#your entire mental sanity gets viscerally fucked over depending on how much you think this impacts dean

[shadystranger]

man searching for redemption and trying to rightfully atone for his sins gets forgiveness by the man he puts over god and shocker he stops feeling remorse and starts transgressing more and more.

the same way dean was sam's reality sam anchored himself gradually as dean's inner-conscience and through sam evaluating dean's actions in place of everyone surrounding and god/logic dean went on relying that sam'll forgive him and stay bc that's what he is sure of later szns (and sam emphasizing his unwillingness to walk out on dean) so this sense of security and convenience coined with the constant enabling at arm's length. that feedback loop ensures dean and sam to never change and always going in circles it's immaculate

[ceasarslegion]

Hey so, with vaccination rollouts happening we’re in the home stretch of the pandemic, and I really hope we don’t all just try to ignore the collective trauma that we all went through. I know that at first, it won’t seem like trauma, because the first time you can go to a party again without fearing for your life, you won’t fear for your life. You’ll feel invincible. I know that after herd immunity, I’m probably gonna go to the first one I’m invited to and either drink until I ralph or get high enough to forget my name while I forget what social anxiety is until 5am, if not just... all night. And y’know what? I’ll deserve it. After the shit we’ve all been through, we all deserve to pull an entire night of intoxicated partying without thinking of how much we’re gonna regret it the next day, or worrying about accidentally killing or getting killed by our friends. We’ll definitely all be socially awkward as fuck in large group settings again, but we’ll be socially awkward together, so it won’t be too bad.

But that’s a coping mechanism. When you’ve been through a traumatic event, and it suddenly stops, your brain needs a moment to figure out what to do next, how to begin to catalogue it, what to learn from it, etc, so it’ll just throw you back into your default pre-trauma phase for a while while it gets its shit together in the background. It’s a weird grey area where you just kind of float for a while. It’s why when someone you love passes, it often doesn’t hit until later. But it’ll hit, and it’ll hit everyone, and I really hope we as a society don’t just try to ignore it.

When I watch movies now, sometimes I have visceral reactions to characters being too close to each other, or touching, or god forbid kissing. Not all the time, but it comes up out of the blue and surprises me a fair amount. That’s a trauma response: I’ve been conditioned to view close human interaction as potentially dangerous, because it has been dangerous for the last year. Right now, it’s helpful, because it keeps me hesitant around other people who aren’t in my bubble, which keeps me safe. It’s when it starts leaking into other avenues where there is no danger that it falls into trauma territory, like when I’m watching movies. Almost every unhealthy coping mechanism started as a healthy one. It all depends on context and moderation. We aren’t very logical animals, our brains didn’t develop like they did for intelligence, it was for empathy and larger emotional ranges that are useful in social animals.

Also, what’s at the back of your mind every time you say something like “after COVID” or “when this is over”? It’s this little demon thats saying “if I survive it,” isn’t it? Most of us don’t really acknowledge it, because we don’t want to and we’ll drive ourselves nuts if we do so we force ignorance for the sake of sanity, but we still aren’t dumb animals, we’re aware of our own mortality, and aware that it could happen to us as long as it keeps going on. Probably pops up multiple times a day for most of us, we just stomp it back down into its box and tell it to shut up, but it’s there. How do you think a year of tacking on this quiet inner “if I make it” at the end of every thought of post-COVID life is gonna influence our mental health? Yeah, it’s normal and I’d argue healthy to acknowledge your mortality sometimes, and even have an existential crisis or two because it helps you get your bearings on reality and appreciate the time you do have, and you aren’t helping anyone by pretending death doesn’t exist and will get us all one day, but we aren’t equipped to do it THIS much. It’s like... you know how if you left a phone plugged in 24/7 you would fry the battery, but you need to plug it in sometimes to charge it? Being confronted with our mortality on a near-constant basis now is like if we were left plugged in 24/7 instead of just long enough to give us a new spry outlook.

Because yeah, we’ll go to that first party and we’ll feel invincible, but what happens when everything else sets in? What happens a month later when a friend tries to hug you and you automatically flinch and step back, and you have to remind yourself that it’s okay now? What happens to the people who get a more intense bout of trauma and now a stranger sneezing near them on the subway launches them into a panic attack? It could be me, or you, or any of us who end up reacting that way. It’s going to happen, we’re not helping anyone by ignoring it, so we need to seriously overhaul how we talk about and treat mental health on a systemic level if we want to come out of this together and supported instead of divided and scared. We need mental health to be covered under public health care, especially after this, or we risk so many people becoming nonfunctional because they can’t afford the tools to work through their trauma, and we as laypeople need to be way more supportive and understanding of each other. We need to show that we’re here for others and that their emotions are valid while they get the tools to work through it in a healthy way.

We unfortunately had to sacrifice humanity’s mental health for our physical health, because we can’t live without our bodies, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t obligated to help each other heal in the aftermath. I really hope we don’t just end up pretending we didn’t all come out of this traumatized. Even the fucking Qanon antimask bullshit conspiracy theorists are traumatized, why do you think they act Like That? It’s not right, it’s still inexcusable, and I will continue to smear them, but their existence is a symptom of a larger problem.