling ugly and like I don't take care of myself.

To any of you who might be getting your doctor degrees or whatever, stop fucking treating fat people like we don't have feelings. Stop treating us like we are ugly horrible people. And for fucks sake mind your fucking business when it comes to information you know Jack Shit about. Stay in your own goddamned lane.

[sweet-potato-42]

one day people will label the existence of the qsmp eggs as psychological torture /j

[courtingwonder]

Visual Comparison of Painting Techniques to Change the Look and Feel of a Room

[myriadeyed]

I don't actually know how I feel about the mindset that any and all pain during the course of a phantom shift must and always does have a physical medical cause and you need to see a doctor. I'm pretty good at distinguishing what is causing my pain and when I have digitigrade leg shifts, it simply hurts. I only have that pain during those specific shifts. My ankles hurt because my brain thinks my bones are not supposed to contort that way. It's pretty cut and dry. I find it strange to say that there's this mental phenomenon that can cause any kind of physical sensation in your nerves from fur to fangs to entire new limbs but not pain. Why draw the line there? Pain is just another sensation that your brain can psychosomatically fabricate.

[pratchettquotes]

Not for the first time, Moist deplored his own tendency to see the angles in whatever happened, good or bad.

Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam