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sleepy-shutin · 2 years

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Rating a “DID Faker Symptoms” List

while waiting to post the simplification of that paper on DID, i want to go over this, because it’s pretty funny. i found it on r/fakedisordercringe a while ago, and FDC is notorious for spreading misinformation on DID, even when presented with peer-reviewed evidence that they are wrong. so i want to talk about some of these, and whether the ratings this person gave them are accurate or not. then i’ll count how many times i agree and disagree, and rate how accurate i’d find this source based on that.

‘body’ is under 16: Yeah, this can be sketchy considering the community has a lot of minors getting roped into DID spaces without fully knowing what it even is and being incredibly misinformed, which isn’t helped because other people keep making incredibly misinformed twitter threads about DID that cite no sources and show that the person has clearly not read anything about DID, ever, and is not qualified to be making a thread like that. i agree with this rating.

another disorder present in only one alter: This one is a bit nuanced, because alters can present as having a disorder that the brain/body does not have, but that’s not the same as actually having the disorder. this is a documented thing, where one woman was legally blind for many years before getting her DID diagnosis, iirc. but integration and DID treatments gradually lessened this. this can happen because someone may have seen something they ‘weren’t supposed to see’, or something they wish they didn’t see, thus splitting off an alter who is blind. overall, disagree with this rating.

Dream SMP alters: i’d probably move this up to a yellow rating, i don’t see how DSMP fictives are too much more different from other fictives, however many very young and incredibly misinformed teenagers claim to have DID with no research or understanding of DID and 500 DSMP fictives. overall, disagree with the rating.

alter counts: i’m condensing this into one section because there’s a bit to talk about here, actually. the actual average amounts of alters i’ve seen in DID literature is around 10-20, so 10+ alters being in the yellow range makes absolutely no sense if you’ve done any research on DID at all. the larger amounts, with 100+ and 1,000+ aren’t actually things i’d consider someone to be malingering or mistaking for something else unless other factors are considered, such as age, the amount of research they’ve done into the disorder, how their system functions, how they talk about their system, etc, all of which are not things you can really glean from just glancing at someone’s profile, or a screenshot of their profile. overall, i strongly disagree with this rating.

system with no trauma: honestly, this is a syscourse topic and it’s up to you. i’m neutral on this rating.

undiagnosed/self diagnosed: i honestly don’t see the difference between these two. if you’re undiagnosed but claiming to have DID, are you not self-diagnosed? unless you’re being very literal and saying that you’re not diagnosed on paper, but are receiving treatment for the disorder, but in that sense, you’re still diagnosed. regardless, i’m someone who believes in a well-informed and well-researched self-diagnosis based in more than just tiktoks, twitter threads and youtube videos. i’m talking reading actual books, actual papers, etc. if you don’t do things like that, i would consider your self diagnosis misinformed and potentially inaccurate. you really need to do the hard work and the hard research into DID and make sure you understand the disorder before self-diagnosing if you cannot get to a professional. overall, i disagree with this rating, and think at most it deserves a yellow.

totally blanking out while switching: i’m confused on this one, honestly. i’ve seen and experienced plenty of different types of switches, and blanking out is only one kind of switch someone may experience for a variety of reasons. this shouldn’t be on the list as a faker symptom at all. disagree with this rating strongly.

all alters are fictives from animes the host likes: i myself would probably give this a harsher rating, honestly. you can’t have *only* fictives, and if you use the argument of fusion, i don’t think you understand how fusion works. plus, this is something that too many misinformed people fall into when inaccurately self-diagnosing with DID and misunderstanding it as ‘fictives disorder’ or misunderstand splitting as ‘this media is comforting, i should have this character as an alter’ when that’s not entirely how it works. overall, i agree with the rating, it’s sketchy.

fictives that are real life serial killers: first of all, get your info straight, it’s “factives” for alters of real-life people. i only really have a problem with this and consider it sketchy if these factives are actively identifying with their source material, as in refusing to change their name and using pictures of said real-life serial killers as “faceclaims” or something. overall, i agree with this rating.

stating that they have both DID and OSDD in the same sentence: i find it very funny that it’s under the red rating, which is “almost only ever seen in fakers/way too rare to be seen all the time”. not only have i not seen someone say this before (though my experiences aren’t universal), this isn’t something that can happen at all, so it’s not rare and is 200% a sign of someone who is extremely misinformed and needs to do more research before saying they’re a dissociative system of some kind, lol. the only thing i can think of is maybe some form of a language barrier is confusing the person and causing them to think it’s the same thing or something similar in a legitimate case, and someone who is just poorly misinformed on the differences between the two in a non-legitimate case. overall, agree with this rating.

non-human alters: non-human alters are completely normal for DID. i agree with this rating.

“littles” cursing in every sentence: oh i forgot that child parts were actual, real life children and not dissociated parts of a fragmented consciousness in an often times adult body, and thus have the physical mental capacities of adults while internally identifying and sometimes behaving as children. it is anti-recovery and increases barriers between alters to force child parts to act like actual children when they aren’t/don’t want to be treated that way. disagree with this rating, strongly.

note that an immature child part behaving like an adult is different from a child part who is actually mature, and that, once again, child parts are not actual children.

littles who totally understand the concepts of pronouns and neopronouns: once again, child parts are not literal children, they are dissociated parts of a whole, fragmented consciousness in an often times adult body and can very well be fully capable of understanding pronouns and neopronouns, lol. isn’t it, like, third grade when you start learning what a pronoun is? things like “i”, “me”, “you”, “she”, “he”, “they”, etc? so in that case, wouldn’t it make more sense for child parts to understand pronouns since it’s more fresh in their minds as children? shut up, FDC. overall, disagree with this rating.

ridiculous pronouns: who cares what pronouns someone is using? disagree with this rating.

“DID is more common than autism, depression and OCD combined”: i haven’t heard someone say this specifically, but it is the sign of someone who is misinformed to say something like this, and is a sign that they need to do more research into the statistics of DID prevalence, because from what i’ve seen, most of the statistics people cite come from studies done in clinical populations, and not the general population. however, i disagree with this rating and would probably give it a yellow myself.

blind/deaf alters with a sighted and hearing body: i just discussed this in a previous section, but this can actually happen and there are good reasons for it. this doesn’t mean that these alters have the same experiences, especially because the origins are psychological in nature, if they’re experiencing the symptoms in their body as well, but this does happen, though i don’t know how common it is, so i can’t provide a super accurate rating myself. overall, disagree with this rating and would probably give it a yellow at most.

“not an RP, we have DID”: i’d probably give this a yellow rating personally. not the inherent sign of someone who is malingering or mistaken, but can be a sign of someone who is incredibly misinformed and perpetuating said misinformation and anti-recovery rhetoric through the idea that fictives have to identify with source heavily, or have to have a strong attachment to it or something. overall, disagree with the rating, i’d give it a yellow at most.

hating on FDC: LOL. if you hate a subreddit for being misinformed on a highly stigmatized disorder where misinformation on it is everywhere, you’re a faker. yeah, gonna go ahead and totally agree with this one, sure, lmfao. disagree.

every alter is LGBT for some reason: i don’t even know why this is a symptom of faking. entire systems can be LGBT, or start out with more mixed genders/sexualities, then as they integrate/fuse and heal over time, become more predominantly cishet or LGBT, like?? disagree with this rating.

talking about sexual experiences with LITTLES: once again, littles aren’t actual children, and many littles have intense sexual trauma and may be hypersexual as a result, where having healthy sexual experiences either by themselves or with other trusted people can be very healing and healthy for that part. this is not unusual in DID treatment, and i’ve heard plenty from diagnosed people with DID who have been in treatment for quite a while about how child parts can be sexual parts as well. DID and how the brain processes trauma doesn’t care about morality or whether it’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to have a sexual child part, because when the person was originally being sexually abused as a child, that is how they were processing that trauma; as them, as a small child, being sexually abused by an adult. in fact, shaming a child part for being (hyper)sexual due to their trauma does more harm to that alter and that person with DID’s recovery and health than it does to allow that alter to explore themselves, reclaim their body and their trauma, and recover. overall, disagree strongly with this rating, though i will note that going in-depth and generally being incredibly weird about the sexual experiences of these parts, talking about that part’s experiences without their permission, or going more in-depth than would be needed for a conversation about sharing experiences and educating would be suspect. overall, disagree with this rating strongly.

art theft: dear FDC, art theft is not a sign of faking DID. disagree.

racial stereotypes of POC alters: this is another one that’s complex, because white people don’t have the experiences of POC, and because of that, may have an alter that appears as a POC in the inner world but acts very stereotyped because that white person with DID has racism they haven’t unpacked. overall, conflicted on this rating, but leaning towards disagree. it can be a sign of valid DID in a person who is racist or was racist at the time that alter split. disagree.

catching a switch on camera: i don’t see this as an inherent sign of faking, but if you’re constantly doing it, it’s definitely suspect considering it’s a highly glamorized, dramatized and publicized part of DID. i agree with this rating overall.

TL;DR

i counted how many times i agreed (6 out of 23), disagreed (17 out of 23), (removing the subjective syscourse question), and came to the conclusion that this faker symptoms list is more inaccurate than it is accurate, with roughly 3/4 of this list inaccurate, compared to the 1/4 that is accurate.

overall, i give this source rating of 26%. pretty misinformed, with some small nuggets of somewhat accurate information, but not a reliable source by a long shot.

#-post #-accuracy ratings #-fdc #fakedisordercringe #syscourse

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firebrands · 4 years

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the square root of infinity | stevetony

2.7k, established relationship, first fight angst | on ao3 | for @maguna-stxrk

***

Tony finds out with his hands deep in JARVIS’ code. Former-JARVIS, actual-JARVIS, he hasn’t really decided on what to refer to the mess of numbers of letters that formed his former AI, and now, well—Vision, too. It’s all a mess, really, and Tony wanted something simple to do with his hands, minimal focus, low-risk.

He should have known better, really. Nothing about him, his work, his life, has ever been low-risk.

It’s a command from Steve with a privacy protocol. Search, identify, and surveil Sergeant James “Bucky” Barnes, also known as The Winter Soldier. Missing, found, and missing again as of six months ago. Tony frowns at the monitor. He knows he hasn’t read it wrong, but can’t believe it; he reads it again.

Somehow, in the span of time of Steve coming back from Washington, of them settling in together, he’d done this. He’d asked JARVIS to do this for him, and keep it from Tony.

Tony leans back against his chair. “FRI,” he says.

His new AI chirps to life. “Boss?”

“Gimme everything JARVIS found on this.”

“It’s on your phone now, boss.” In front of him, a hologram materializes as well, displaying hundreds of photos, grainy and filtered, and copies of reports on sightings. Tony stands up, takes a step back and frowns some more. He opens his mouth a few times, borne of his need to verbalize even without anyone listening; he’s angry. He’s more shocked than angry, but the anger is there, low and simmering.

Beneath it, though, is a grain of doubt: Why? Why did he keep it hidden? Especially now—after all the truth came spilling out of them, crystallizing into something Tony held dear. And after all Steve had said, about keeping secrets, about trust. He briefly considers asking FRIDAY to print it all out, just so he can throw the sheaf of paper in front of Steve and demand: what the fuck, but he’s better now, more mature. Or so he likes to tell himself.

So instead, he walks to the penthouse and finds Steve reading.

Tony clears his throat.

Steve looks up. “Hey,” he says, setting his book down. “You done working?”

Tony smiles, pained and tight. “So,” he says, sitting at the foot of the bed. “Bucky.”

Steve’s eyebrows meet, looking concerned. “What about him?”

Tony shuts his eyes and counts backward from five. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

Steve inches closer to him and rests his hand on Tony’s knee. Tony doesn’t open his eyes.

“I didn’t want to worry you,” Steve says very quietly.

Tony’s eyes fly open, the anger now boiling over. “Oh is that it?” He asks sarcastically. “So you decided to use JARVIS—without my permission, to look for him?”

Steve’s mouth works, and he looks genuinely shocked. “You said I could talk to JARVIS.”

“That’s not the point!” He pushes Steve’s hand off him and stands. “Why would you keep that a secret?”

“I—I didn’t,” Steve says haltingly. “I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to know if JARVIS could find him, but I knew it was almost impossible anyway, so there was no real point—”

“If there was no point,” Tony says, voice lowering, “then why’d you do it?”

“Tony,” Steve stands now, too, tries to reach out and touch Tony’s elbow, to disentangle Tony’s arms that have crossed over his chest on their own volition. “He’s my best friend. I’m worried about him. I just thought it was something I should do myself.”

Tony nods, not really listening. His head is swimming with what he thinks could be actual reasons why Steve had kept this from him. A tangled mess of fear and insecurity, then shock at his ability to be aware of it. Is this maturity? He doesn’t like it much. Better if it stayed Steve’s fault—and it is Steve’s fault, it is. But maybe Tony doesn’t need to work himself up like this. But then again, Tony’s already worked up. “Stop,” Tony grinds out.

So Steve stops, a foot away from Tony, looking more scared than Tony’s ever seen him.

“I’m going to go.”

“Don’t.”

Tony looks up at Steve. He hadn’t even realized he’d looked away. Steve takes a deep breath, closes the space between them, and takes Tony’s hands in his.

Tony sighs.

Steve threads their fingers together, squeezes Tony’s palms. “Hey.”

“Hi.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Want to say more than one syllable, maybe?”

A joke? Now? Tony feels his frown deepen.

“No.”

“Is this a fight?”

Tony looks up at him. “A fight means you don’t think you should be sorry.”

“Now, hold on a second,” Steve says, a small frown beginning to form on his face. Barely perceptible, if you didn’t know the signs. “I already explained why—”

“And that’s supposed to make it okay?”

“Where is this coming from?” Steve asks, letting go of Tony’s hands, which means he’s mad too, which drives Tony insane.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“There’s no need to raise your tone—”

“Don’t fucking use your de-escalation tactics on me.” Tony hisses, turns on his heel, and walks out the door. He gives himself the satisfaction of slamming it shut.

***

The next few days are filled with small acts of penitence: a cup of coffee on the bedside table when Tony wakes, a sandwich in the workshop, a completed report for a day-old mishap. It’s on Thursday that Tony’s heart finally softens. Over nothing, really, just a small doodle on his desk. He realizes, in that moment, that of all his achievements, perhaps learning to understand Steve Rogers should rank highest. Right up there with being understood by him, too.

Tony’s lying in bed, reading a report on his tablet, when Steve peeks in.

“Hey.” He sounds tentative.

Tony sighs, sets his tablet aside, and takes off his glasses. “Well, come in.”

Steve’s barely able to hide his grin, and nearly bowls Tony over when he hugs him. “Hi,” Steve says, burying his nose against Tony’s neck.

“Hello to you too, you overgrown labrador,” Tony laughs, pushing Steve away a little lest he be crushed under all combined weight of supersoldier and three bowls of pasta that Clint prepared for dinner.

“I missed you,” Steve says, hugging Tony closer to him. He looks up at Tony, resting his chin right on Tony’s sternum. “Was that our first fight?”

Tony snorts. “Unlikely to be our last,” he says.

“Hey,” Steve chides, leaning up and brushing Tony’s nose with his. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. Anyway,” Tony leans closer, brushes their lips together. “Make it up to me.”

Steve arches an eyebrow.

“Don’t start,” Tony warns.

Steve huffs out a laugh, tips them over until they’re lying down, and makes it up to him.

***

As a man of science, it behooves Tony to conduct experiments and to test hypotheses.

First, identify the problem.

Second, conduct research.

Third, develop a hypothesis: follow if / then structure.

Fourth, test through experiments: ensure factors are varied one at a time.

Fifth and final, draw a conclusion.

Tony’s tapping the tip of a screwdriver against his bottom lip as he thinks, and then two strong arms wrap around his waist and just like that, the problem has identified itself.

(One frustrating blind spot in Tony’s life: relationships. Which isn’t to say he hasn’t tried to make sense of them, sped read through self-help books and trawled through Reddit. Unlike everything else, research pales in comparison to experience, and there’s only so much he can do to make sure this one precious thing in his life is perfect.)

“Busy?” Steve presses a small kiss on the back of Tony’s neck. Tony can barely suppress a shiver.

He wants to say, I was, until you showed up. It doesn’t just apply to this moment. That fact shouldn’t hurt.

Instead, Tony says: “Yeah, kinda.”

“Okay,” Steve says easily, pulling away. He comes back to press a quick kiss to Tony’s cheek. “See you later?”

“Yup,” Tony says, and okay. Maybe he needs to spend a day or two really figuring out who the problem is, here. (It’s him. He knows this. He’s always the problem.)

Two days later, Tony settles on having to review related literature. In this case, this means sitting alone in the workshop as he relives every moment when Steve was distracted. Was that a sign? In a brief moment of clarity, Tony asks: “Fri, am I crazy?”

“Signs point to no, boss. But I can pull up recent results on the search engines?”

“I’d rather not hear what the general public thinks, thanks,” Tony says, sighing. He rests his face in his hands. It’s not like he meant to think of this—what is wrong with his brain, that the intrusive thoughts come in the form of the few moments he’d asked Steve what was on his mind, only to be brushed off?

What did that mean?

Did it matter?

Step three: if that was a sign, then there was a problem.

If that wasn’t a sign, then there wasn’t a problem.

If Tony didn’t figure this out, then there would definitely be a problem.

This isn’t how a hypothesis is meant to sound. Tony’s a terrible scientist.

“Fri, call Bruce.”

“Tony?” Bruce’s voice is rough. He sounds annoyed.

“Hey, seven PhDs, how do I form a proper hypothesis?”

“Fuck you, Stark.” The line clicks off.

Tony turns his wrist, checks his watch. Three AM? Figures.

He stretches out his back. “Friday,” he says, standing up. “The search functions for Barnes.”

“On it, boss.”

“Atta girl.”

***

Try as Tony might—and he’s trying, which in itself feels like a failure, because Tony stark does or does not and there is no need to attempt—he feels like something has shifted between them, and he doesn’t know how to fix it.

Maybe he’s just making it all up in his head. That’s the easy solution, isn’t it? And that’s usually the answer: start with the easiest answer and work your way up. He can already see Natasha rolling her eyes at him. Maybe the solution is to stop treating your relationship like it’s quantum theory.

Steve’s hand is on his lower back, steering him inside a restaurant. He thinks only of what Steve said, all those weeks ago: I had to do it myself.

Tony wants to argue, right this moment. But how can he? It’s awful that they can be so alike. The only reason he keeps his mouth shut is because he knows that Tony’s used that argument before. Maybe this is growth, to know when to back down from a fight. Or to avoid one totally.

Steve reaches over the table, brushes his fingers over Tony’s wrist. “You okay?”

There are a lot of answers to that. Tony settles on the truth. “Not really.”

Steve’s brow creases with worry. “What’s wrong?”

Again: an infinite multiverse of answers to answer a question that simple. With this, Tony does struggle for a moment, and the next words are much harder to say—they almost feel caught in his throat, like a lump of meat. “I don’t know.”

“You can tell me anything, you know,” Steve says gently. So gentle, it almost breaks him; Tony doesn’t deserve this. Steve doesn’t deserve this.

“I know,” Tony says, and this is him lying through his teeth, and this is what he’s good at, and maybe this is why he’ll never know how relationships are. It’s a trust issue, probably. He doesn’t know if the issue is with Steve, or with himself. “Don’t worry about it.”

Tony tries harder, now: smiles more, eats with gusto. He knocks Steve’s thigh with his knee, looks up at him from under his lashes. This is what life is like for Tony Stark: it’s acting. He knows the approximations to get his point across. As their evening goes on, the small wrinkle on Steve’s forehead smooths out, and maybe Tony wishes he wasn’t so good at pretending.

Maybe he wishes that Steve read him better.

***

The moment of epiphany is often described as transcendental.

This one hits like a ton of bricks—literally, because Tony does know what that feels like, and the suit is shock proof, sure, but that shit still fucking hurts, and even in moments of epiphany, somehow he still manages to go off on a tangent. The point remains: Steve’s hand is on his hip, and they’re in bed, and epiphanies usually equate clarity, peace.

Tony freezes up.

“Tony?” Steve murmurs, sliding his hand up Tony’s side.

“I’m sorry,” Tony says, sitting up. “I know I’m being difficult.”

“I didn’t say you were.” Steve sits up beside him, rests his hand on Tony’s shoulder, and turns Tony to look at him. “Who said you were being difficult?”

“Me, I’m saying it,” Tony says. Panic is beginning to bubble in his belly, slowly rising up his throat. Typical of him to mistake a eureka moment with a panic attack. Par for the fucking course for Tony Stark. “I’m being difficult right now.”

“No you’re not,” Steve says, rubbing up and down his arms. “Tony. Look at me.”

Tony breathes out through his mouth, then in through his nose. Steve tips his chin up and meets his gaze.

“Here are the variables,” Tony breathes out, is afraid of what he’ll say next, his brain is fogged over and full of static. “I love you, and I don’t know what to do with that.”

Steve takes a deep breath, takes Tony’s face in his hands. “Here’s a constant,” he whispers, breath warm on Tony’s cheek. “I love you. I love you. You, Tony Stark. I love you.” He kisses Tony, hard and close lipped, more aggressive reminder than affection.

“Okay,” Tony says, because there’s a wild part of him that still thinks—there was a problem, there was a problem and if this is love, then what comes next? If this is constant, then what variable will arrive to change all of that?

Steve kisses Tony again, almost desperate, this time. “Is this about Bucky?” Tony sucks in a breath at the question, horrified at being discovered. Steve hums, then he runs one hand down Tony’s back, up his arm, down his side. A reminder of his presence. Tony is suddenly grateful for it.

“And if it is?” he murmurs.

“Tony,” and somehow, Steve sounds fond, which throws a wrench in this whole debacle, and deep in the recesses of Tony’s brain, rationality begins to take root. “He’s my best friend. You’re the love of my life.”

Tony breathes.

“Did you hear me? You. You’re the love of my life. Please don’t make me compare,” Steve huffs out a small laugh, and it warms Tony all over, like sunshine peeking through the clouds after a strong rain. “And maybe you don’t believe me just yet,” Steve touches their foreheads together, then rubs his nose against Tony’s, the affection plain and chaste. It makes Tony feel more loved than he’s ever felt in his life—not that there were many moments to compare against, but still.

“I feel a little crazy,” Tony says, finding it in himself to smile up at Steve.

“A little crazy in love?” Steve asks, grinning.

“I can’t believe you just made a Beyonce reference. In the middle of my panic attack.”

Steve bites his bottom lip, a poor attempt at stopping himself from laughing. Tony flicks his forehead. “Say it again,” Tony says, and his smile still feels a little wobbly, but it’s a step.

“Crazy in Love?” Steve asks, pulling Tony close and wrapping his arms around Tony’s waist.

It’s an odd angle, and eventually Steve shifts to lift Tony up onto his lap. “Ass,” Tony says. “You know what I meant.”

Steve smiles again, right before pressing a kiss to Tony’s shoulder. “Step one,” he says. “The problem is you’re afraid I don’t love you. Step two: find out how to show you that I do.” He pauses, and Tony feels breathless as he presses another kiss to Tony’s bare skin. “Step three. Hypothesis? If I show Tony I love him all the time, then eventually he’ll believe me.”

“Sounds like a shaky hypothesis,” Tony says, but his voice quivers a little as he says it. He can’t explain how he feels, other than warm in Steve’s embrace.

Steve tuts. “Step four, experimentation. Small gestures, date nights.” Steve rubs Tony’s back as he speaks, and stops to tilt Tony’s head up to face him. “Am I getting this right?”

Tony smiles. “I don’t know, what’s the conclusion?”

Steve wraps his arms around Tony’s waist once more. “You’re here. I’m here. I love you.” He leans up, brushes their lips together. “Is that enough?”

#stony #steve rogers #tony stark #stevetony #(well hello) (sometimes you just want to write something warm and familiar. i thought i'd forgotten how.)#things i write

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sunnylildragun · 5 years

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Merging Souls

Day threr of three of the Bumbleby week! This one came in a bit of a rush, but I wrote it with a lot of love ^-^

"So... you're telling us that you already bought the ring but hasn't proposed yet?" Weiss asked before sipping the wine in her glass. He other hand was intertwined with Ilia's on the table, exhibiting her silver wedding ring. Both women were staring at Blake with disbelief, what made the tallest amongst them sigh.

"Listen, it's not that I don't want to... I just..." the woman sighed. "I'm not sure about how to do it. Would it be good to make a speech? Should I take her out for dinner? Or should it be something more intimate, like a candlelit dinner? Or are these too cheesy?"

"I don't think she would mind it, to be honest." Ilia voiced her opinion. "She would say yes if you proposed on the battlefield, sweaty and bloody and gross."

"Like you did to me?" Weiss nudged her wife playfully.

"You know my ways, sweetheart heart." Ilia pecked white haired woman's cheek.

"First of all, please get a room." Blake said with a smirk, just before sighing. "Secondly, a few years ago she told me marriage was a huge deal to her! I don't want to disappoint her."

Weiss reached out for Blake's hand over the table. "Blake, she loves you. She loves you a lot, soulmates level of a lot. I don't think anything you do regarding asking her to marry you could ever disappoint her."

"Yeah!" Ilia agreed. "Besides... I think she was talking about the wedding itself when she said it's a big deal to her. Not about how either of you is gonna propose."

The ravenette remained silent for a moment, and then nodded in agreement. "I think you're right. Both of you."

That made Weiss smirk. "Of course we are. We're the voices of reason in your life."

"Sure," the cat faunus rolled her eyes.

"Hey! What's that supposed to mean?!"

"It means you should recall how I was the one who helped you through your countless gay panics when you and Ilia were still in the 'is she flirting or just being nice?' phase."

"I- you- how dare- the nerve of-" the CEO blushed so hard there's no shade of red to describe it. "Fuck you, Belladonna."

"Nah, that's for Yang to do." Blake grinned at their friends' disgusted expressions. "That reminds me... I should probably head back home. It was nice talking to you and having some wine, but Yang's winter break from Beacon starts today, and I wanna celebrate with her."

Blake hugged them goodbye and went out of the diner that was by the Senate, where she worked. She still didn't believe how far she had been able to take the Faunus Rights cause. In a few years, she was able to have laws in protection of her people approved by her fellow Senators. Now any kind of discrimination towards faunus was punishable. There were also separate classes on Faunus History, Faunus Literature and Faunus Rights, from kindergarten to the academies.

She hadn't done things only for the faunus, though. Blake reviewed various projects on the reconstruction of the city, helped founding an effective police force to avoid crime lords such as Torchwick from rising again. She also suggested the building of the Municipal Vale Library, which is planned to be a safe haven to many students, researchers and bookworms. Blake has a bold dream for it, and wanted it to have more books than one would be able to read in a lifetime.

She thought about it as she rode her truck back home. As she stopped in a red light, thoughts about Yang came to her mind. If what Ilia and Weiss said was true, then Blake wouldn't be able to hold herself back when she got home. She would propose to Yang right then and there, and kiss her girlfriend- fiancée by then- as if that was the last time she would do so. And then they would do it all over their apartment to celebrate their engagement.

Blake's eyes finally found the building they lived in. It wasn't nothing too high class, but it was still considerably big. As heroes of Remnant they receive an ungodly amount of privileges and gifts, ones that she found very unnecessary, but accepted anyway. Most of them she and Yang donated to people who actually needed the money that could come from selling them.

They didn't need expensive things. They just needed the world to be safe.

Blake parked her car in her spot, and couldn't help but notice Bumblebee 2.0 parked in its own spot as well. Yang said she would work on some students files until a little bit later that evening, as she was just back from a training trip. Then what in the world was her motorcycle doing there? Had something happen? Probably. Was she suddenly feeling ill? No... she would tell Blake if she were.

The only way to find out was asking, the woman figured. She walked to the elevator, entering it and pressing the button to the eighth floor. A person entered as well, a man named Robin who lived in the sixth floor. He was a fox faunus, and had chatted with Blake some times. He used to be a robber, doing his own kind of justice, but not quite into the White Fang. Being caught in the middle gave him a few scars, which he wore proudly even as he settled down with his wife.

"Senator." Robin smiled at Blake, nodding respectfully.

"Greetings, Robin. And I told you already, there's no need for these formalities. Out of the Senate Building, I'm just Blake."

"It's force of habit. It's just so common to see you on TV, giving speeches, that I forget that you're actually my two floors up neighbor."

Blake chuckled at that. "Well, you should get used to it."

The elevator ringed, making both of them drop their ears. "Geez, they should really make this shit stop doing that noise."

"Yeah... pretty disrespectful." Blake agreed as she rubbed her cat ears. "I'll try to talk them into it. Again. For the thousandth time in six years."

"I believe it's my time to go, though. See you around, Blake."

"See you."

Soon enough, Blake was in her own floor. As she reached her apartment door, she could feel the unique smell of Yang's grilled salmon. It made her stomach growl like an angry Sabyr, which prompted her to rush to the door. She fumbled with the keys for some seconds, saliva almost spilling from her mouth. Yang knew the effect seafood had in Blake, what made the short haired woman wonder what was the occasion.

Just as she closed the door, a body collided with her own. She was caught in a tight, warm hug that could only be given by the sunshine of her life, Yang Xiao Long. She hugged back, head burying into her girlfriend's shoulder. Blake took in all the warmth she could, enjoying the moment.

"Welcome home, dear." Yang said in her cat ears, kissing the space between the two.

"Hi." was Blake's muffled answer.

They pulled away for a moment, and then their lips met. Yang's trip had taken some days and there was no words to express how much Blake missed her. Missed her lips. Missed her arms. Missed her as a whole. So she pushed her girlfriend to their sofa, making her sit there. Then, she sat on the blonde's lap amd they started kissing again. It was a mess of damcing tongues, of biting teeth and of light moans.

Yang's hands were already unbuttoning Blake's dress shirt as the shorter rolled her hips agains her. The groan that came from the brawler was almost a growl, feral and raw as she pulled away from their kiss- with teeth pulling her lower lip- to attack Blake's collarbone. She kissed and sucked and bit, and there were hands on her hair. Her hear was soon guided by impatient hands to the ravenette's neck.

Yang licked the column, taking a moan from Blake's lips. She then proceeded to bite and suck on her girlfriend's pulse point, as more room was given for her to explore. She felt a hand pulling her blond locks lightly, and it triggered something in her. The hands that were once moving with Blake's hips were soon exploring her back and her stomach and only some times- teasingly- grazing her neglected breasts.

"Please." Blake's voice was wavering as Yang scratched her stomach. "Take me, Yang."

"You gonna have to wait till after dinner, Blakey." came the raspy response.

"What is so important about dinner that can't wait?"

"I haven't eaten with you for days now, babe." she sucked on the other's ear, and than bit it. "I really miss having a quiet moment with you."

"You could be eating me right now. Isn't that even better?"

"It sure is. But I bet you don't wanna miss on the salmon I cooked."

"Ugh, I hate it when you do that."

"Do what?"

"Tease me."

"You actually love it, don't lie to yourself."

"Let's just get this dinner over with."

"Okay. You're gonna love it, I promise."

Blake got off of Yang and then helped her up. She didn't even bother buttoning her shirt up again, and swayed her hips on the way to the kitchen. Yang started the show, then she sure as hell will have it to the end.

They sat on the table, face to face. Their plates were already served, and Blake dived in as soon as she looked at her fish. She could feel Yang's eyes on her, could tell she had a smirk on those delicious lips. But Blake couldn't care less that instant. It was her and her salmon. Girlfriend could wait.

"How were things with Weiss and Ilia?"

"Good." Blake answered after swallowing. "The two of them are progressing well with their project of dissolving the Schnee Dust Company. Weiss wants it to become something else and she said that to do so, she must destroy it from the inside to build it back up."

"Sounds cool. What about their married life? Are they past the honey moon phase?"

"Will they ever be?" Blake shot back, making Yang laugh.

"Yeah, I don't think so." she smiled. "You should really take a look at your napkin, though."

"Huh?" Blake was confused for a moment, but did as she was told. She started unfolding the napkin, and a metallic object fell to the ground. Just as she was about to lean down to get it, Yang shot up from her chair and grabbed it. She kneeled before Blake, holding an engagement ring with her right hand. "Yang-"

"Listen, Blake. Please. Or I may never be able to say what I want to say. We've known each other for twelve years now. During all this time, we've been through a lot together. We cried together, we laughed together, we hurt together. We rebuilt ourselves, and then rebuilt what we had with one another. We defeated our biggest demon together... and then we defeated the world's worst nightmare together. You're to me, Blake Belladonna, what no one else ever was. You're the one who came back. You're the one who stayed, even after slipping from my fingers. You're the one who raises my spirits. You're the one I can't see myself without. You're the one I love. And that's why I ask you here and now. Blake Belladonna, will you be my wife?"

Blake's jaw dropped and tears started falling from her eyes. The ring was marvelous, sculpted in black metal and gold. There was a yellow gem on the top, a shade that matched Blake's eyes- and Yang's aura. It reminded her of the engagement ring she had bought to propose to Yang.

Right.

She was going to propose, too.

She started laughing involuntarily, tears of joy spilling from her eyes. Yang looked at her in confusion. Just... what was she laughing about?

"Uh... why are you laughing?"

Blake reached in the pocket of her skirt. She took a velvety black box from it and kneeled down before the blonde.

"Yang Xiao Long... there are no words to describe the love I feel for you. It transcends time, it transcends our weak and breakable bodies, it transcends everything. My soul is yous, and yous only. My whole being falls in love with you every single day, over and over again. You complement me in a way no one ever har, and that I thought no one would ever be able to. So yes, I wanna marry you. What about you, though? Would you do me the immense honor of being my wife?"

"Yes!" Yang shouted, hugging Blake and knocking both of them to the ground. "A million times yes!"

They kissed again, this time sweet and slow. There was no desperation in the way Yang's prosthetic fingers traced the scar on her left side. So many years ago, those wounds pulled them apart, just to tie them back together. And today, they started a new phase in their lives. A new step into their futures, a whole of possibilities for their eternity.

#bumbleby #yang xiao long #blake belladonna #rwby #bmblbweek #bumblebyweek

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eeveelutionsforequality · 6 years

Note

@vape, if you look into the hunger strike, the only reason they break it (& have someone else take their place iirc) is if they’re at risk of permanently damaging their body. when the article i read was written some of them hadnt eat in two weeks and couldnt even walk?? so, yeah, no, it looks to me like the people bbqing are just being cruel :/

[Quick Sidenote: It's all from like 2017 anyway so... I wrote this for nothing tbh.]

Post this is referring to: http://eeveelutionsforequality.tumblr.com/post/177108827819/otherwise-called-squidpope

Firstly, you're not going to die after only two weeks, it's not that dramatic - if they genuinely are experiencing extreme symptoms after only fourteen days, they either have an underlying health condition or they aren't drinking enough water. But what do I know, I've only spent the last few years periodically starving myself and researching how to starve myself.

"At the age of 74 and already slight of build, Mahatma Gandhi, the famous nonviolent campaigner for India's independence, survived 21 days of total starvation while only allowing himself sips of water."

"Reports of the 1981 hunger strike by political prisoners against the British presence in Northeast Ireland indicate that 10 individuals died after periods of between 46 and 73 days without food."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-can-a-person-sur/

"During his protest, Gandhi ate absolutely no food and only took sips of water for 21 days, and survived. What extraordinary about this case is the fact that Gandhi was very lean when he started his hunger-strike, thus not having much energy reserve from the outset."

"In a 1997 editorial in the British Medical Journal, Peel briefly reviewed the available literature regarding human starvation. Generally, it appears as though humans can survive without any food for 30-40 days, as long as they are properly hydrated. Severe symptoms of starvation begin around 35-40 days, and as highlighted by the hunger strikers of the Maze Prison in Belfast in the 1980s, death can occur at around 45 to 61 days."

http://blogs.plos.org/obesitypanacea/2011/05/13/the-science-of-starvation-how-long-can-humans-survive-without-food-or-water/

As all of those say - lacking water is what will shorten your survivability (to anywhere from a few days to two weeks).

They ain't dying, they're tapping out because the motivation to do what they're doing isn't overpowering the discomfort of not eating.

Which brings me on to my next point - hunger strikes are supposed to be for situations that you would literally starve yourself to death for. They are a last resort implemented by those who have no other options for protest, who's movement and voice are so shackled that the only thing that they can do is not do something... ultimately dying for future generations, or forcing your captor/oppressor to force feed you in a stark display of their cruelty.

"A hunger strike is appropriate when due process is unavailable to the victims of injustice. When it is invoked by relatively privileged citizens, and when the processes of law are working, the tactic is poorly chosen. It implies a false equivalence [...]"

"When the spectacle of fasting is used in a context where people of equally good will can and do disagree, it also signals disregard for the value of disagreement, reason, research, evidence, debate, and persuasion. The tactic declares that the only solution to disagreement between members of a community in a lawful society is to physically threaten the bodies on one side."

These people are tapping out because they aren't willing to die for this cause... and they've chosen the wrong form of protest, intentionally, because they are trying to intimidate and cause a spectacle.

Hunger strikes are suicide, they are self-destruction, they are a tool for battling when the only thing that you can physically do is nothing at all.

Hunger strikes aren't for rich kids who think that they're freedom fighters against a fucking university. Hunger strikes aren't for when you undemocraticly want to force your incredibly upper-class and comfortable university to implement things that haven't yet gone through the proper channels and were only voted on by a specially selected fraction of students.

"Yale has declined to begin bargaining while it awaits a reply to a request for review by the NLRB. The university maintains that graduate students are first and foremost students, not employees, but that if the students are to decide on unionization, that decision should be made by all graduate students, not just those in the eight "micro-unit" departments. These represent under 10 percent of Yale graduate students, and hail from carefully selected departments, such as sociology, history of art, and history, where organizers felt they had the best chance of winning."

"What is starved in this "fast" is the commitment to principled disagreement in a community dedicated to education. It halts the conversations that knit those who see the world differently into a shared enterprise of learning."

You say that cooking next to the hunger strike is cruel, yet harming yourself directly in front of the office of a man who has not wronged you, but has simply followed the proper processes for having the conversation that you want to have... that's not cruel?

What they are doing is using self-harm and threats of suicide as a manipulation tactic to get their own way, while spitting in the face of people who have used hunger strikes as a form of protest when no other options were available to them. This is the equivalent of slitting your wrist in the bar because you asked somebody if they liked your hair and they didn't answer you quickly enough.

"We must be able to disagree without the threat of violence, self-inflicted or otherwise."

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-the-Yale-Hunger-Strike-Is/240037

The BBQ is not cruel, public self-harm for an elaborate threat, while knowing full well that it's not a cause severe enough to warrant such behaviour, is cruel. If your cause is too stupid and benign to die for, then don't use a suicidal protest tactic... build a fucking placard, you dramatic nitwits. You're not fighting an oppressive government for basic human rights here, you're throwing a strop at your university - and if you're going to utilize self-harm to do that, to try to threaten and intimidate and elicit pity, maybe don't be surprised when there's backlash from people who find such behaviour insulting.

For the record, I'd suggest that the fasters break their fast with a light smoothie, moving on to solid fruits and veggies, instead of attending the BBQ. They also need to drink more water and, since they have no commitment to actually starving, take vitamins.

~ Vape

#Mod Vaporeon

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ellaenchanting · 7 years

Note

Psych student here. I keep hearing a lot about hypnotists using Neuro Linguistic Programming and how it can be used in trancey situations but... From everything I've heard, it's basically pseudoscience. Tumblr doesn't let me link to things in an ask, but there's scholarly articles dating back to the 1980's saying that. (Journal of Counseling Psychology , Vol 32(4), Oct, 1985. pp. 589-596.) (The Wikipedia page also includes a lot of sources debunking claims made by NLP's creators.) [part 1/2]

Is the hypnokink version of NLP somehow different from that? Or is it more a fantasy/role play? Thanks for everything! [part 2/2]

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH NLP?

Hi! Thank you for your question!

First of all- here is a mandatory psych major announcementfor you: If you are a sophomore orabove, I heavily encourage you to get in some research experience if youhaven’t already. Even if you don’t decide to get a graduate degree inpsychology, this will really help you if you decide to continue in the field inany way.

Also- good for you, psychology major, for caring if psychologyideas from hypnokink are evidence-based!* A psychology major who is not askeptic is a poorly-trained psychology major. You are doing exactly what you’re supposed todo- questioning “common sense” and ideas that are presented to you. In a way,it’s kind of the job of the field to find the holes in “common sense” that noone else is looking for. Good job!

When people in hypnokink talk about neurolinguisticprogramming, they are talking about using a verbal technique (almost a “cheatcode” if you will) as a way of influencing people. This is how salesmen andpick up artists and trainers tend to understand nlp. But nlp actually startedout and was intended to be used as a therapy- often in conjunction withhypnosis. There is no secret,super-effective type of nlp** posted on fetlife somewhere- the nlp we all useis derived from the therapeutic modality.

So- how good is the therapy itself?

If we’re looking to see if a therapy is evidence based, thebest place to look for what is evidence based is the Division 12 website of theAmerican Psychological Association (https://www.div12.org/).(Bookmark this, psychology major!) Under their “psychological treatments” tab,you can search for what are considered the best treatments available forpsychological disorders. You’ll note that nlp is not listed as an evidencebased treatment. (To be fair, nor is hypnotherapy). That’s usually a bad sign.

Let’s move on to litreviews!

If you look further at the few related literature reviews,you’ll see more bad signs. There seems to be very limited evidence basis at allwith more negative than positive results- and the positive results generallyare coming from the lower quality research. I like the one you pointed to anon! Also- This lit review is enjoyably snarky in the discussion section. This one is more modern and seems more robust. Either way, the evidence of effectiveness in any of these is pretty scant. (The officialnlp page on Wikipedia, which you mentioned, is also pretty shady with those damning quotes in the referencesection.) These lit reviews areprimarily based on nlp as a counseling practice, but there’s also negative information heretoo about individual specialized nlp techniques- like eye accessing and using submodalities.

So- if you want to learn an effective therapeutic intervention,you should probably not put too much time or money into nlp training.

However!

Can knowing nlp can be useful for your casual sexyhypnofetishy hypnotists?

Potentially!

Here are some ways:

1. It’s a cultural signifier. Since we (and hypnotistsas a community) have decided that nlp is A Useful Thing, knowing about nlpbecomes valuable. Showing that you know nlp (even a little bit) shows that you’vecracked a book/attended a class and you have sought culturally-valuableknowledge. It gives you authority. For example- I usually ask subjects abouttheir modalities (kinesthetic/auditory/visual/some people throw in others). There’ssome mixed evidence on modalities existing but the most and best evidence saysthat the concept and the theories behind it are inaccurate. But! The communitybelieves in modalities. My subject likely believes in modalities- or at least itis a useful thing to have them believe. If I use their preferred modality, itboth shows that I’m listening to them/respecting them and it shows that I knowenough about hypnosis to be trusted. So- I’ll generally still ask about modalities and use them as though they were real.

2. Theplacebo effect. A lot of what we do as hypnotists is exploit the hell out ofthe placebo effect and people’s pre-existing beliefsabout hypnosis. A spiral, a pocket watch, someone’s eyes- none of these thingshave any power on their own. A bunch of people see my eyes every day andthey’re not hypnotized by them. But they can be very hypnotic when me and mysubject agree that they are! Tricksy language patterns, in my opinion, often worksimilarly to pocket watches or a spirals. Since I am a hypnotist and I am doinga tricksy language thing, the language thing works- in the same way that myeyes work in the correct circumstances. ***

3. NLP isn’t entirely ineffective! NLP was designedby Some Bros watching a bunch of good trained counselors and deciding toreplicate their techniques. Thus, thereis a lot of gently borrowed good counseling technique in nlp! I’ve noticed bothSFBT and ACT tend to teach some ideas that I first saw in nlp- although Isuspect that those may come from a similar parent therapy and not nlp itself.**** Utilizingsomeone’s own language, metaphors, and world concepts (their meta-model, if youwill) when working with them is a good basic therapeutic technique and is utilizedby most evidence- based practices. Outsideof therapy, there’s very strong scientific basis for ideas like subliminal cuesand priming (although some variations- like subliminal messages- have been debunked).Those ideas are somewhat nlp-connected.

4. Feeling like you know a powerful thing is a confidenceboost. Sleezy pick up artists (aka all PUAs) use nlp techniques all the time-some of them successfully. The technique itself may be flimsy, but theconfidence boost of knowing a technique probably boosts their success rate. *****

5. Increase your punning and hypnotist!joke makingability.

So in conclusion:

NLP is a big mix of proven counselingtechniques, wild speculation, great marketing, and somewhat outdated linguistictheories all thrown together and pureed in a blender. (It’s kind of like hypnosisin that way- a big mix of scientifically-based phenomenon, artistry, and bullshit blended together so seamlesslythat it’s hard if not impossible to sort out the active ingredients). There’s afamous book by a therapy skeptic that derides therapy as “the exchange of myths”. In a similar way, there’s a lot of what we do that could be considered exchanging myths in a similar vein. Brainwashing is amyth. The subsconscious (at least the way a lot of people view it) is a myth.NLP is a myth******. That doesn’t mean that these things aren’t fun or sexy or eveneffective in cases. After all, myths are powerful!

But yeah- your scientific skepticism here isvery warranted, anon.

Thank you for asking!

———————————————————————————————————-

*Spoiler: No, they are not!*******

**Except the kind I’m selling!

***And yeah- I admit I’m being pretty simplistic here. I think hypnosis is too complicated to just be a large placebo effect (although I definitely used to believe that)- but the placebo effect is a big component. A lot of what we do is really, really cultural.

****One of the criticisms I read of nlp stated that it’sbasically a grab bag of techniques from a bunch of more evidence-basedtherapies. This may be true. However, that’s also how many licensedprofessionals tend to practice counseling.

*****Although, to be fair, there is evidence that some nlp techniques actually harm rapport- such as over-mirroring/matching words.

******For added discussion- I think a lot of what we do in/with hypnosis is not even something that hypnosis researchers would consider to be actual hypnosis. But- they have no better, more specific and clear descriptions of what hypnosis is and neither do we. It’s a relative experience: If you say that you’re in love, I can’t scientifically validate if you are or are not.

*******OK I kid. But only partially!

#at some point you will probably also become skeptical about therapy and evidence-based practice itself #as well as psychological research #and I'm here to tell you that's normal too #welcome to the paradox!#also- you know why there aren't a lot of psychologists hanging around hypnokink?#stuff like this may be why #but also- I promise you can be a skeptic and still have lots of fun #also- learn some cold reading!#it's more fun and you'll pick up less wrong information #ymmv of course

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crabbybun · 6 years

Note

there are different kinds of GMOs please stop acting like you know what you're talking about LOL

You have clearly never met me.

If there’s one thing I love to do, it’s read. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’swriting research papers. The fact that Ihave anxiety and read random Wikipedia articles to cope means you just gave mea challenge.

To start, I have a pretty loose definition of GMO. Considering that, since the time humansdeveloped agriculture, we have been cross-breeding plants & animals to fitspecific needs/solve a problem/create a specific taste/etc. – thereforealtering their genetic makeup – I consider most of what is consumed by humansociety to be a GMO. To split hairs now,to essentially say that the new technology we develop to continue to do whatwe’ve been doings since early civilization, is now somehow “bad” without anyclear evidence to back it up just smacks of hypocrisy to me. Like, if you actually do research, you’llfind out stuff like we used to use X-rays and Radium to genetically modifyplants but yeah it’smodern biotechnology that’s killing us.

To address your assertation – of course there are differentGMOs. The definition of “organism” iskinda broad to begin with. According toWikipedia [fuck whata professor says; it’s a good place to learn broad knowledge of a topic, if youhave critical thinking skills] it’s very close to the technical legal term“living modified organism” and if that isn’t the broadest thing I’ve ever heardof idk what is. And while the term GMOdoes not generally refer to organisms that have had genetic material added tothem to change them, transgenic crops have geneticmaterial added to them, not “chemicals”of any sort.

[That’s another pet peeve of mine – the crusade against“chemicals” by the pure life groups. Nothing has ever sounded more like pseudo-science than that crap.]

However, the fact that there are different GMOs doesn’t makethe supposed “controversy” over their safety any less inane. I’ll freely admit that, despite my terriblyunderdeveloped digestive system, I am a major foodie and I don’t reallydiscriminate in what kinds of food I’ll eat. That means that I’ll look at all the vegetarian & vegan dishes thatpeople make – and even some gluten-free ones for my Celiac bestie. A friend from high school found me onFacebook and she had gone way raw vegan by that point so…I have been around the“GMOs are unsafe” discourse the most.

The first genetically engineered plant is reported in 1983 –a tobacco plant resistant to a specific kind of bacteria. Genetically engineered animals go back evenearlier. That means that the scientificcommunity has been studying GMOs for at least 35 years. That’s a lot of time to study; that could betwo generations worth of people to look at!

And in that 35 years, they haven’t found any real dangerwith GMO crops. The Library of Congressnotes that the scientific consensus is

“indicating that there is no evidence that GMOs present unique safety risks compared to conventionally bred products.”

This study looked at 10 years of GMO cropsafety. Anotherliterature review consisting of 6 years of studies came to roughly the sameconclusion. And a decade of EU-funded GMO research says

“The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, andinvolving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, andin particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plantbreeding technologies.”

Note: these are from several places, not all American. Is that enough for you? What about the American Association for the Advancement of Science who says

“contrary to popular misconceptions, GM crops are the mostextensively tested crops ever added to our food supply”

and while

“there areoccasional claims that feeding GM foods to animals causes aberrations…althoughsuch claims are often sensationalized and receive a great deal of mediaattention, none have stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.”

The AMA agrees and their Council on Science and Public Health found that

“bioengineered foodshave been consumed for close to 20 years, and during that time, no overtconsequences on human health have been reported and/or substantiated in thepeer-reviewed literature.”

Yes, I agree with the Food & Agricultural Organization ofthe UN that any new plants that wecreate have to be studied for adverse effects,but considering the testing that GMOs go through in most developed countries, Idon’t really worry about their safety when they come to the market. The idea that GMOs are, in fact, extensivelytested for safety on a regular basis is reinforced by this article in theJournal of the Royal Society of Medicine:

“The European Food Safety Authority and each individual member state have detailed the requirements for a full risk assessment of GM plants and derived food and feed. In the USA, the Food and Drug Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service are all involved in the regulatory process for GM crop approval.”

The same study also finds that:

“goods derived from GM crops have been consumed by hundreds of millions of people across the world for more than 15 years, with no reported ill effects (or legal cases related to human health), despite many of the consumers coming from that most litigious of countries, the USA.”

So let’s just lay it out there: science says GMOs are safe –so safe that even Bill Nye had to change his mind about them -and there is now an absolute mound of science to look at.

However, one of the things that bugs me about the pseudo-sciencethat keeps bunk like this around is that it’s detrimental to the science takingplace on a large scale with this. Our globalpopulation is rising quickly, and we need to address the challenges that gowith that. Plant genetics could hold thekey to things like global food security, for instance. Climate change threatens how we doagriculture now and GM crops could be a lifesaver. We’re losing fresh water for crops and GMcrops could be adapted to that. Tbh I’vefound that a lot of this bunk is rolled up in privilege that doesn’tacknowledge the fact that GMOs are helping out in needed areas of theworld. This article in Genetics magazine talks about adapting GM ricefor resistance to floods in places like Southeast Asia or India, and how drought-resistancecorn can help in Africa. This articlefrom the National Academies Press discusses how genetic modification can simply affect the yield of crops.

There’s a lot that can be done for a lot of people that canbetter their daily quality of living, and that is worth a lot more to me than abunch of pseudo-science ignoramuses standing in the way of progress. It’s kind of a racist argument, to me. Not to mention that your idea of “there aremany different GMOs” – insinuating that some may be dangerous – is as dumb asan anti-vaccer saying “well there are many different kinds of vaccines so onemay cause autism!” Much like that argument,there is ample evidence to suggest GMOs are safe. Considering that pretty much everything youeat was engineered to be that way, y’all just better learn to deal withthat.

Every carrot you eat is a GMO

Every orange you eat is a GMO

Get tf over it already.

#asks #answered #anonymous #sj #food choices #gmos #Anonymous

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tedfashionski · 4 years

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Finking, Finking.

Hi, welcome to my ted talk. (That is the only time I will ever make that joke. This is Fashionski Finks. Expect radically low standards of self-involved rantiness with zero research or accountability from here on out). For a while there I seriously thought that the covid-19 quarantine was going to result in people being increasingly placid and accepting of creeping extensions of the police state. But here I am, getting depressed again, not about the protests, which I love, but more about my relationship to in-group pressure dynamics. One of the problems with being a relentless contrarian is the discomfort of my impulse to rebel against groups even when they’re championing the right thing. I have to find my own way to fight against the system as an outsider. No gods, no masters, no fucking peer pressure. I’ll never be happy joining a chorus line. I don’t sign fucking petitions (they’re just lists for the NSA). I do donate, but like fuck will I do it performatively. I can’t go to protests cus I get panic attacky in crowds. I empathise pretty strongly with outsiders of all stripes but believe ridiculously excessively in the public good of criticism, and have a nostalgic love of trolling (I like to think I’m gentle with it though). Bring back the troll! We need that fucker, he’s a sign of a healthy internet. I’m writing this blog thing as an extension of my need to vent my extreme negativity. TBH I never expected to get any followers with ted twitter and the bizarre welcomingness of the hf twitter community totally wrongfooted me. I’m not nice. Ted isn’t meant to likable. He’s my dark side. I was meant to be using this alt as a way to terrorise the nice nice (secretly cruel) fashion people. I’m gunna try and up that aspect more. Just bear in mind, my complaints are largely about the system, but if I see you perpetuating fashion’s entrenched anti-intellectualism or its insidery bullshit, I’ll come for you with a little meta-bomb with your name on it. Maintaining my misanthropic tone does take work tho, like, deep down in some twisted part of my psyche, I guess I do actually want to be liked. It’s fucked up.

I suppose it’s only fair to explain this Ted fursona. Like, new concept, who dis? Why all the furry porn? …..because I just think it’s hilarious. Every time I think about the furries I cackle (not at them, mind). I just love the mad corruption of pure Disney aesthetics into hardcore pornography. That’s anti-authoritarian as fuck. I love the sincerity of their culture. The way the crazy fetish aspect means they’ll never be fully blandified by mainstream acceptance. The way it’s so cringe but so delightful. And more seriously, I’m interested in how a culture of mostly gay male nerds developed to the point where they’ll invest 10k in custom fursuits and support eachother’s independent businesses in ways that the fashion community completely fails to do. The fashion world sucks. There’s so many correlations there that I want to investigate: the newness (furries date from around the 70s, fashion culture in its self-aware state dates from the late 19th C – both very young fields); the centralisation/decentralisation; the hierarchy (furries can be pretty catty, I have discovered in my research, and we all know what fashion people are like); the adoption of new identities; the cis-boy gayness aspect (I’m increasingly tired of the extreme nasty hierarchy of certain CSM queens. It’s all very UGH. Just, fuck those particular bitches.) There’s more to the furry love, but I’ll explore it in future posts.

More importantly, why Ted fucking Kaczynski? I’m not like, actually a terrorist. (….yet. tehehe. NO, seriously I like non-maiming violence. Fuck yeah to property damage. Fuck yeah to disabling the system in extreme way. But no to wooden IEDs. Think of my shitty jokes that fail to land as my hand-crafted bombs). I think I like the shitness of Ted. He was just an epic fail of a terrorist. I’m a little white girl living in London. I’m not actually a primitivist, as much as I crave a hut in the woods. I did go to an elite school though. I had some really shitty experiences in the fashion industry in my early 20s, and I watch my friends who are relatively successful in that system and I get so angry on their behalf at their poor treatment. They think I’m too angry. Fuck that. They should be more angry, and the fact that they can’t be angry at their extreme precarity and the fact they’re still insecure and terrified of being ejected by the system after all their investment and skills they’ve built up is BULLSHIT. I’ll be double angry for them, I’m not invested in that system. I don’t need it to pay my rent. I’m free, motherfuckers, and I’m coming for the abusers and exploiters. If you’re a complacent industry figure not fighting hard from within, uggghhhhh fuck you. Yes, YOU. Soooo, I relate pretty hard to the MK ultra stuff. (go look him up, he was basically tortured and experimented upon by the elite). But there’s a pretty big chasm between my views and his, and I’ll try to be clear about the extent of my interest in his extreme beliefs. I haven’t even finished reading the manifesto. Basically, I watched that shitty show on Netflix with sam worthington around the same time I watched Joker (that movie fucked me up) and thought it’d be a good outlet to larp online as a terrorist. There’s the angry white alt-right school shooter aspect, which I’m still figuring out, cus I’m non-binary and I was raised by nutso trumpy right-wingers, who I barely speak to anymore, and I struggle to get along with people generally. There’s sad, self-pitying rage here. I empathise with the angry white dudes too much. I feel guilty about it. That’s good ground for artmaking (yes, shamefully, this…is…art. Sorry). I modelled this fursona a little after my brother, who I spent years living with and arguing with and trying to lift out of his scary racist youtube rabbit holes. This is actually quite an emotional thing for me, cus I did the ‘talk to your fascist family’ thing. And I completely failed. I realised his right-winginess wasn’t lessening, I wasn’t gaining ground, and in fact my excessive empathy and desire to reach out to the relative most similar to me in character meant his extremism was rubbing off on me. Making me more resentful and depressed. Feeling powerless. I was being too kind-hearted and forgiving of his masculine impotence. So I’m exploring some personal shit here. But Ted is also a cute lil fuzzball teddy bear. He means well, but me being super autistic and faily at social skills means he’s kind of a dick, cus I am. I’m going to try and further develop this character, this POV, and this post is the only time I’ll explain the divide between him and his creator (moi). The ‘I’ on the twitter and here is Ted Fashionski, I need that space between me and him. Masks give us this freedom to be more ourselves. Internet culture has lost a lot of its wild brutal anonymity in the last decade or so, now everyone’s afraid of making mistakes. How the hell do you grow if you’re not allowed to fuck up? This is a vital outlet. He’s become an important part of my life and I have to say, I love being Ted Fashionski. He’s like Paddington Bear who just escaped form Guantanamo or something.

I get pretty fatigued as a matter of course. I’m a long-term depressive since childhood. I have a difficult time keeping my hard-on for living. I don’t get suicidal really but I do struggle with extreme fatigue. I sleep a lot. I often fall into spirals of self-hate. And as someone who utterly believes in revolutionary leftist politics, I beat myself up about not doing enough. I’m so middle class and english and white. I was raised in such a chauvinistic and complacent culture; I don’t even know where to start. I’m wading my way through post-colonial literature and beating myself up for finding it boring and uncomfortable. It’s hard to force yourself to acknowledge your culture is The Bad Guys. It’s easier to fall into fanstasies of supremacy and butthurt misunderstoodness. And it’s not like my depressive brain needs any encouragement to hate me. My trajectory is ever leftwards, but I remember the righteous fury of being right-wing. I get it, that was me. We need more paths back from fascism, more comprehension of why people are that kind of shitty. I talk less, and less well, the more depressed I am. If I’m talking, it means im feeling a lot better. Just, fyi.

Give me a minute to be critical here. With the George Floyd protests, a lot of the cool guys on fashion twitter has gone blazingly hardcore on the political side. But there’s this troubling rhetoric about ‘no return to normal content’ or ‘this isn’t the time for fashion’. Like fuck it isn’t. This is a key problem with fashion culture right here, we have this received perception of fashion as empty escapism. Escapism matters in fashion, yes. But seriously, talking about the surfaces of things does not equal not caring about deeper meaning. What the fuck. Clothes are a connective tissue, a membrane between us. They’re emotional and powerful. We can talk about things that matter THROUGH clothes. I speak fashion, pretty fucking well. Most people who work at fashion magazines are morons with no understanding or respect for their subject. They’re incapable of doing it justice, and that’s deliberate. On this tumblr you’ll see rants and reviews of fashion and other artforms, always interpreting through a fashion lens. cus it matters, cus it’s a vital part of the culture, cus just because something has a glittery, seductive surface doesn’t mean it doesn’t communicate or contain depth. There’s no going back to ‘normal fashion content’, yes. Normal fashion content is a fucking psyop to divert legitimate interest in aesthetics amongst largely non-academic dyslexic visual types away from careful thought/feeling and towards empty consumerist commericiality. The traditional fashion media wants you to express yourself and your interest in the zeitgeist through buying more shit. Another fashion world is possible. Let’s destroy the old and build a new one, one where surface and spirit are connected and true and fashion can’t be abused in service of evil industrial monopolists.

/end rant. TLDR: angry fictional teddy bear with tin-foil hat and an eco-anarchist fetish says no to stupid fashion and yes to the renewal of conceptual fashion. Also, Fuck White People.

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erraticfairy · 5 years

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Podcast: Hiding Depression- Using Perfectionism to Hide Our Struggles

Are you always in control and always perfectly put together? Are you professionally successful, a great friend, and always showing a happy face to the world? But what about on the inside? Is there something in the background or in the past that you don’t talk about? Do you feel disconnected, like no one knows the “real” you? Deep down do you just know something is wrong? Well, you might have “perfectly hidden depression.”

Today Gabe speaks with Dr. Margaret Rutherford who has done extensive work on the relationship between perfectionism and depression. Dr. Rutherford tells us how childhood trauma can lead to the development of coping mechanisms that don’t serve us as adults and how those behaviors might be masking depression. Then she shares how to challenge those beliefs and show ourselves the same compassion we would give to anyone else.

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Guest information for ‘Hidden Depression’ Podcast Episode

Dr. Margaret Rutherford, a clinical psychologist, has practiced for twenty-six years in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Earning the 2009 Arkansas Private Practitioner of the Year award for her volunteer work at a local free health clinic, she began blogging and podcasting in 2012 to destigmatize mental illness and educate the public about therapy and treatment. With a compassionate and common-sense style, her work can be found at https://DrMargaretRutherford.com, as well as HuffPost, Psych Central, Psychology Today, The Mighty, the Gottman Blog and others. She hosts a weekly podcast, SelfWork with Dr. Margaret Rutherford. And her new book, Perfectly Hidden Depression: How to Break Free from the Perfectionism that Masks Your Depression, will be published by New Harbinger in November 2019.

About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘Hidden Depression’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: Welcome to the Psych Central Podcast, where each episode features guest experts discussing psychology and mental health in everyday plain language. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Welcome, everyone, to this week’s episode of the Psych Central Podcast. Calling in to the show today we have Dr. Margaret Rutherford, a clinical psychologist who has practiced for 26 years in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She’s the author of a new book, Perfectly Hidden Depression: How to Break Free from the Perfectionism that Masks Your Depression. Margaret, welcome to the show.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Thank you very much. I’m more than delighted to be here. This is a subject I’ve been passionate about for over 5 years, so any time I get to talk about it, I’m delighted.

Gabe Howard: Well, that’s wonderful. Now you have been a therapist, as we established, for well over twenty five years. How did you come up with the term perfectly hidden depression and why do you decide to write a book about it?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Well, I actually was sitting down to write a blog post one day. I had been blogging for, I don’t know, a couple of years by that. And I thought about several people that I had seen and I just sort of thought well, they are perfectly hidden. They don’t talk about their depression, they’re not open about their depression. But if I say, gosh, could you be aware that there’s something in the background that you’ll tell me a bad story or a painful story and there’s a smile on your face, but you’re not crying about it. So there was this problem between someone talking about something traumatic and yet not having any kind of painful emotion that was connected with it.

Gabe Howard: I know that a lot of times people think that depression is supposed to look a certain way. Whenever we see pictures of depression, it’s always somebody with their hands on their head or they are crying or dark storm clouds. But that’s not really the reality. There’s a lot of people who suffer from depression that upon visual inspection look perfectly fine.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Yes. And you know, in the literature that’s often called high-functioning depression or smiling depression. These are people who really know that they are depressed, that they have even the classic symptoms of depression, like it’s hard to get out of bed or they’re not as enjoying as many activities that they had in the past or something like that, or they even know when they get home from the office, here comes this negative energy or with this tendency to want to withdraw. Perfectly hidden depressed people can look like that. They can be aware on one level that they are depressed. The difference is there’s also a huge group of them that really don’t actually know they’re depressed. They have been hiding for so long. They have been pushing away trauma or painful emotions. Maybe they weren’t even allowed to talk about pain when they were children. There are all kinds of situations that can foster a perfectly hidden depression. And so this process is so automatic that they’re not really sure anymore. They know maybe their gut is telling them something’s wrong with this little tiny voice inside of them says, you know, this isn’t right. You should be happier. You should be actually more fulfilled. But they try not to listen that voice, because, of course, their major focus is on looking like they have the perfect looking life.

Gabe Howard: I know that when I was depressed, I thought that it was some sort of moral failing and, you know, my parents would say things to me like, well, what do you have to be upset about? Why? Why aren’t you happy? You have more than others. You know, I grew up in the era where we heard about, you know, starving children in other countries all the time when we didn’t want to eat dinner. So there was just always this comparison. And that made me, as a young adult, believe, well, yeah, since I don’t have a reason to be depressed, I must not be depressed. Is that what you’re trying to highlight and discuss with, you know, your work, your research, and in your book?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: That’s certainly one of the traits. There are 10 commonly shared traits of perfectly hidden depression, Gabe. And one of them is an emphasis on counting your blessings to the point where you don’t even see that some blessings have vulnerabilities or problems attached to them. For example, I have a successful practice in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I’m very proud of that. I’ve worked hard for that. I’m very honored by that. But sometimes I get tired and we all have… Maybe you’re a great beauty or you’re wealthy and you wonder, are people attracted to me because I’m beautiful or because I’m wealthy? Let’s say someone has four children and they love having a big family. But then when it comes down to carting children to four different things or or having four different sets of homework or just buying clothes for four kids. There are some hardships that come along with blessings. And when you are trying to, well, what you said you were told as a child you don’t have anything to complain about. Then you were told, don’t talk about vulnerability, don’t talk about pain. It’s unseemly. You’re not being grateful. And I think that that sets up this dynamic where you shame yourself for not being grateful enough. Perfectly hidden depressed people, and even perfectionists in general, that perfectionism is often fueled by shame. Where you do you have to do your very best, because if you don’t, there are all kinds of shameful consequences for that. And you are completely self-critical and not counting their blessings is one of those criticisms.

Gabe Howard: Has research demonstrated a relationship between perfectionism and depression?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Yes, perfectionism actually started being written about, I don’t want to go into too much history, but back in the 1930s. It began getting some attention as a psychological problem. And there are some researchers now that are actually finding some correlation and a strong correlation between perfectionism and suicide. When I think about some of my own patients thinking, OK, what are the threads that might define or identify these people? What are the things that they spend a lot of time thinking about or doing? And I came up with 10 of them. Some I’ve already mentioned like being highly perfectionistic with a lot of shame, having an excessive sense of responsibility. These are people who have their hands up in the air all the time. They stay in their head. They tend to be very rational people. They detach from pain by being analytical. They worry a lot and they need a lot of control over themselves and their environment. They can easily focus on tasks because what they do is how they feel valuable. This is the kind of person that if they go to a party and they’re not given a role to do, they’re very uncomfortable. They really don’t know.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: So they’ll start picking up plates. They’ll assign themselves some role because that’s where they’re most comfortable. Again, I’ve said this already. They don’t allow people into their own inner world, but they really sincerely focus on the well-being of others. They mean it’s not made up. It’s not fake. They discount personal hurt or sorrow. And they have hardly any self-compassion. They believe strongly in counting your blessings. We all often talk about that. They actually may enjoy success professionally, in fact, but they don’t know how to be emotionally intimate in their relationships. So their relationships are often very troubled. And the last one is something a little different. A lot of times these folks will show up in your office or just in life with a panic disorder or an eating disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder or an addiction. And when you think about that, the thread of all those disorders is the fact that they’re all about control. So they may have some accompanying diagnostically accurate mental health issues. And those are important to address. But the important fact about them for me, with perfectly hidden depression is the fact that those diagnoses reflect a problem with control.

Gabe Howard: Is there a way that a person can recognize this in themselves, if I’m somebody listening and I’m listening to what you said, or are there some cues or questions that I can ask myself so that I know if I’m falling under this?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: That’s a great question, Gabe. You know, one of the people said to me, in fact, many people said to me, “When I saw the term perfectly hidden depression, I knew you had figured something out about me. Yes, I’m perfect looking. But yes, I have known something was wrong for a long time. And I am lonely and I’m despairing. No one knows me. And I have these thoughts of hurting myself that I don’t share with anybody.” I mean, I think you could recognize yourself in those 10 commonly shared traits. Probably the only one I hope that got confusing a little bit was the one talking about the other diagnoses that could accompany it. But I think even if you’re one of that huge group that I talked about a few minutes ago, that really this has become so automatic or unconscious that they don’t quite realize what they’re doing. They would never tell you that they were, depressed, however. What the people I interviewed told me is what they are very clear about is that they’re getting lonelier and lonelier. It’s getting harder and harder to maintain that mask. You’re feeling more and more pressured at work or at church or wherever you put your energies.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Because once you accomplish something, you have this sense of now that’s my “I have to top that.” And then the next one is I have to top that and I have to top that. The pressure is incredible. We know on a gut level and they know on a gut level if it’s them or you know what, if it’s you that something is amiss. And when you go back to your childhood and you think, how could I have learned this? You figure out, well, I was screamed at because I was told I would be no good. And so I decided to look perfect all the time or I took care of everybody in my family because my dad was an alcoholic and I never got to talk about anything bad for me. So, you know, guess what? I’m living my life as an adult that way. Or you were the star of your family where your mother or your dad or both said, “Gosh, you’re so talented. We don’t have to worry about you. You are great. You’re so successful.” And so you took it on like, oh, this is the way I get attention. I have to be this in order to be loved.

Gabe Howard: And these are examples of all the things that causes somebody to want to look perfect or appear perfect or be perfect?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Yes, exactly. There are several different causes. There are many roads to Rome, do you say? There are many ways to or paths that lead you to creating this: sexual abuse, neglect, just bad parenting and especially growing up in families where if you were crying or sad or angry or just wanted to voice your own opinion, that was not allowed. You adopted this drive, this strategy, for lack of a better word. I think it’s a good word, in fact, this strategy, to I just can’t let anybody in to my own vulnerabilities. It’s not allowed. I’m shamed for it. So then you shame yourself for it. Many of us have a childhood strategy that we came up with given the family we were born into. And that strategy helped us survive that family. Maybe you were smothered and you learned, you know, I’ve got to sometimes be more independent because I will get smothered if I don’t. We all have different ways we handled our parents’ vulnerabilities. What happens as an adult is often that strategy is no longer working. But we’re still using it. And so a perfectionist may have learned in their childhoods that they needed to create a perfect looking life in order to handle whatever was going on in the family. But then you come into adult life and looking perfect is something you’re still doing, but it’s gradually going to erode and sabotage your own joy and fulfillment in life.

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after this message from our sponsor.

Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe Howard: And we’re back with Dr. Margaret Rutherford. So what can somebody do if they identify with perfectly hidden depression? Is there an end? Can they get better? What’s the solution?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: You know, I thought this book was… I was going to describe something. And I sent my book proposal in to all the publishing houses and that’s what it was. New Harbinger got back to me and said, no, no, no, no, no. If you want to describe it, fine, you need to do that. But you also need a treatment strategy.

Gabe Howard: Wow.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: And so. Oh, goodness. And so what I did was I came up with a model that I use with almost every patient. They don’t have to be perfectionists. It’s a general model of what I do with therapy. And the model is you have to be conscious. Consciousness is the first stage. You have to be committed. So consciousness, commitment and with perfectionists, there are a lot of hurdles to commitment. A lot of them. Then you have to confront beliefs that you learned in childhood. This is really sort of cognitive behavioral work where you go back and you look at what you learn. You should, ought, must, have to, always do. And you begin to question those beliefs. Some of them are great, but which ones are causing a problem? And you look back on all that with an objective eye as much as you can, and then begin to think what beliefs do I want to live through? What beliefs do I want to live by now? The fourth stage is connection. And this is one of the toughest for perfectionists because we’re going to go back and do a trauma timeline about their childhoods.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: What that means is you go back at year 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 11, whatever years you think are important. And you talk about the positive things that happened, but you also let yourself write down the painful things that happened. And as you do that, you want to go back with self-compassion. What would you do with anybody else? Now, of course, all of that is about really rediscovering or discovering a new way of being for you. The last part is the part that’s about change. Changing your behavior. If I’ve learned one thing as a therapist, I’ve learned you get a lot of insights. Insight is wonderful; insight is great; insight helps you see things. It helps put the puzzle pieces together. But where you get your hope is in behavior change. What’s it like to act on these new beliefs? What’s it like to confront something that you’re sabotaging yourself with? What’s it like to feel emotions that you have suppressed for so long? It’s probably pretty frightening, actually. And so you want to start putting those things into your own life and into your behavior. And that’s where you’re going to get your hope.

Gabe Howard: I’m fascinated by this idea that something that individuals did not know was a problem is able to change their life in such a dramatic fashion. What kind of feedback are you getting from people who have utilized these methods? How are their lives improving by embracing this?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: That’s a great question. I will tell you, and I promise you, I’m not being dramatic, just this year I’ve had two people have said to me, I wouldn’t be alive right now if I had not done this work. They actually were so miserable that they had those thoughts and they were so afraid they were going to act on them that that’s why they came into my practice. So I don’t think that’s true of everybody. But what I have heard is that, for example, one woman came, a young woman came into my office and she said there’s something about that term, “perfectly hidden depression” that I’m drawn to, and I’m not sure why. Well, come to find out. There was a lot of trauma in her lifetime that she had never talked about with anybody, didn’t even see it as trauma. When I used the term trauma, she started laughing. Oh, that’s not traumatic. And her father had hit her so violently when she was a young child that she’d had surgeries on her face.

Gabe Howard: Wow.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: She didn’t consider that traumatic. So you’re trying to wake people up to the idea that what they have considered well, that was just my life or again, they have discounted it of what their reaction would be to someone else telling them that had happened in their lives, they would be horrified. And so you’re inviting people to get in touch with feelings. Another example, and this is gonna be about sexual abuse. So please listen carefully if you have any history of that. But a woman came in who had had a college sexual relationship, a boyfriend, that she had been with him for years, and he had been sexually abusive to her. When she first brought it up, she said, “You know, maybe this is important, maybe it’s not. But, you know, I should probably tell you about this relationship in college.” Yeah. I mean, it was very important in the way she was living her present life. So often these people just want you to confirm was this trauma, was this more difficult than I thought?

Gabe Howard: It’s obviously interesting to think about what we see as trauma and other people versus what we think about as traumatizing for ourselves. The examples that you used. I’m like, oh yeah, that that’s absolutely traumatic. But maybe you don’t recognize that in yourself. Is this what you’re noticing? Could there be perfectly hidden trauma? I mean, does all of this sort of go hand in hand?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Huh, that’s an interesting kind of thought, isn’t it? Yes. I mean, I think we are in a culture often that tells us to buck up. Don’t call it a problem. You know, you’re whining. Quit it. It’s selfish to think about that. In fact, it’s one of the funny, not funny but ironic examples. Years ago, you know, I had 7 or 8 patients a day typically, and sometimes I run real tight between sessions and one person had gone and the other person who came in, I don’t know, a minute after her sat exactly where she had sat on the sofa so she could feel the warmth of the body, warmth from the sofa that was still holding that warmth from the other person. And she looked at me and she said, you know, all of a sudden I get this feeling that I bet that person’s problems are a lot more important than mine. I feel silly being here. And I looked at her and I said, so you felt warmth on the sofa and somehow you jumped to the idea and the belief that you’re not important. Why you’re here isn’t important. So help me understand that. Amazing to me how many people have things in their life that they have very courageously gotten through. And I admire their courage.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: I admire their resilience. It’s when resilience is on steroids that I have the problem. Don’t sweat the small stuff. OK, fine. Don’t sweat the small stuff, but sweat the big stuff and call it big. Berne Brown, of course, has written incredibly and presented incredibly about shame and vulnerability. One of her tenets is that you could only get to courage through vulnerability. She said a man stood up in the audience because people kind of going in, well, you know, maybe. But courage is courage. Courage is a lack of fear. And the soldier stood up, he had had three stints in Iraq. He’d been shot at. I mean, he’d seen people die and he looked at her and said, you are so right. I was afraid over there. And I had to recognize that fear and that vulnerability before I could get to my courage. Rudy Giuliani said it after 9/11. And I’m not going to say it as eloquently as he did. But he said something like, I thought I knew the definition of courage before 9/11, and that was the absence of fear. I found out that I’m wrong. Courage is feeling your fear and going forward. Recognizing vulnerability, admitting vulnerability, revealing vulnerability. And that way you can work your way toward true courage.

Gabe Howard: Dr. Rutherford, I completely agree and I’ve learned a lot and of course, getting to the end of our show, obviously we can find the book on Amazon. What is your Web site? I know that you write for PsychCentral.com. So obviously you can check out Dr. Margaret Rutherford there. Where can folks find you if they want to learn more?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Sure. My Web site has the creative name of DrMargaretRutherford.com.

Gabe Howard: I love it.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: And I’ve been blogging there for seven years. I do have a tag. You know, if you click on the tag, it will take you to all my posts on perfectly hidden depression. I also have a podcast that I’ve been doing for three years now. It’s called Self Work with Dr. Margaret Rutherford. And that’s on i-Tunes, on Stitcher, SoundCloud. It’s now on Spotify and I Heart Radio. So I really love the podcast. I can go more in depth with topics on the podcast than I can through blog posts. You know, I can spend 20-25 minutes talking about something where, you know, a blog post maybe has maybe a thousand words. I’ve got a Facebook page, I’m on Instagram, Pinterest, it’s all under Dr. Margaret Rutherford or Pinterest is Doctor Slash Margaret, I think. I would love to have your listeners join me. And the book does come out November 1. I’m thrilled that New Harbinger is publishing it. It is a much better book because they were involved because I’ve never written anything. I never thought I would write anything. And they have made it really, I think, a very readable book. I include lots of stories of these people I interviewed as well as my own patients, of course, anonymously. So I hope you’ll join me there.

Gabe Howard: Thank you so much, Dr. Rutherford. My final question before we hop on out of here is did you have personal reasons for writing this book?

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: Yes, I did. I wouldn’t call myself perfectly hidden and depressed. But certainly, my mother was. She ended taking anxiety medications in her thirties that developed into a prescription drug addiction and actually sabotaged a great deal of her life in the last decade or two of her life. But my mother was extremely perfectionistic. I can remember the dining room table being set for a party and we couldn’t go in there for a week. I remember that party would occur and my mother would ask me, was the food any good? Because she would always look for people who needed her help or her conversation because they might be uncomfortable. She got up at 4:00 in the morning so no one would see her without her makeup and her high heels and hose. I mean, that’s maybe being Southern and being a 1950s housewife, but a lot of it was her perfectionism. So I saw how miserable it made her. And I also adopted a great deal of her perfectionistic standards until I became a therapist. And I began working my own way through those and realizing that those were actually my mother’s vulnerabilities speaking to me and I no longer wanted to live my life like that. So people have said to me, your mother would be so proud of you for talking about yourself on the Internet. And I said, no. My mother would think it was terrible. So I don’t want people to live in that same prison that my mother lived in. And I hope that it will be helpful to those who want to get out.

Gabe Howard: Well, thank you so very much for everything that you do for our community. Thank you for everything that you do for PsychCentral.com. And thank you for being on today’s show. We really, really appreciated having you.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford: The thanks is mine, and the gratitude is mine, Gabe. Thank you very much for asking me and everyone have a wonderful day. And if you are hiding, please, if you can, get the e-book if you don’t want to buy it for real. There’s also an e-book and an audio book is coming.

Gabe Howard: Very cool. And remember, everybody, if you want to interact with the show on Facebook, all you have to do is go over to PsychCentral.com/FBshow. And don’t forget to review our show on whatever podcast player you found us on. Do me a favor, tell a friend to share us on social media. And remember, you can get one week of free, convenient, affordable, private online counseling anytime, anywhere, simply by visiting BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. We’ll see everybody next week.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Psych Central Podcast. Previous episodes can be found at PsychCentral.com/show or on your favorite podcast player. To learn more about our host, Gabe Howard, please visit his website at GabeHoward.com. PsychCentral.com is the internet’s oldest and largest independent mental health website run by mental health professionals. Overseen by Dr. John Grohol, PsychCentral.com offers trusted resources and quizzes to help answer your questions about mental health, personality, psychotherapy, and more. Please visit us today at PsychCentral.com. If you have feedback about the show, please email [email protected]. Thank you for listening and please share widely.

from World of Psychology https://ift.tt/35jTmLP via theshiningmind.com

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itsjayyyy · 6 years

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March 20, 2019 8:30 am

Alright I’m in a much better state of mind now. It’s been an astronomically long time since I’ve given an actual update on my life, not just venting. wow, just checked back at my last few updates and i really haven’t written almost anything about this semester, but So Much has happened.

okay so first of all: i switched majors. again. so I’ve done a lot of reflecting, about my whole plan for life. social work seemed like a good field for me because I want to help people, right? but in cps, you’re not always working with people to help them, a lot of the time is spent working /against/ your client to help their kids, who are often too young to understand what’s going on. You’re basically always fighting; a lot of posts on the social work subreddit are all about how to deal with clients who are uncooperative, or yell at you, etc. I want to state that mom is wrong when she says I’m “terrible with people,” I’m actually quite easy to get along with as long as you don’t purposefully seek to offend. But I am terrible with people who try to kick up shit all the time. I mean, I can barely handle dealing with an annoyed guest at starbucks, how am I supposed to spend the rest of my career dealing with that times, like, 100? And yeah, I know I always say that I can totally live on a small income, but man I sure do love the security of having a nice savings account. And donating to online charities is practically a hobby of mine, so having a big income would make it a lot easier for me to live the life of that rich person who pays off 100 gofundme’s for medical costs every month.

And I’ve come to realize that the atmosphere of a class matters more than anything in terms of how well I’ll do. Not to sound arrogant, but I’m smart enough that I can pass any class that I try, I just need to put in effort. And effort comes a lot easier with a good atmosphere. The reason why I failed comp sci the first time was because the class had no interaction whatsoever. I mean, it was online and over the summer, and the professor gave us weekly emails telling us what assignments were due that week but he stopped doing that halfway through the semester so I just forgot about the class tbh. I felt so disconnected. And frankly, I’ve felt that way about stem since high school when I was the only girl and was always singled out because of it. That just made me go into college with a negative mindset. Even retaking comp sci was only originally for some stupid grade forgiveness so I could keep my scholarship. But this semester is just...different. My professor is just so lively, in a way that I’ve never had a stem class be. He starts off every class with “good evening everyone, it’s another day in paradise here at ucf in orlando, florida” (and sometimes he adds on “and some day you all will realize that” which tbh sounds kind of like an ominous threat to me) and throughout the class he’s always joking around, we can ask questions in class through his own website, we have a discord group to talk about the assignments that the TA is also in (and he shared pics of his dog once), all that stuff. Our professor also tells us about all the other resources we have, like supplementary instruction, tutoring (somehow those are two separate things), “the cave” (which is a room i think in HEC that is just generally inhabited by random comp sci students who hang out and can help with assignments), office hours not only for him but also his 2 TA’s. I’ve never been to any of those physical places but it’s nice knowing that I have a support system.

I know it’s the atmosphere and not just me trying to work harder, too, because I really walked into that class at the start of the semester already hating it. I gave it the last section of my 5-subject notebook specifically for how little I cared about it. (To me, calc was my priority. And yet I’m coasting by in comp sci with a 99 and a 100 on the first two exams (class averages being 72 and 68 respectively), while the same stale, disconnected atmosphere of calc has earned me a 52.) Last semester I ended with a 47% (written in as a D though, not sure if that’s because my professor wanted to give me mercy or if it’s because he wanted the pay raise associated with having your students pass). Comp sci just became a fun subject again. Coding really is my favorite thing.

The final push was a post I saw on the social work subreddit. It was about a case manager (what I wanted to go into) who had done a home visit and was unable to hide her disgust of having roaches crawling near her. I absolutely cannot. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I realized I needed a sanitized office to work in. Before I made the official change, I talked to my coworker shayna about it, because she’s 26 and currently in her last semester of her AA, and next semester she’s hoping to transfer to ucf to get her bachelor’s. She said it is kinda stressful to take so long to get a degree, but as long as you get it, it’s okay. I know that now that I’ve wasted 2 years, I’m probably gonna graduate a semester late, but it’s okay because iris did too. And rose has been at valencia for 4 years and she’s still working on her 2 year degree so...

Wow that took a lot of words to say. Back to how my classes are going: I did the math, and I would need to get an 80 on all 3 of my remaining calc exams to get a C overall. Yeah I’m kinda pissed at myself for figuring out I like comp sci in the middle of the semester, when i already got an F on the first 2 exams. Before, my mentality was “I’m just taking this class for grade forgiveness, I can literally get a D and raise my gpa, and then I’m never going back to stem,” but now that I’m back in stem I need to get a C or better. I mean, I could get a D and then retake the class, but the college of engineering only allows for 3 tries on a class so I would really be on my last attempt before I’m completely kicked out and have to find a new major, wasting even more of my time. I know I would absolutely kill it on the third attempt, but man I sure am gonna hate myself for letting it get to that. It’s not an issue of “the material is too hard for me,” but rather “i didn’t care when I really should have.” I never studied for the first 2 exams and got over half of it right on both, imagine what I could do if i did study. Anyways, 80 sounds manageable, right? I mean, it’s the low end of a B. But this class is cumulative, to in order to do well on the next exam which is literally next week, I have to study literally the entire course instead of just these last few units. AND I need to go even farther back and study trig, since I never took a formal class on it and that’s why I failed calc the first time. It’s been 4 years since I looked at the unit circle.

I’m trying to cut back on how much time I spend on my phone. I really think that’s the biggest detriment to me, that I always feel the need to look at it. Definitely using the forest app more often. All the time I spend cycling between the 3 social media apps I use, where I just look at the same posts over and over again every day, could be better spent studying or doing something else productive.

In comp 2, we’re doing a semester-long individual research project about anything rhetoric-based. It has to be multimodal, eg not just “what’s the symbolism in this classic novel” but rather about society and media. A lot of people chose stuff like “how do women’s magazines push certain beauty standards” or “how is greek life (sororities, not the country) portrayed in american media and is it really accurate,” but because the professor stated that we should be “creating new knowledge and building upon an academic conversation,” I tried to come up with something that nobody had done yet: I chose “what are the motivations of the incel community?” And yeah, it’s so unique that when we had to do a literature review of what other scholars have already said about the subject, there were literally no academic journals on it. My literature review is just about the layout of a subreddit’s community and how the members interact (which has been discussed before), and from there I’m going to apply that to the incel community. I’ve done “research” by reading through their posts. Wow I just tried to ctrl+f this blog for “incel” and only one instance came up, from like november last year. It’s crazy, this has been kind of a big deal for me this semester. You know all those self-hating posts about my appearance recently? Well, I walked into this project thinking “man incels are stupid they just need to stop being entitled and care about their appearance a little and maybe then they could get a girl” but as I read through the posts I realized I was wrong. A lot of these men have issues that can’t be easily fixed, like being short, balding too young, just general bad face structure, and because of that people would instantly judge them. One guy even talked about how he had cerebral palsy and needs to walk with a cane, and his super handsome brother’s girlfriend was super patronizing to him. Frankly, a lot of their posts spoke to me. I mean, before I had braces I had a really recessed chin and while everyone said “oh I didn’t even notice,” you could tell that it made me less attractive and hence why nobody has ever asked me out. Not saying it’s the only cause, but you’d be lying if you said looks didn’t matter. Especially the posts about being considered uglier than their siblings, that really hit home for me. it’s like, I see their pain and I know how badly it hurts, but at the same time as a woman I’m obviously going to disagree with their response. When women were given harsh beauty standards, we took two routes: either try to improve artificially (makeup and plastic surgery), or work to dismantle it (body positivity movement). Men, who have always been a little entitled, just blame others. I feel like if incels started an actual body positivity movement for men, we could really go somewhere.

Damn, its been so long since my last genuine update that frankly I’m not sure where to go from here. Like so much has happened and I can’t really pick out anything that seems particularly noteworthy after 3 months. I think I’m gonna end this update here, then, and just promise to give more frequent updates from now on so I can go into more detail. Today I’m going to write an email for the future (like i try to a few times a year) to rehash the whole major change (since my last letter was all about how i just switched to social work), then do the comp homework, then study for calc I guess.

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zipgrowth · 7 years

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Why Professors Doubt Education Research

Lauren Herckis, an anthropologist at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied the culture of ancient Mayan cities, is turning her focus closer to home these days—exploring why professors try new teaching approaches, or decide not to.

She found many professors are reluctant to move away from the way they’ve traditionally taught, even when presented with evidence new approaches might work better. But that isn’t because the professors don’t care about teaching. In some cases the issue was broader philosophical differences among faculty members over what it means to teach.

“I found that every single professor who I spoke to really valued teaching,” she said. “To all of them, teaching was central to their avocation—and their identity.”

EdSurge sat down with Herckis to talk about her research and what it might mean for others leading teaching-innovation projects on campuses. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can listen to a complete version below, or on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher).

You've discovered an interesting paradox: Professors at research universities like yours of course value the scientific method and doing rigorous research—and yet these same professors, it seems like, often say they're skeptical of rigorous research about teaching. What do you think is going on there?

Hericks: I think that folks who value rigorous scientific research at the university level have often been steeped within a specific disciplinary context and many of them are quick to avow their expertise or lack thereof. In other arenas that aren't their specialty, they tend to try not to step on other people's toes. When it comes to teaching, it is a practice that many of them have cultivated over years of experience that is separate from their research or their identity as a researcher

So they don't feel as comfortable even reading the research about it?

Oh, many do. There are many professors I've spoken to who are fascinated by research on learning science, educational technology, approaching to teaching of learning. Many who are deeply steeped in it. But there are many who are not. I think it really depends on the faculty.

There's a distinction between researchers in learning science and educational technology, and folks who are researchers in, say, physics, or biology, or engineering, who are also teachers. They teach at the university level, and they may or may not be about research teaching.

You found that professors really care about their teaching, and yet they are skeptical of education research. It sounds like a lot of people ended up teaching the way that they had been taught, or the way that they felt good as a student in classes they had had.

That's right. People sometimes ignore the research precisely because they care about teaching. Different faculty arrive at the point where they're teaching college students from wildly different experiences of their own. Some have wanted since they were small children to be professors at a university, and some fell into it later in a career.

For faculty who think that research is a good way to learn how to teach, they will devour the literature on learning sciences. They'll reach out to experts across a number of disciplines and within their own discipline to try and learn what the best way to teach is

For faculty who believe that teaching is an art, that it is just something that you develop with experience and time, that you can't learn from a book, you need to learn by doing more or learn from your students, no amount of exposure to learning science research is going to disrupt their sense that this is something they learn by doing, or that they need to follow their gut on.

Can you just a minute to talk about what your method was at exploring this topic? Like how you set up your work here?

For the most part, we used an ethnographic approach. That meant sitting in on lots of meetings and lots of phone calls, having conversations with lots of people. I followed four specific projects over the course of a year, and each of these projects was an effort to either develop or to improve, or to scale the use of some kinds of educational technology.

I'm curious, because you note in your study that higher education is at a big moment of change, and that new ways of teaching better fit the needs of today’s workplace. How optimistic are you—based on the attitudes you saw among professors—that widespread change is possible?

There are different strategies that are appropriate for different institutions. One thing that I encountered that I think is very important and very compelling is that different professors have different ideas about what it means to teach well. The review and promotion process is characterized by some metrics that are supposed to evaluate teaching effectiveness or teaching excellence, but those also vary from one unit to another. The institution may say in its mission statement, or in other kind of high level visioning, that good teaching is valued, but what that means, operationally speaking [often] means different things to different people within the same institution.

Your ability to shoot for the same target, to try and reach the same goal, is impeded. The kinds of transformation, or the kinds of barriers that we could anticipate in those different contexts, are going to depend on what you mean when you say you're going to do some excellent teaching.

Probably everyone has an idea of what makes a good teacher.

Yeah. We found that there are faculty who think that the goal, their job as an instructor, is really to build a relationship with the student in which they recognize expertise in their disciplines and are afforded the space to do their own exploration—so that [the students] themselves can do the hard work of learning.

There are other faculty who are very focused on, "Well, in order to learn this content well, you need this piece first. And then, you can't learn this other concept until you've really mastered this first concept. And once you've mastered those concepts, then there are these kinds of exercises that can help you learn. And so my job as a faculty member is to put the right pieces of content, or the right challenges, in front of students in the right order." Which is, the heavy lifting is the professor's burden in that model.

Then there are faculty who firmly believe that no one learns without struggling with their own lack of mastery before reaching a point where they can achieve things. Those faculty really, strongly believe that the most important part of the teaching practice is to demonstrate to students that they don't know the answer, and then help them find a way to learn how or to understand.

These different ways of approaching teaching really affect how faculty approach the classroom. How they prioritize different aspects of teaching and learning. If you write a policy or create some procedures by which all faculty need to approach their teaching in the same way, there are going to be some faculty for whom it's a perfect fit. But there are going to be others who feel like they're doing students a disservice because they're not doing that relationship building, or they're not finding the right challenges, or they're not able to present that really vital piece of information first.

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to change someone's mind to either adopt or consider more of this evidence-based research?

People can always change their perspective. If you're trying to communicate the value of a technology or an approach, or even of learning science or education research as a field, you have to start with the person you're speaking to. They may come to that conversation with a sense of, "I know that people get PhDs in education. People get PhDs in curriculum design, and I've never even taken a class where we've talked about curriculum design. I would like to know what they know.”

Then there are people who will say, "I've been teaching since I was a graduate student. My students are very happy with the teaching. I feel pretty good about my teaching. I understand that you have a PhD in curriculum design, but I don't really need that.”

You need to approach those two different faculty members differently, understanding that there are some people who are interested in hearing about evidence-based practices, and just pointing them towards the resources is great.

What about your own teaching? I'm curious. Are you someone that tries different techniques that are based on research?

Yeah, I love trying new things in my teaching. I do. Research-based teaching, or teaching effectively by the book is challenging for so many different ways. For a couple of years, I was the coordinator of the Graduate Student Teaching Initiative, and one of the parts of that job was I taught a class for doctoral candidates on university teaching. These are graduate students who are planning on getting PhDs, and virtually all of them were hoping for careers in academia. They planned to teach college students, eventually, if they weren't already.

The class was a seminar about university teaching. It was really interesting. It was really fun. But the hardest thing was that I would spend the class meeting talking about, or working with students about these principles of effective teaching, and having to demonstrate those principles in action while I was doing it.

There is so much literature, and there are so many right ways, and there are so many recommendations that incorporating all of them into your practice at the same time is literally impossible. Many of them are contradictory. You have to choose a suite that you're adhering to, because you can't do the others if you're doing these. Trying to embody best practices while teaching is really complex. It's a skillset that you develop. You develop with time, and instruction, and you can master, but you're always going to have to continue to perfect it.

I think that you can absolutely teach in evidence-based ways, but remembering that professors are human, and that even when they know all of the quote/unquote "right ways," there are still lots of [other] ways to do it right, and there are lots of reasons why it can go south.

Why Professors Doubt Education Research published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

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