#what is cognitive dissonance

[truelovescamrecovery]

Why Do We Believe Lies?

Why do we believe the lies the narcissist or sociopath tells? Because we're normal. It's normal to believe what people say. It's normal to make sense of things that seem odd.

Why do we believe the lies the narcissist or sociopath tells? Because we’re normal. It’s normal to believe what people say. Here’s the thing, it’s normal to believe other people. believing others is hard-wired into our normal human hearts. We’re born this way. We trust and believe others as such a regular part of life, it’s something we barely notice. Continue reading Why Do We Believe Lies?

[idontmindifuforgetme]

I genuinely think that any change in behavior starts w telling yourself that your worst days, worst performances, just worst moments in general aren’t who you “truly are.” It’s all about unlearning any thought process that essentially chalks up traits you aren’t proud of to “this is who I really am” “in reality I’m lazy” “in reality I’m just a bad person” bc not only is that never true, but it impedes your efforts to try to do better as well. Anything we struggle with has roots in things like childhood trauma, thoughts you’ve been fed before, your upbringing…. but never that you’re inherently a bad person. What I’m learning this year is that a lot of us doing better & being better & improving really comes down to self-talk—to disavowing the very notion that deep down we’re simply bad.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Remember: The burning sensation is part of the process.

[pillarsalt]

Currently trying to crawl my way through Cat Bohannon's Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It sucks because I've enjoyed a lot of it, the actual evolutionary and developmental biology discussion is super interesting and informative, and the illustrations are so gorgeous. But then every twenty pages she'll follow up a brilliant paragraph with the dumbest trans-pandering shit you've ever read, with zero of the evidence normally provided to justify every other subject in the book. It's like she's constantly grovelling on hands and knees not to get cancelled for the mortal sin of daring to write about the female sex. Severely irritating and really brought down the experience of reading it.

[stlamb]

they did a study and the average shein consumer is 35 years old, makes 65k a year on average, and spends $100 on average a month ($1,200 a year - 60% more than the average US woman)

also - ???

[soapsod]

little wip

[dreamerdrop]

Dukat becomes worse the more pitiful he is. Winn becomes more pitiful the worse she gets.

Dukat has these moments where you could almost feel sorry for him, but he just doubles down on how horrible he is in a way that makes you forget that moment of pity because he genuinely and sincerely does not think he’s done anything wrong, ever.

Winn has moments where she seems to be weilding her cruelty like armor, but then has a moment of vulnerability and doubt that make you realise you can’t quite hate her, you just feel sorry for her instead, because some part of her seems to know she’s going down a bad path but she is so terrified she can’t make herself turn back.

Their character arcs look similar on a surface level but are very, very different trajectories.

[benevadeca]

Ok ramblings that lost the plot but... One of my least favorite SJ tropes is his past abuse leaking and everyone is suddenly soooo sympathetic to his past as a slave. Like it puts so much of the misunderstandings about him on his own shoulders, in a "oh this was a safe space and if you'd just been honest people would've been understanding" way. And i get it's a very modern-ism to be like ofc slavery is bad and the worldbuilding has weird mixes of gayness being fine but slavery is legal.

Like if anything in the original PIDW-verse it just reaffirms them at the end that ofc SJ was an outsider that could never fit in or make nice. They would've been like well that's a mortal social issue that the cultivation world should be above but ofc it makes so much sense for a snake like that to have been lying and hiding even more of his true colors.

And I mean even in SVSSS verse w shen yuan when it gets revealed they're just like well whatever! We don't care abt his past bc he's our guy and stopped being sucks so he like got over it and also we have a monopoly on violence so him doing a little childhood massacre is fine. He's Good (read: one of us) now. Like the hypocrisy and classism and ignorance, not even of social issues or your peers burdens but not even knowing what you don't know, is never something the members of the cultivation world ever worry about until it the consequences of those things actively effects them. SJ was their martial sibling but never One Of Them, but SY integrated well in an entirely different cultural norm bc he still had young master socialization. And unlike SJ he was good at being nice even though it was for equally selfish reasons as SJ's meanness. IE both being their learnt survival methods they used to protect themselves.

Idk it just undermines SJ's entire reasonable paranoia and valid reasons for not being willing to reveal the things he could v much get into legal trouble with, that people would use against him, the tangible discrimination that exists, etc. Like he was literally named qingqiu it kind of shows the trend of the things people do to him when they Know.

Anyway idk let them be ignorant and hypocrites! I like SY as a character bc he's a Nice person that is simultaneously incredibly narrow-minded, privileged, selective in who he gives a shit abt, and resistant to having his preconceptions questioned until his life is literally on the line lol. They are both posers! And for that to be undermined by the well sy wins bc he is Nice and Cares while sj wasnt those things is so like. Reductionist and equally woobifying in my opinion.

Rest of the CQM PL's too! CQM is destroyed in original PIDW-verse not just bc of SJ but bc it's complacent w the system no matter the guise it puts on as being the liberal equitable sect. Like this is the breaking the bones and locking a kid in a cave and then sending him to fight a demon lord sect.

[thebookworm0001]

i can't quite put words together about it but it is very funny and telling that when solas talks to you on your balcony, it is wildly obvious in retrospect how he's trying to figure out if you're more like the spirits he considers people than the rest of thedas

"your mind, your morals, your [insert massive pause and look off into the distance] spirit"

like, i wonder which one of those things matters most to you in this moment. you'd never be able to tell

[shoezuki]

i been thinkin bout sampard a lot in terms of their values n morals n like. i feel ppl dont really address the fact that they are very much on opposing sides a the law in terms of what it would mean for an actual established relationship. which ofc is fine who cares but it Interests me so much like

at their cores they Do share a clear care for other ppl and the planet they live on. but gepard is very much a by the rules, follow the law, justice driven character who will follow laws to a T. its integral to his character. Opposing this is Sampo though like. he's a criminal and he messes woth people and we can argue that he isnt evil but he IS unlawful and orchestrates scams that harm people to arguable degrees.

i think the solution i see to this dichotomy the most is sampo turning a new leaf n becoming a Good Civilian but tbh i'd argue that his criminality is just as integral to his character as justice is to Gepard's. ive said before i cant imagine him ever changing into a Good Boy but i genuinely mean it.

i just think it'd be the most contentious aspect to their relationship like. that gepard believes the law is always moral and just, sampo doesnt see the law as always moral nor that He should always be moral. i dont know fully how they would actually parse that n i wanna explore it

[voidpunkpal]

fantasy high sophomore year: *a whole episode about confronting your deepest fears that massively calls you out and fucks with your head*

five minutes later

fantasy high sophomore year: 'you're gonna shit in my mouth and you, sexy rat, are gonna fuck me or whatever'

[corsairspade]

absolutely unhinged scenario where beren and luthien finally pass in the way of men, gently and together and in love, ready to embrace the unknown— and wake up in the light of laurelin. Obviously, in the classic way of beren and luthien, they proceed to accidentally fuck up the first age in new and interesting ways.

[tititilani]

Isabela: You know, Taash isn't the first non-binary member of the Lords of Fortune we've had

Taash, apparently concussed from countless fights against dragons: Really?

Rook, nonbinary, a Lord of Fortune, and also sitting right next to them:

[gingerswagfreckles]

Well they caught him. If he wasn't the exact kind of person tumblr loves, the conspiracy theories about this being a random person being framed would have continued to spread. But he's an attractive 26 year old white man who was caught carrying a manifesto about corporate America and has an internet history that matches up with tumblr's general politics. So everyone is going to get excited about how he's a martyr and go back to acknowledging reality in that there isn't a conspiracy to frame the wrong guy.

The discussions over whether or not this man should be lionized as a hero are honestly not as relevant as the comfort with which people are going to drop the conspiracy theory they would have been fully committed to if this man's politics turned out to be nuts. The ease with which the userbase of this website switches between realities based on whether or not they confirm their biases is really alarming. I just hope people understand how weird it is to claim a random person is 100% going to be framed by the FBI on one day, and then drop that by the next day when it becomes clear that the person being "framed" is the exact kind of communist you had hoped.

[variousqueerthings]

being trans in the UK right now is so very strange, you're able to go to a mainstream high-budget arts and/or science institution and find beautiful acknowledgements of your history and respectful inclusion of current lives and projects and politics that's based in well-researched community-minded testimony and statistics, but then the government and healthcare industry is all but openly admitting that they want you to disappear off the face of the earth, based largely on the ravings of one terminally online author, a few disgraced academics and comics, and their far-right antisemitic misogynist racist american evangelist friends on a site run by a billionaire megalomaniac. i go to some positive visibility celebrating bodily autonomy that makes it seem like we're moving forwards on the same day as the cass report is released and everything is on fire

[deancasforcutie]

doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them