#Narcissistic Personality Disorder (Presumed)

[wings-of-fire-confessions]

Hi, I just wanted to send in a quick message to ask for people to not use terms for mental conditions/disorders to mean something incredibly incorrect based on assumption.

Such as using words like delusional to mean when you're a little obsessed with a character, or when a character is a bit dumb, or saying a certain character is psychotic or claiming they're a narcissist solely because they're selfish or they were mean to another character, or any other terms for disorders used in a derogatory way.

(for example, calling Darkstalker narcissistic because he was abusive, or calling Peril delusional for her obsession with Clay. Both terms are used incorrectly in a presumably derogatory way.)

It's ableist towards people who have and/or struggle with these conditions, as it continues to spread misinformation and further demonize them.

(Obviously, if it's a headcanon that you've made and you actually know what the conditions mean or you have them yourself, by all means go ahead.)

It doesn't happen often but I've seen it enough times for it to be a bit upsetting.

-Sincerely, someone who suffers from frequent delusions. (I don't have npd or any other personality disorder nor am I psychotic to my knowledge, so if I got something wrong I do apologize.)

.

[growling]

*average self-proclaimed safe space tumblr blog voice* I soooooo support people with schizophrenia that must be so hard to you anyway I just saw some weird looking woman talking to herself right outside my house im fearing for my life should I call the cops. Yeah dude I support all the adhd havers in the chat just try to pay attention when I talk to you it's not that hard it's like the least you could do to show some regard for the other human being in front of you. Like it's fine to have memory problems but why did you forget this one thing in particular that was important to me do you like not care or anything you should try harder. I am one of the only real mental health advocates to still exist in this world I hear your struggles that being said I hope I never get to meet one of those irl sociopaths or people with aspd whatever they call them now they're so freaky and they can blend into society so well you might never know if you're actually face to face with an actual socio i mean person with aspd in the store absolutely one of my biggest fears what if they torture me in their basement. I absolutely empathize with all the people in here suffering from delusions as long as they like, don't actually show it or have one concerning me that'd be highkey uncomfy leave me out of this dude im not talking to you until you get help, anyway my fav character from my anime just presumably died but i still think they actually survived im sooo delulu lol. We should push for more wheelchair accessibility in our cities I agree but like it's so difficult to tell how many people are actually disabled and who are actually faking it, like, ummm why did that "wheelchair" "user" guy stand up just now cover blown lmaoo…. Yeah I support people with facial differences but I still have a right to be disgusted you can't control my emotions anyway can you tag your selfies as #body horror this deeply triggering to me. Speaking of triggering can you also pleaseee hide your scars or at least warn us beforehand jesus do you know how many people genuinely do not want to see it. Here is my extremely fast strobing lights and flashing gifset #epilepsy. Yeah I loveee girls with bpd beautiful princess disorder am i right they're so interesting the stigma sucksssss i'd love to get to be one's favourite person as long as they don't actually have any of those weird or violent symptoms or don't go into any of their "episodes" near me like that's a bit dramatic….. I deeply feel for those who had underwent narcissistic abuse from the hands of an npd I think my shitty ex boyfriend was a narcissist too tbh #surviving narcissism here are 10 signs you are dealing with a narcissist and here's a tutorial on how to trigger a narc crash to epically own them anyway does anyone else think we should start enforcing mandatory castration of all the newly diagnosed narcs like you know what happens when they reproduce right. But I am willing to support them as long as they go to therapy to get that fixed it's just you know. Anyway sometimes hospitalisation is fine if they're genuinely a danger to themselves like what do you want them to go live on the streets or actually get help?? I support all the people dealing with being a professionally diagnosed disordered system and I think it's sooooo terrible how literally 99% of the youth population nowadays is purposefully faking it for attention I did my research (1 minute google search, 2 minute r/fakedisordercringe scrolling session and consulting a single system that agrees with me). It's just not believable to me that there's really that many people with it isn't it supposed to be rare… Also are we really sure all those alleged people in their heads are really real or just their imagination maybe all of them are actually faking it huh food for thought. I am very uncomfortable with nonverbal high support needs ppl actually having sex like consent is supposed to be explicitly verbal only and, are we really sure they can even consent arent they like basically children. You can't call me ableist I'm literally autistic

[musicfeedsmysoul12]

How do the Bakugous handle the fallout of Katsuki ripping off Izuku's necklace in Son of the Sun?

Like, he presumably just did something like telling an abusive partner where their victim is and considering how you write the Bakugou parents with abusive parents...

They are not happy. At all. They have noticed that Bakugou has a degree of entitlement and were already looking into therapy for him as it has slowly gotten worse since going to UA where he isn't instantly on top of the pack, and it's worrying. Mitsuki's mother was diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and she is really worried it's genetic since her son seems to have many of the same tendencies as Mitsuki's mom.

Having Bakugou rip the pendant off for no damn reason? Other then he 100% believed Izuku was cheating? Messed up. Completely in their eyes. They are horrified by their son. If he really had a concern, he could have spoken to a teacher. Maybe Izuku wouldn't have participated in the sports festival but holy shit this was not good.

Added to that, but Bakugou ends up saying some fairly nasty things about the whole situation that they are not okay with. They fully support his demotion to 1C, and set Bakugou up in therapy asap.

[calls-himself-julian]

"He calls himself Julian after the last Roman Emperor. He sheds his skin every sundown and grows a new one by morning. He's ancient and corrupted and not to be trusted."

I found out about this site through a few girls at my school. Seems like it is ripe for potential projects.

I am Julian, a typical Year 11 student. I move a lot so I do not stay in one place for long. If you see a Blonde Brit in a trenchcoat smoking a cig, please tell me. I am seeking him out.

Ooc section! Hi, I'm Granite Mun. I caved and made a Julian blog.

Mun Stuff: Mun is an adult. Main is @granitespider I also run other blogs ( @d3vils-in-th3-d3tails ) So I may not always be super active here. I am also definitely projecting onto this rat, so expect some Canon divergence and/or Headcanon stuff.

Ooc posts out after this one will look like this for the sake of being obvious. They will also be tagged as #Granite Mun Speaking.

Asks will be tagged as #Julian Decrees and Non asks will be tagged as #Julians Projects

Small warnings: This blog is mostly likely going to feature a solid amount of body horror, gore, suicide, and discussions of addictions due to the nature of the character and some of his lore. If you are uncomfortable with any of these subjects, either block the tags: Tw Body horror, Tw gore, Tw suicide, and Tw addiction, or do not interact. This is my only warning for this.

Another warning: Julian had both Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. While I do not have either disorder, I try to portray these accurately. Meaning, Julian will be very manipulative, easy to anger, and will belittle and insult others.

Details about this bastard because I doubt everyone has read every Hellblazer issue.

Age: Approximately 3500; was born in Ancient Babylon.

Name: Unknown real name, refers to himself and uses Julian as her name.

Gender and Pronouns: Genderfluid, He/She

Species: Ekkimu, a shape-shifting demon.

Personality: A sociopath, narcissist, and all-around manipulative and vile person. Willing to lie, cheat, and manipulate his way into advantageous positions. Grows bored easily and uses "projects" (discovering new forms of torture) to entertain her.

Other Notes: Julian shapes shifts every night by having his skin peel off to reveal her new form. The skin she sheds is highly addictive if heated up and placed on someone's skin. Julian most frequently takes the form of a young ~15-16 year old British girl. She frequently changes his appearance to suit her process, though.

Small bit of backstory (I'm going to leave less important stuff out): Julian was born within Ancient Babylon to a Whore of Ishtar, who wished to make a demon that would bring misery to humanity. Julian met Constantine and bargained with the magician to try and make him a servant. During this, Constantine eventually slips a love potion into Julian's drink. After Constantine burns his "keepsakes" after refusing Julian's offer of marriage because of the love potion, Julian murders Constantine's girlfriend Phoebe. With the love potion still affecting the demon and Constantine as the prime suspect in the murder, Julian confesses to the crime and goes to prison to save Constantine. In prison, Julian completely took it over, using it as a personal playground for pain and torment, which Constantine eventually stopped before letting prisoners presumably kill the demon. While Constantine was dead for a time, Julian assumed his appearance and even slept with Constantine's then wife Epiphany before being "killed" by her and Constantine's nephew. After over a decade in Hell, Julian has returned to the mortal plan for new projects and for a bit of vengeance.

[antitheticallyargumentative]

I’m going to attempt to explain why the ending of Ted Lasso re: Jamie and his dad, bothers me so much. I know a lot of other people have made posts about this, and excellent ones, too, but I also have a lot of thoughts. These are just my opinions. Feel free to disagree. Feel free to discuss with me why you disagree. I love respectful conversations.

 This is gonna be long. sorry guys.

tw/cw- James Tartt Sr., abuse, The Amsterdam Thing

not detailed, but they are mentioned. proceed with caution and take care of yourself, please. <3

It is not the decision to have Jamie reach out to his dad that I hate. It is not even the decision to put Jamie’s dad in rehab (though I do think it was… A Choice.) To me, it’s very unsurprising that Jamie would try to reach out to his dad. Not just because of who he is as a character, but because of what this kind of lifelong abuse does to a person’s psyche. A lot of kids who come from abusive or neglectful homes have an incredibly hard time cutting off their parents. Even if they’re scared of them, even if they’re angry with them, there is still a deeply ingrained need to be loved, that maybe this time it will be different. They’ll mean it when they say they’ve changed. They’ll love me. Going no contact is fucking hard. It’s also fucking dangerous. As much as Jamie says he’s done everything he has to spite his dad, there is a part of him that deeply, desperately craves James’s approval. Of course he would visit him in rehab, because, if he’s in rehab, he’s trying, right? And maybe this time it will be different. 

But it won’t be. Because James Tartt has a pattern. A pattern of playing super dad, presumably where he cleans up his act and “makes an effort” with Jamie. Does father-son things with him, talks to him outside of asking for game tickets or telling him he played like shit (I’m hypothesizing here), lulls him into a false sense of security. And then what happens? Well, things like Amsterdam happen. And I highly doubt that was the only time he pulled that act. He likely also pulled it when he first came back into Jamie’s life, and probably other times after Amsterdam, too. What he doesn’t do, ever, though, is apologize, or take accountability for his past actions. Because James is a narcissist. At least, that’s what I would say. He feeds off Jamie’s fame and success to make himself feel bigger, important, entitled. And narcissists lack empathy. They struggle to take responsibility for their actions. They’re also, commonly, very manipulative. 

James is not an abusive piece of shit because he’s an alcoholic. He is both an abusive piece of shit AND an alcoholic. Not only does acting like he was horrid because he was drunk perpetuate the stigma of substance use disorders, it also completely takes away accountability.  James going to rehab does not change what he did. It does not fix what he’s done. It does not mean that he is magically going to win father of the year because he got sober. More likely, he’s going to continue to the cycle. I truly do not see a way in which we get to the happy ending of the show. Which brings me to my final point. 

This is not a happy ending. Jamie going to see his dad does not fix things. Jamie forgiving his dad does not take away from his trauma. Jamie should not have to forgive his dad, not for James, not for himself, not for anyone. The thing that bothers me most is that the show plays this scene like it’s closure. Like everything is OK now, and they have a good relationship, there’s no fallout, no consequences, nothing left the heal. And I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. 

The things our parents do and say to us cut deep, at least in my experience. It doesn’t matter if they apologize, it doesn’t matter if they learn and grow, it doesn’t matter if we forgive them. That hurt stays. It sticks. You remember it. You feel it. There is no way in hell that seeing his dad wouldn’t be incredibly difficult for Jamie— just judging from what we’ve seen in the show. There’s no way it wouldn’t bring up all the trauma James has put him through, even repressed. It would not be easy. It would not be happy. And I don’t think it would be healthy. 

Whatever Jamie eventually decides to do regarding his relationship with his dad, whether its cutting him off or choosing to forgive him, which personally, I don’t think he should (but I also know that cutting off a parent is no easy feat), it would take time, it would take effort, it would be a struggle. It would take actually working through the years of abuse and trauma caused by his dad. And we don’t get any of that. We get “forgive <3” and problem solved! And honestly, I think that’s a dangerous message to be passing out. 

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. (Hehe, get it?) 

[doawkturnedaround]

Front & Back covers of the DOAWK fanfic/LLB I'm currently working on. DOAWK Turned Around takes place 5 years after Greg puts down his final middle school diary. Greg is now 17 and facing a recent diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, decides to make some changes in his life. He is a junior at Crossland highschool and is still best friends with Rowley; but their friend group has expanded to include Chirag Gupta, Holly Hills, & Albert (Al) Sandy. Manny is 8 years old. Rodrick is 21, and presumably still in Löded Diper, but he left home 2 years ago and Greg hasn't heard from him since.

There will be various positive and negative themes covered in this fanfic, including but not limited to:

Drug Use, Underage Drug Use, Suicidal Ideation, Mental Illness, Homophobia, Acceptance, Bullying, Healing, Growth, Coping, Coming Out, High School, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional Abuse, Self Harm, Friendships, Romance

Events in this fanfic will reference the original DOAWK novels, the DOAWK movies, as well as elements of pop culture, memes and other media. I intend to keep this story relatively canon compliant in structure, personality types, and awareness of the events of the actual books, but there are some parts of this story that WILL be non-canon and potentially ignore prior DOAWK events. I'll answer any questions about this along the way :)

All of the illustrations created for the interior pages of this book, as well as sneak peaks, qna, and Turned Around canon art that I post is created solely by me. I will have a watermark on every illustration. If I post something not created by me, the original creator/artist will be credited, ALWAYS.

Thanks for reading! I'm super excited to share more on this project as I continue to work on it

<3 TA

[amoresdahlia]

You're The Light In My Deepest, Darkest Hour

John Munch x Dahlia

John's plot in Legacy (S2 Ep 4) with a twist.

I'm posting this here, but it's also on my AO3 :)

one | two

“...If Skoda’s right, it’s more than need. I think she’s jonesing for a sympathy fix.” John had said during a briefing with the rest of the SVU squad, along with Alex and Cragen. Dahlia sighed softly, knowing that John was right. Cragen looked at her for a second, before turning his attention to Much. “And what do you propose?”

The room falls silent, then John shrugs his shoulders. “Feed the junkie.”

Cragen dismisses everyone from his office, sending Fin to call Jamie to the precinct. Dahlia heads up the stairs in the squad room and takes a deep breath, running her fingers through her hair in an attempt to calm down. This case felt all too much for her, hitting a little too close to home. She sat on one of the chairs, head in her hands as she took a few quick breaths, gasping in slight startle when Olivia took a seat next to her. “You look rough.” Olivia said, hoping to ease the air for a moment. Dahlia chuckled, shaking her head. “Thanks, it’s a trend I’m hoping to start.” She shot back with no malice in her voice. Olivia smiled softly, but she could tell Dahlia seemed to be barely holding on by a thread. “What’s got you like this, hm?”

Dahlia carefully thought over her next words. “When I was young, my mother started beating me. It started with a few slaps, and it had escalated into being thrown into a closet for hours after she would hurl anything she could at me.” She began with a whisper. “Across the street from me lived a boy, possibly in his late teens. I would see him get home from school every day, and I would stand outside on my porch watching him. I don’t know why I did that. Maybe I hoped he would notice my scars. My bruises. He would glance my way, but always just went inside.” She took in a shuddering breath when she felt Olivia rubbing her shoulder; a silent affirmation. Dahlia continued, “Some time later, my mother threw me out the window. I was taken to the hospital, but then my father came in with a random man, and they told me they would keep me in hiding for a few years. I heard them talk to the doctors, then I was presumed dead.

My mother had been diagnosed with a narcissistic disorder long before I was born. When she gave birth to me, it just made things worse. Pair that with postpartum stress disorder, well…” Dahlia let out a wry laugh, rubbing at her eyes. Olivia said nothing as she wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “They held my funeral the following week. I never heard anything from my mother again, aside from when they told me she was put away in an asylum of some sort. Then I was told when she died back in ‘90.” She sighed. “So I came out of hiding, resumed my identity, and joined the precinct soon after.

I was angry at that boy. For years, up until I was in my teens, I was mad. I kept thinking, if he had just told one person… I would not have had to hide. I couldn’t see my father. I was sent to live with an estranged aunt. She was wonderful, but I missed my father so much. And I hated that boy for too long. As I got older, though, I understood.” Dahlia looked at Olivia with a slight shrug. “Teenage angst is a terrible thing.”

They sat there for a bit, enjoying the silence and each other’s company for a while more, when Cragen called up to them. “Benson, Myers. Jamie’s here.” Olivia and Dahlia gave a knowing look at each other before heading downstairs, bracing themselves for whatever was in store for the squad.

—

“I just wanted her to stop crying. Is that too much to ask?”

John had been the one to talk to Jamie. It was logical, considering she’d been paging him quite often. Jamie’s confession left everyone feeling nauseous and disturbed, but the words clearly affected him in a way no one seemed to understand. Except Dahlia. Olivia watched as Dahlia stormed out of Cragen’s office, ignoring the voices calling out her name. A folded piece of paper seemed to slip out of Dahlia’s pocket, catching Elliot’s attention as Fin went to follow her. He picked it up and opened it up, showing it to Olivia.

The paper was a picture. It was Dahlia and who she assumed was her father. They were smiling and happy. She pocketed the picture, watching as John left the interrogation room in a daze, slowly walking out, ignoring Cragen’s congratulatory words. Fin came back, a gloomy expression on his face. “She went to go see Emily. I guess the case brought back unpleasant memories.” Olivia nodded in understanding, whispering that she was gonna talk to John as she grabbed her coat.

Up on the rooftop, a few words were exchanged between the two, with Olivia commenting on the fact that he really took a chance by lying to Jamie about Emily having come out of her coma. John didn’t look at Olivia as he remarked that Jamie didn’t care about any of her kids. How the scared four year old reminded him of a child who lived across the street from him.

A little girl who stood out on her front porch everyday, looking at him with sad and lost eyes, like she was waiting for him when he got home from school. Like she was trying to tell him something, but that he was too full of his own teenage crap to pay attention. How he came home one day, and she wasn’t there. Instead, he found out how her mother had thrown her out a plate glass window.

“Went to the funeral. Saw her dad. It’s the first time I saw a grown man cry.” Olivia had been listening intently, eyes widening ever so slightly as the story started sounding familiar.

“What happened to her mother?”

“They sent her to a sanitarium.” His voice had begun to waver ever so slightly. It grew tighter, almost angry, when he said that she had told his own mother she didn’t understand what the fuss was about. “She was the one who had to get a new window.” His resolve crumbling, he played the times he’d come home to look at the porch, swearing up and down that he saw that little girl again, looking at her with that look.

“I almost let her down again.” He finished with a sniffle. Olivia brought out the picture, hesitating for a moment, before taking a step forward and showing it to him. “Was this the little girl?”She asked, her own eyes having gone misty. John took a good hard look at the photo, his breath catching in his throat. “How do you have that?” His voice cracked, just enough to break Olivia’s heart. He looked at her with a look she’d never seen on him. “She’s with Emily, Munch. Go to her.”

The drive to the hospital was a blur. Who’s with Emily? Why was Olivia being cryptic? Why did she encourage him to go after this mystery person -not like he wasn’t already planning on it, he had swiped Emily’s copy of Oh, The Places You’ll Go–, and more importantly, why was she with Emily?

John loves to think he’s a rational man. Sure, he can be a tad bit mean at times, but it’s part of his charm. That aside, he prides himself on being level-headed and mentally prepared for anything life and the job threw at him. Though, as soon as he entered Emily’s hospital room, nothing could have prepared him

Dahlia. She's sitting there, singing softly to Emily. He remains confused for a moment when he realizes Olivia knew Dahlia would be here.

Could this really be..?

When John quietly shuts the door, Dahlia sits up straighter, eyes widening in surprise. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were coming.” She started to get up, grabbing her jacket. John held a hand up to her, motioning her to stop. “Don’t. Stay, please.” He whispered, partly to keep the peace in the room. He motioned her to put her seat next to his. Dahlia didn’t hesitate to do so.

They sat in silence for a while, when John looked at her. The longer he stared, the more he could see that face. The face that had haunted him for years. Dahlia felt him staring, so she turned to him with raised eyebrows. “Are you okay?” She whispered. John opened his mouth, an automatic “yes” on the tip of his tongue. He shut his mouth and reached into the inside of his jacket and pulled out Emily’s Dr. Seuss book. Dahlia smiled in amusement, ready to -gently- tease him for being such a softy when her own words died in her throat when he pulled out the picture. They looked at each other with wide eyes, realization dawning on her face.

John feels everything from back then begin to resurface. The girl he thought he’d let down sat right next to him. He grabbed her hands, squeezing them tight. “I don’t understand, I thought you died.” John started, his voice losing composure again, but Dahlia shook her head. “I promise I’ll explain.” She whispered, her own voice sounding like it was on the verge of breaking. He quietly pulled her onto his lap, the ache in his heart settling just a bit. Dahlia made no attempt to pull away, instead let herself be in his arms.

John opened the book to where Emily had set her bookmark and set it on Dahlia’s lap, resting his chin on her shoulder.

“...But on you will go, though the weather be foul. On you will go, though your enemies prowl. On you will go, though the Hakken-Kraks howl. Onward up many a frightening creek; though your arms may get sore, and your sneakers may leak. On and on you will hike, and I know you'll hike far. And face up to your problems, whatever they are...”

[brograndpa]

okay but gale really IS a beautiful princess with a disorder you're so right

Thank you so much for giving me a chance to talk about how BPD Gale is literally so real.

While you can easily make the claim that Mystra is Gale's FP, and how he both idolizes and reviles her within the same breath depending on his rapidly changing mood, there's so much more to it than that.

There's the subject of his alignment. How at first he seems like a genuinely good guy, constantly giving approval for doing kind acts towards others. The more you delve into his reasons as for why, though, it quickly becomes apparent that he's far more neutral in standing. Doing good acts is something he hopes will bring him closer to Mystra once again, but more importantly, being good is not necessary to keep him at your side. You can be an awful, deranged person who attacks refugees just because you can, and so long as you convince him he'll be lost without you, he'll stay.

He is desperate to be accepted, and yet he is the first to volunteer his own dismissal upon learning about the orb. He believes whole-heartedly that he is unlovable and not worth expending any effort on, so he tires himself out in trying to be someone reliable and useful. Without any means of proving himself, Gale truly thinks he's not worth anything. That's why he doesn't fight for you if you break up with him. He assumes any relationship he enters is as doomed as the one he had with Mystra, not because of anything wrong with you, of course. He assumes himself to be the problem even when there isn't one. He genuinely thinks it's inevitable that he will be left alone by everyone he cares about because he's done nothing to deserve them in his eyes.

You can presume a lot of that has to come from his upbringing. The fact that he was such a troublemaker in his youth, possessive to the point of narcissistically believing he had the right to a book he didn't buy or a staff he was forbidden from wielding, all point to him trying to find purpose to his talents and the expectations that came with them. His ego inflates the moment he comes near a source of power he thinks he can control, for no other purpose than the belief that he will be revered and respected when he does eventually tame it. His ambition is nothing more than a means to impress the one he loves most, and I truly mean this when I say there is no way God Gale doesn't become your personal stalker should you refuse to enter the heavens with him.

All and all, Gale is a pretty classic borderline. His contradictory narcissism and self-loathing come together to create a man dying to please yet only out of a sense of self-preservation. He is desperate for a reason to understand why he exists, and his only means of finding peace in that split existence is for someone who truly loves him to say he is enough and to treat him like he's enough.

Edit:

But like come on. You can see it. The way he snaps at you and holds the breakup over your head just to feel in control over it. He doesn't even allow you to call the breakup a mistake. The fact that you were ever willing to break his heart over your indecision is too much, and you're no god to him. Not anymore.

[metalheadsagainstfascism]

Hi, could you please explain to me the following terms: "Psychopath", "Narcissist", "Sociopath", etc?

Up until now, I've ignorantly used these words to describe someone who is self-prioritizing, without empathy or compassion, and antagonistic towards the boundaries of others.

I want to be better informed in order to avoid repeating this mistake from now onwards; Most of my search results present unreliable information; which is how I came to fall for the misconception in the first place.

I am mentally disabled myself, but completely out of the loop- mental health is stigmatized where I come from. I'd like to understand the distinction between the terms listed above, and how they came to be associated with negative records.

First of all I'd like to thank @bfpnola because I got this information from people diagnosed with these conditions on the bfpnola discord server.

Second of all, I'd like to say I've not been diagnosed with these conditions nor do I presume to have them. So I do ask you seek out people with antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder who talk about the stigmas against their conditions to hear them out. I'd suggest a tiktoker I used to follow but people with these conditions tend to get banned quickly on tiktok due to abelism.

I'm just trying to explain where I'm coming from when I say it's abelist to use these terms.

Now to continue with the answer. Sociopath and Psychopath are outdated terms. They used to be diagnoses that were in the DSM, but the terminology has been changed to antisocial personality disorder. People with antisocial personality disorder do not experience empathy. Like... at all. And that's what people are trying to attack when people call someone a psychopath. However, that implies an incorrect definition of empathy.

Empathy is the ability to feel and understand others pain. People assume that means they don't care at all about others. They are very capable of caring about other people and forming close emotional bonds. They are also very capable of being protective of those they care about. They just don't feel empathy. Furthermore, there's people that experience empathy that legitimately just don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves. Just because they feel others pain doesn't mean that they give a shit.

And attacking someone's lack empathy is often used to stigmatize other conditions that can cause low empathy like autism, Borderline, narcissistic personality disorder, schizoeffective disorder, and there's probably a bunch more I'm forgetting.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder. People think a narcissist is someone that thinks the world revolves around them. But based on what I've heard people diagnosed with the mental health disorder have said, it's a deep insecurity rooted in being raised with their caretakers making them feel deeply insecure. They compensate by masking with self-aggrandizing behaviors. And that's why people think people with NPD think the world's revolves around them. Because they're experiencing external symptoms with no awareness of the internal monolog in their mind that leads to those symptoms. Which is why I keep saying only a psychiatrist or therapist can diagnose people. Because even if you grew up with this person, you won't have the connection with them that a therapist will have to learn their internal right process.

And a lot of the people that are incorrectly called Narcissistic actually have BPD. (I've seen an overwhelming number of people in response to these posts say "I've experienced Narcissistic Abuse. My abuser had BPD.")

Borderline Personality Disorder is COMPLETELY different from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder is the result of an insecure attachment style from the caretakers as a child. This results in unstable relationship styles as an adult. They like someone and develop a "favorite person". Which sounds really cute but can actually be really traumatizing for the person with this disorder. Then they do something called "splitting" in which their views of the people they care about change. They feel the person is pulling away or rejecting them (even if it's untrue). This leads to dangerous behavior like threats of suicide, binge drinking, taking drugs, excessive shopping, gambling, passive aggression, etc.

And the sad thing about NPD and BPD both is the fact that a lot of the negative stigma surrounding them is due to how they externally react to the things the inner demons they have in their head.

Now I know someone is going to say "You can't let people use their mental health as an excuse for shitty behavior". This isn't letting people use their mental health to excuse shitty behavior. I'm saying you can't use mental health terms to describe shitty behavior. A self absorbed asshole is nothing more than a self absorbed asshole. It's not crazy. It's not psychotic. It's not narcissistic. It's an asshole. No more no less.

-fae

[hasbrotoys]

god I'm tired of the this trend where people pathologize the action's of their abusive parents in order to explain them. my sister said my mom was a narcissist and I looked at her and said literally nothing she did was because of any kind of presumed narcissism, she wasn't horrible to me because of a mental illness, I don't even think my mom is mentally ill or has a personality disorder. I think she is a bad person who willingly went out of her way to do selfish and bad things to me because she had power over me because that's what her own mother did to her and she just replicated that because she didn't know other ways to raise her kids. that's literally it. sometimes people do bad things to you and it's not because of some scary and nefarious disorder that makes people Evil (NPD isn't that), regular people are just capable of great harm to one another. as all humans have experienced in the hundreds of thousands of years we've existed. and you know what. it sucks.

[shakesymbol]

This person that caused me to be thinking about this on a workday is weaponizing therapy talk, but as much at themselves as outwards to the people in the fandom we are all in together.

I mean, mental illness symptoms overlap a lot, but if you’re not diagnosed with something, and you have a lot of overlapping symptoms with several disorders, picking the most aesthetic/sympathetic condition in the batch without doing anything to manage the symptoms, what does that serve aside from your own victimhood?

I guess it sounds better to say that you have BPD instead of admitting that you’re a narcissist. But then you work on neither sets of those issues and continue to treat everyone in fandom spaces (and presumably real life - since you talk about being not having close friends in your local area) like tools.

it’s true, you’ve never asked me personally for money, even though you made your money struggles very clear in group chats, but I think the emotional intimacy I provided, as myself and as my characters was actually more valuable to you than money. Even now, I cannot be sure if I was an actual living, breathing person to you, (even though we met in person and spent hours walking and talking and staring at the same sky) or if I was just some sort of algorithmic series of outputs.

I guess based upon the way you talked about me when you thought I’d never see it, it was somewhere in between?

it’s a bit hypocritical of me to say that every day the hold you had on me slowly breaks, one strand of a spiderweb at a time, when I created this throwaway just to toss my feelings out. Just writing it out feels like excising the wounds I’ve been silently carrying since… idk, October? November? I don’t want to look at my DMs to remember how you made me feel.

[tagdrop]

Name. Mariya Konstantinovna Rostova

Nicknames: Elizabeth keen, number 1, n-13.

Birthplace: Moscow, Russia, USSR

Ethnictiy: Slavic

Birthday: December 28th 1985

Species. Human

Gender: Cis Female

Sexuality: Bisexual

Zodiac: Pisces

Pets: Beligian Malanoise: Kate

Height: 1.78

Hair: Brunet, wavy

Eyes: Blue

Accessoires: Bracelets, golden necklaces, her wedding ring on a necklace

Accent: Russian

Flaws: Cruel, Abusive, Arrogant, Greedy

Positives: Hardworking, Tough, Curious, Perfectionistic, Gentle, Funny, Enduring

Negatives: Possessive, Strict, Violent, Narcissistic, Undecided, Manipulative

Neutral: Arrogant, Eloquent, Boisterous, Calculating, Controlling, Hedonistic, Impulsive

Family:

Mother: Yekaterina Dominiknova Volkova †

Father: Raymond Reddington †

Great Grandmother: Yelena Volkova

Stepmother: Naomi Highland †

Adoptive Father: Sam Scott †

Adoptive Father: Konstantin Rostov †

Grandfather: Dominik Volkov †

Maternal Grandfather: Dominik Volkov †

Maternal Grandmother: Virginia King †

Adoptive Grandmother: Agnes Scott †

Adoptive Aunt: June Scott †

Ex husband/s: Nik Korpal † Thomas Vincent Keen †

Education: Red banner institute. FORMERLY ( 1989 - 2002 ) Psychology student., FORMERLY ( 2002 - 2009 ) Forensic psychologist and counselor for the FBI'S mobile emergency unit. FORMERLY ( 2007 - 2008 ) . Quantico student, FORMERLY. ( 2009 - 2011 ) Criminal profiler. formerly ( 2011 - 2013 ). FBI agent. FORMERLY ( 2013 - 2015 ).  head of the reddington task force. FORMERLY ( 2013 - 2015 ). Informant. ( 2016 - 2021 ) Sleeper agent of the kgb/fsb. ( 1989 - CURRENTLY ). Don of the elizabeth keen syndicate., CURRENTLY. ( 2015 - now )

Likes: Card Games, Magic Tricks, Walks

Dislikes: Dishonesty, Liars, Lying, Secrets, Silence, Being treated like a child

Temperament: Choleric in Childhood, Extremely Choleric in Adulthood

Alignment: Chaotic Evil

MBTI: ISTP

Diagnosis: Antisocial Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

BIOGRAPHY:

Yekaterina Volkova marries Konstantin Rostov and takes his name. One year old Mariya spends a unknown time in Takoma Park House. Kathryn starts working for Yekaterina as a nanny. Mariya isn’t two years old yet. It’s presumed that Kathryn was sent by Konstantin to watch over his family. Somewhere that month, Yekatarina kills a Soviet agent in their kitchen, Kate finds out Yekaterina works for the KGB. Mariya gets placed into a spy school. In Autumn of 1990:  , RRR kidnaps Mariya from the Summer Palace in Cape Breton. Yekaterina informs Fitch that RRR has abducted Mariya and convinces Fitch to discredit RRR by framing him. They fabricate evidence against him. Yekaterina gets Mariya back, there is a fight and Mariya kills RRR. The beach house burns to the ground and Yekaterina takes the body and buries it somewhere. The archive is put into Liz. Two days later, RRR is reported missing by his wife and she and their daughter Jennifer are placed in protective custody/ WITSEC. Ian Garvey is assigned to their case. Jennifer grows up terrified of Reddington, turns to Garvey as a foster father. Mariya and Yekaterina hide in motels with Kathyrn. [ MARCH 1991 ] :  , Yekaterina walks into the ocean in Cape May. She survives and contacts Ilya. Ilya makes a plan to take RRR’s money and flee with Yekaterina. Mariya is given into the care of the Red Banner Institute. This is the last time she sees her mother. Mariya spends nine years at the school, graduates at age fifteen and is then given in the care of Sam Milhoan. She gets adopted by him and is given the name Elizabeth Scott Milhoan. In 2002 rob drugstores together. Back at home with Sam, she goes to college and plans to pursue a career in the law field. She becomes bored in their house and due to Sam’s neglect, she becomes a criminal rather quickly. Two years later, she starts to work at a mechanic shop, part time, and meets James ( Who she is claimed is named Ronnie to Dr Creel. ) They robbed stores, cracked cars. Liz gets addicted to drugs. James cheats on her. She almost kills herself due to an overdose, by accident. Liz finishes college, starts her master degree in psychology. Liz gets depressed over James, who had cheated on her and attempts suicide, not by accident. A few months into the year, Liz graduates as a psychologist. In December, she begins to work as a psychologist in the Mobile Emergency Psych Unit in New York for the FBI. Red hires Tom. On July 10th, Liz and Tom meet in a café in Gorgetown, their first date. Tom falls in love with Liz, Liz falls in love with Tom, Red fires Tom in 2011. He is hired by Milos Pavel Kinsky and continues his life with Elizabeth. Liz and Tom get married. They move to New York in 2012. In 2013, they move to DC. There Liz starts her course at Quantico to become a field agent. The course takes 20 weeks. It’s her first day as a profiler, she oversleeps. Her husband and her are on their way to work when two FBI vans and a helicopter arrive outside and escort Elizabeth to the Fbi. At the headquarters she is interviewed by Harold Cooper about Raymond Reddington who has chosen her as his intermediary, to her surprise. They begin to work together, she doesn’t trust him. During lunch, she calls Tom and tells him she won’t make it to their adoption agency appointment.

When she comes home later, she finds decorations, saying ‘it’s a girl’ implying their adoption went through. She is overwhelmed and doesn’t realise Tom is bleeding and chained to a chair. Zamani appears and stabs Tom in the chest, allowing him to flee and prevent Liz from following him. Tom is taken to the hospital and Liz storms into Red’s hotel room, stabs him in the neck and demands answers. At home she finds that she can’t remove the blood from the carpet and rips the carpet off, discovers a secret floor storage with a box. The box contains passports of her husband, a gun and money. She falls into a coma for ten months. Reddington tells her that Tom died. Eleven months later, Liz moves to Alaska to mourn her husband’s death. She wants to start fresh. She uses the name Grace Talbot and steals a dog from a shelter, names her Kate. One day she finds a dying man outside of her house, she meets his alleged friends soon. Said friends are revealed to be members of the Carlucci crime family. They kill Liz’s dog. She hunts them like fair game, ruthlessly slaughtering one by one. She then dropps Elroy off at the hospital like a Christmas gift. She returns home and tells Reddington that she killed some men and that it felt good. She searches for Oleander, a dangerous operative, finds out it’s her grandfather. She threatens Reddington, goes on a hunt to find the bag, it seems like they parted ways forever. She stages her own abduction with help of Sutton Ross. Let’s herself get beaten bloody by him so she can get Reddingon’s secret. Emotionally manipulates him. She hallucinates Tom again and starts to work on a plan with Jennifer. She kills Robert Navarro, stabs him with a shard of glass, later dissolves him in acid. She and Jennifer agree that they shouldn’t go to the cops about this. Uupon being back, Liz founds her own syndicate to bring Reddington down while still working with the FBI. It’s clear that she suffered a psychotic break, she hallucinates people, especially Kathryn. Reddington gets arrested, he believes he was tipped, Liz visits him in prison, unbeknownst to him that she was behind it, manipulating answers out of him. She continues to work in the task force while still working with Jennifer behind their back. Liz finds and tracks down Klepper and holds him at gunpoint. They kill him after his request and kidnap a woman off the street. At takeoff, a van approaches and kidnaps Jennifer. Liz stuggles with the woman, shoots her in defense. It’s on February 22nd that Jennifer decides to stop helping Liz. She accepts it, promising her it will end. But of course, nothing ends.Reddington is set to be executed, Liz visits him one last time. Although content with him dying, she tries to help him.

[alarajrogers]

Actually, I think you may be on to something.

I've had difficulty with a lot of your posts on this topic in the past, because narcissistic abuse is different from other forms of domestic abuse -- not necessarily worse, mind you, but there are specific toxic elements that aren't usually found in other forms of domestic abuse. But when you laid it all out like this, I realized the connection.

Abusive narcissists behave as if society has granted them a position of extreme privilege over their targets that, in fact, society has not.

We expect a government to deny that an atrocity happened. We do not expect our spouse to deny that they did a specific thing. We (nowadays, if we've been paying attention) expect cops to lie about how an encounter went down. We do not expect parents to do this. We expect bosses to exploit workers; we do not expect friends to exploit friends.

Narcissists who abuse people do so in a way that presumes upon privilege that we don't actually grant to people in their position. Except for the limited set of "parents are allowed to commit violence and demand respect from children, without reciprocation", none of the described behaviors are considered normal from parents, and absolutely none of them are expected normal behavior from siblings, lovers, spouses or friends. They are behavior expected from people who have extreme levels of authority and control... and, in fact, a lot of society does not believe that those levels of authority and control are appropriate from anyone. Plenty of people talk about "narcissistic abuse" and then also talk about police brutality and penchant for lying.

Parents are not expected to behave toward children like politicians trying to cover something up, and claim a thing never happened when it did, very clearly, a short while ago. Parents are not expected to exploit children for cash. People who do these things to their children are seen as abusive, full stop, whether they are seen as narcissists or not. Parents are granted absurd levels of rights to punish children, including lashing out when children express a need they don't want to fulfill, but a lot of people do not think this is good parenting even if they're unwilling to acknowledge that it's abuse.

I do not believe all narcissists commit abuse. I do believe that when they do, there is a discernable pattern to it which is different from other forms of abuse committed by people close to you. The fact that cops freely lie, dish out harsh punishments and expect to be treated with kid gloves in return, and in general behave as if they are untouchable and can do anything they want to you... that's certainly awful, but if your wife behaves that way, that's very different than a cop doing it. And while parents are granted a lot of leeway to punish, they are not treated like it's okay for them to lie about what you did or what they did. Everyone knows a politician will do that, but most people don't have to deal with a politician every single day.

The big problem with the concept of "narcissistic abuse" is not that narcissists have no pattern when they commit abuse, and it's not that other roles and relationships can commit abuses of the same type. Really, it's the idea that all narcissists are abusive and that the term is basically equivalent to Bad Person Disorder, or that every time certain types of abuse happen it's because of narcissism. There are entire Christian sects whose belief in strict authoritarian parenting results in certain abusive behaviors that narcissists might also engage in, and it's important to know the difference between "abuse by an authoritarian" and "abuse by a narcissist." Among other things, the abuse by an authoritarian often comes with so much social support for the authoritarian that people are much more likely to end up as authoritarian abusers themselves, because they think that is what's normal and expected.

Ableist Shithead: "But narcissists have specific patterns. They abuse people in unique ways."

Narcissist: "Name one."

Ableist Shithead: "Narcissists hurt you then act like they're the victim when you fight back. They only ever tell the story in a way that makes them a hero or a victim."

Narcissist: "You just perfectly described the police."

Ableist Shithead: "Narcissists manipulate you into begging for their validation while they treat you like garbage."

Narcissist: "That's considered normal when bosses do it to employees."

Ableist Shithead: "Narcissists use you for everything you have then leave you for dead when they can't use you anymore."

Narcissist: "Like when a tenant works long hours buying a landlord's house for them then the landlord raises the rent and evicts the tenant when they can't pay it anymore?"

Ableist Shithead: "Narcissists hurt you because they refuse to heal from their own trauma. They think you deserve whatever was done to them."

Narcissist: "So, every parent who spanks and everyone who opposes student loan forgiveness because they already paid theirs?"

Ableist Shithead: "Narcissists regularly do things to you that they'd consider a horrible disrespect if you did it to them once."

Narcissist: "What about parents who yell at their children and whoop their ass if they yell back? That's extremely normalized. Parents openly brag about doing that."

Ableist Shithead: "Narcissists cover up the abuse they inflict so it looks like the you're lashing out over nothing."

Narcissist: "So, everyone who tries to cover up the history of racism in order to make it look like black people are rioting over nothing?"

Narcissist: "There's no such thing as narcissistic abuse. Every single pattern that you blame on narcissism is considered normal when people with the right amount of privilege do it. And you're completely okay with that until a narcissist starts doing the same thing. Then you suddenly start seeing the abuser as evil and caring about the trauma that the victims suffer.

[valkyrien]

I’m Frightened

My mother became enraged earlier while I was cooking at what appeared to be nothing, left the house driving in what I can only describe as an extremely unsafe manner, came back, and began to scream vulgar abuse at my father, throwing things around the kitchen and at my father generally.

Then she spat in his face.

For days now she has been talking about how she’s concerned she may be infected with coronavirus, yet she spat in my father’s face. The fact she’s been saying that as a manipulative tool, which is the case, is irrelevant; it is unacceptable to do that.

She continued to scream and shout, slam things, and throw things.

She made statements regarding the household arrangements which are categorically untrue. She accused my father of awful behaviours which are the very ones she herself has been exhibiting now for many, many years and which have only grown worse, especially in the last three years since my father realised the patterns of abuse she was perpetrating and stopped catering to her every whim and called her on some of her many lies which for years have been harming the family.

She ranted at length about how unfair it was that she is no longer being catered to.

When she was told - calmly - that these things were all things she herself was guilty of and that this was her projecting all her own unacceptable behaviour on to my father, she became even angrier, despite that being entirely the case.

She stormed into her room, continued to throw things, kicked the doors, and kept shouting. All of it was vile, all of it was her accusing my father of behaviour and actions which she has been the one guilty of now for years.

My father did not go in her room. He stayed in the hall, then went in the bathroom with my dog, who was hiding and terrified, because he hates shouting and arguments, seeing as he’s a rescue dog who’s had two homes before us, at least one of which was physically abusive to an extent we can’t be fully sure of. My father tried to console my dog.

My mother then shouted, ‘Oh yeah, go and seek comfort with your oldest (child).’

This is the kind of thing she periodically says when she’s feeling very nasty indeed. She insinuates that there is something ‘unnatural’ about mine and my father’s relationship. She has made such insinuations in so many words many times, even to my sister, because she wishes to undermine us both, and particularly to hurt me, and hopes it will drive a wedge between me and my father as well as discredit anything we may say to anyone against her.

There is obviously nothing wrong with my relationship with my father. We are close because when I was an infant he was my main caregiver, my mother not being interested in the work involved in a child, and when my sister was born my mother made it very clear she now had a new child to love and shape in her own image as I was a disappointment to her, and did her damnedest to keep my sister to herself and away from both me and my father, meaning I essentially never had two proper parents. My mother has been abusive towards me and otherwise disinterested in me all my life.

My father told her in this instance that he was in the bathroom consoling the dog, and asked her what she was on about.

My mother said she ‘Knew what we were up to,’ and that ‘It’s always the two of you’ in the nastiest, most disgusting way you can imagine that said.

My father asked her to please keep me out of this unpleasantness of hers.

My mother then backtracked and started insisting ‘I never said anything about our (oldest child)! I never mentioned (me)!’

When my father told her that was utter nonsense, she then started claiming she was referring to him, because according to her, he refers to himself in the third person.

This is not true.

My father said as much.

My father also at this point asked her whether she had taken anything or drunk anything she ought not have, since she was making no sense.

He also asked her to calm down before she did something foolish.

She turned up the screaming again, demanding a divorce.

This is also something she does periodically. She never actually registers for one - it’s simple, you do it on the government’s website, the spouse gets an email, then the spouse signs off on having seen it, and it goes from there, and the registration costs roughly £50 or so - because she knows she has it good here, where no one ever asks her to lift a finger, everything is paid for, and the only thing that isn’t being done for her anymore is five-star-hotel-style laundry service and meal delivery. She obviously still has access to the laundry room, where everything is paid for and maintained by my father and myself, and the kitchen, where groceries and meals are provided and then scorned by her or complained about but still eaten although not appreciated in any way.

Essentially, she’s angry that she’s not being fully catered to any longer by slavishly adoring subservient staff in family form, and every so often when she’s been visiting a little too often with her two friends who both drink heavily (something my mum should not do at all since she has a damaged liver and cannot handle her alcohol) and encourage her to do the same, or when she’s been once again taking medicine she should not have and has no prescription for.

One of her friends gives her strong painkillers her liver can’t really handle, and also prednisone, which does not agree with her, especially when she’s been drinking. Prolonged use of prednisone has the very common side effects of mania, psychosis, and difficulty regulating mood. My mother’s doctor does not prescribe her prednisone any longer to avoid this and some of the other nasty physical side effects of prolonged use, but my mother has been acquiring and taking it for years anyway. Thusly she has many of these side effects. She refuses however to admit the two things may be connected.

Recently she has been both visiting her drinking friends and admitting to imbibing even though is takes days to leave her system and makes her unstable, irrational, and sick. She has also been taking the ill-gotten and unregulated prednisone and strong painkillers, one of which is Tramadol, which her doctor also will no longer prescribe her as she has liver damage, which is heavily contraindicated, and also has the side effect of worsening her instability.

My father knows this as well as I do, so he asked her if she had been indulging. He knows she has - she talks about it freely because she enjoys worrying us and also gets smug about ‘putting one over’ on the ‘idiot doctor’, and two days ago she actually spoke to a secretary at the doctor’s on the phone and admitted she was taking illicitly-got prednisone, which is a mark of how unstable and irrational she is at the moment since normally she would never have told someone like that - but she would not respond, instead claiming that what’s wrong with her is that she’s married to him, and she regrets every moment.

She then began to rant about;

- how he’s mistreated her (I cannot express how much a lie this is, no one I have ever met has been as spoiled as her by their family and spouse, she has been a pampered despot in our home all my life);

- how she feels like a prisoner in her own home (this makes no sense as she is free to come and go as she pleases, and does, she has her own car - though until a few months ago actually she used the family car which my father paid for and maintains at great cost since she is reckless with vehicles - and she moved into the biggest bedroom in the house of her own volition and after another huge pointless tantrum she threw to make sure we’d let her have her way about it when my sister moved out);

- how my father is petty for no longer catering to her every whim (which makes no real sense as just about everything is still provided for her despite the fact she pays for nothing, gives no one anything except shit, and makes huge demands on our time and energy constantly for help with things she won’t directly ask for or thank us for, including things relating to her job, which we have both helped her with immensely over the years).

My father told her all this was demonstrably false, which it is.

She did not like that and kept screaming about how she was going to register for a divorce so the house could be auctioned off and ‘that would teach him’.

That wouldn’t happen since he can prove that he’s been the sole household provider for years while she’s contributed nothing and she knows this, but she went on in that vein for some time quite irrationally.

My father then asked her what the hell she thought she was playing at and whether she really thinks her behaviour is acceptable, and at this point she began to make wild threats against us both and repeatedly claim we’d ‘be sorry’.

She is currently so unstable and so close to violent outbursts at any given moment that I am genuinely frightened. All her behaviour is characterised by aggression at all times, but this is a sudden escalation over the past week we haven’t seen before in this open way.

It’s the middle of the night and all this was five hours ago but I am still feeling utterly shattered because I don’t deal well with adrenaline fall-out, and my dog is sleeping next to me but keeps waking up with a nightmare and then being groggy and terrified and growling at me because he’s half-asleep and doesn’t recognise me for a few moments which then makes him horribly sad and confused when he does recognise me because he is not a boy who normally growls for anything and this is a pattern we see in him when he’s had a regression in his recovery and is working through trauma. It used to happen all the time in the first year we owned him but recently he’s been much improved. I am appalled and angry that he’s suffering this setback because of her.

I am also terrified of what she might do.

She is too selfish to do herself harm. She would seek to harm one of us. She is utterly without guilt or empathy and feels entitled to hurt us, as evidenced by her many past actions, but this time I fear she may go past the point of no return and try to do one of us serious physical harm. Previously she’s not gone that far because she’s had a sense of consequences, but at the moment she seems to be operating under something which is eroding her self-preservation to the point of lunacy.

I also don’t know what to tell my sister. My mother threw some things around earlier this evening which leads me to think my sister must have told her at some point about how my sister and I discussed - two years ago almost now - the possibility that my mother has an undiagnosed personality disorder (likely narcissistic, as it fits on all counts) just like her entire family (almost all of whom have had psychological issues amounting to a personality or mood disorder of some kind and a few of whom have been worse).

I have always tried to protect my sister from our mother’s worst. Especially when we were very young and her violent outbursts for once included my sister, which usually happened when my sister defied her or tried to stand up for me.

Especially because at the time my mother’s main weapon she liked to use on me was that ‘Your dad knows you’re a nasty little liar so if you tell him about this, he’ll believe me, and he’ll support me getting rid of you and you’ll be alone and never see your sister again’, and so I never felt safe telling my father what she got up to.

Owing to this, it’s only in the last five years or so my father has learnt about my mother’s abuse as she’s lost the ability to be subtle about it with him after a few head injuries.

It’s also caused my sister to be most of the time a tacit or willing accomplice to my abuse, and to develop her own trauma response of just not ‘seeing’ or even remembering our mother’s behaviour.

When I told her my theory about our mother potentially having a personality disorder about two years ago, it’s because at the time our mother was recovering from the latest of three recent mild head injuries and had begun to lose the ability to be subtle about her outbursts and tendency to lie about everything - she couldn’t keep her stories straight anymore, so my dad found some things out about how she’d been stealing and keeping money from him, gambling, and was still addicted to nasal spray, as she has been for many years.

My sister had noticed our mother’s irrational and strange behaviour worsen because our  mother kept calling her (my sister lives in another city, same one our mother works in, with her boyfriend) and my sister was worried because as she told me, ‘It’s like she’s had an aneurysm, she slurs words, doesn’t make sense, and can’t remember what she’s just told me, and I think she’s lying to me about things but then she says she just can’t remember, and she’s being very rude and aggressive to retail staff and people she doesn’t like and having a lot of disturbing road rage and I think she’s sick...’

My sister was also at the time having personal difficulties and seeing a therapist, and was starting to remember disturbing events from our childhood which she wanted me to corroborate.

I did, as all of it was sadly true and I couldn’t lie, and I tried to be supportive and encouraging, and thought and hoped it was a good sign she was questioning and working towards realising our mother’s truth and coming to terms so she could work on the fact that their relationship has always been deeply unhealthy and is the source of most of my sister’s issues, but at the time it turned out my sister was not ready to make those realisations or take that step.

After her psychologist suggested to her that she consider that her problems closely mirrored those of children of parents with substance abuse issues, my sister stopped therapy and instead completely regressed backwards to a state where she now doesn’t ‘see’ our mother being cruel or rude to me or our father or anyone even if it’s right in front of her, and she responds to any criticism of our mother or any attempt by me or my father to inform her as to my mother’s mental state and behaviour with loud repetitive insistence that whatever our mother has done must be at least partially the fault of the one she did it to (usually us) and that anyway our mother is stressed and so can’t be blamed for anything.

Earlier when my mother came home screaming and violent, I could have called my sister and let her hear it.

I didn’t, because I was ready to call the police.

I have not felt the need to do that for years, usually when she was also threatening my sister.

I’ve never actually called the police on her. I probably should have a few times, looking back. I usually refrained because she convinced me they, like my father, would also see that I was just a little liar, and then they’d lock me up and take me away from my sister for good.

I am very frightened of what she might do. I am frightened because I don’t know what to tell my sister, who can’t handle the truth and thus is likely not to want to believe me and has probably already been lied to about this by my mother, but whom I feel has to know about this.

I am frightened because I do not want her to be alone with my dog, or my father, in case she does something heinous - if she’d had a knife to hand earlier she’d have tried to stab my father I have no doubt - but I do not want to be under the same roof as her anymore, and my father will not leave her here alone, both because he won’t be chased out of his own home which he pays for entirely but also because we’re actually both as always concerned for what she might do in a fit of irrationality which may cause her or others harm either by accident or on purpose.

It’s a pure miracle that she didn’t run anyone over earlier the way she was driving, and that sort of things happens all the time. She never displays remorse. She also regularly drives despite being tipsy as she won’t admit her liver damage means even a small glass of wine will linger heavily in her for up to 24 hours and she regularly drinks more when she’s with her friends. She also never displays concern or remorse about that.

For years my father and I have tried to protect her from herself, the irrational and aggressive behaviour that she can’t seem to properly control anymore at all, and to shield my sister from the worst.

But everything’s coming to a head now, and I am just frightened.

My dog keeps waking up scared and crying and I am frightened and I can’t go to sleep because part of me is afraid she’ll burn the house down with us in it or murder my father or something equally horrendous and my door doesn’t lock and I cannot handle her being anywhere near us anymore, it’s enough, and how dare she think she can get away with screaming at us earlier that she can’t stand looking at us another second or deal with being under the same roof as us when she has ruined my entire life and stolen my relationship with my sister and I have not once not been fucking frightened for one reason or another as the direct result of her deliberate actions against us all!

[thenightlymirror]

I have noticed, and maybe this is just me, that if you live to 40 and you are not married, not sure there’s really a point. At no point in my 20’s did it seem necessary or desirable to be married. Sounded like bullshit, actually. Through my 30’s, now and then it occurred to me that it might not be horrible. There might be nice things about it. It’s conceivable. Even kids. You know, I can see the appeal.

And then suddenly, at 41, there are no… people… anywhere. It’s not that there’s no potential mates. Quite the opposite. It seems like either you fuck somebody and you cannot presume to be friends or have any emotional attachment or you have no friends. I have people I work with, who all like me and find me easy to talk to, and personable. I feel like I spend my whole life talking to baristas and fucking corporate spies. People who like to blow off steam and would absolutely slit my throat if an email maybe felt like it was asking them to. The only people in my life who pass a Turing Test are on screens. Or in books. Or old movies.

If I had a partner, I might get invited somewhere. The only consolation hahaha is that that too would likely still be unbearable.

The world just feels so dystopian. Maybe it’s just bipolar disorder because it’s always felt that way even before the evidence became overwhelming. Can you be this alienated and not be a narcissist? If I’m in the wrong place, is there a right place to be? I fucking hate everything. Everything. I dislike life.

Loneliness is our way of relating. Right? All this stuff I’m feeling is because I am relating to everyone in my life from a position of guarded loneliness. Because I’m afraid to tell them how much I just hate all of it. It all just bores me so much. It’s all so stupid. I’m being smothered by idiots. Every now and then I find someone who feels like an oasis, and I can’t even call them because they are a woman with a partner. Every time. They’re all tied up: life over. See you in the next one.

It’s a bummer.

[ganymedesclock]

These are questions I've had for some while and it's hard to find someone who'll answer with grace. This mostly relates to disabilities (mental or physical) in fiction.

1) What makes a portrayal of a disability that's harming the character in question ableist?

2) Is there a way to write a disabled villain in a way that isn't ableist?

In the circles I've been in, the common conceptions are you can't use a character's disability as a plot point or showcase it being a hindrance in some manner. heaven forbid you make your villain disabled in some capacity, that's a freaking death sentence to a creative's image. I understand historically villains were the only characters given disabilities, but (and this is my personal experience) I've not seen as many disabled villains nowadays, heck, I see more disabled heroes in media nowadays.

Sorry if this comes off as abrasive, I'd really like to be informed for future media consumption and my own creative endeavors.

Okay so the first thing I'm going to say is that while it IS a good idea to talk to disabled people and get their feedback, disabled people are not a monolith and they aren't going to all have the same take on how this goes.

My personal take is biased in favor that I'm a neurodivergent person (ADHD and autism) who has no real experience with physical disabilities, so I won't speak for physically disabled people- heck, I won't even speak for every neurotype. Like I say, people aren't a monolith.

For myself and my own writing of disabled characters, here's a couple of concepts I stick by:

Research is your friend

Think about broad conventions of ableism

Be mindful of cast composition

1. Research is your friend

Yeah this is the thing everybody says, so here's the main bases I try to cover:

What's the story on this character's disability?

Less in terms of 'tragic angst' and more, what kind of condition this is- because a congenital amputee (that is to say, someone who was born without a limb) will have a different relationship to said limb absence than someone who lost their limb years ago to someone who lost their limb yesterday. How did people in their life respond to it, and how did they respond to it? These responses are not "natural" and will not be the same to every person with every worldview. This can also be a great environment to do worldbuilding in! Think about the movie (and the tv series) How To Train Your Dragon. The vikings in that setting don't have access to modern medicine, and they're, well, literally fighting dragons and other vikings. The instance of disability is high, and the medical terminology to talk about said disabilities is fairly lackluster- but in a context where you need every man you possibly can to avoid the winter, the mindset is going to be not necessarily very correct, but egalitarian. You live in a village of twenty people and know a guy who took a nasty blow to the head and hasn't quite been the same ever since? "Traumatic Brain Injury" is probably not going to be on your lips, but you're also probably going to just make whatever peace you need to and figure out how to accommodate Old Byron for his occasional inability to find the right word, stammers and trembles. In this example, there are several relevant pieces of information- what the character's disability is (aphasia), how they got it (brain injury), and the culture and climate around it (every man has to work, and we can't make more men or throw them away very easily, so, how can we make sure this person can work even if we don't know what's wrong with them)

And that dovetails into:

What's the real history, and modern understandings, of this?

This is where "knowing the story" helps a lot. To keep positing our hypothetical viking with a brain injury, I can look into brain injuries, what affects their extent and prognosis, and maybe even beliefs about this from the time period and setting I'm thinking of (because people have had brains, and brain injuries, the entire time!) Sure, if the setting is fantastical, I have wiggle room, but looking at inspirations might give me a guide post.

Having a name for your disorder also lets you look for posts made by specific people who live with the condition talking about their lives. This is super, super important for conditions stereotyped as really scary, like schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you already know "schizophrenic people are real and normal" it's still a good thing to wake yourself up and connect with others.

2. Think about broad conventions of ableism

It CAN seem very daunting or intimidating to stay ahead of every single possible condition that could affect someone's body and mind and the specific stereotypes to avoid- there's a lot under the vast umbrella of human experience and we're learning more all the time! A good hallmark is, ableism has a few broad tendencies, and when you see those tendencies rear their head, in your own thinking or in accounts you read by others, it's good to put your skeptical glasses on and look closer. Here's a few that I tend to watch out for:

Failing the “heartwarming dog” test

This was a piece of sage wisdom that passed my eyeballs, became accepted as sage wisdom, and my brain magnificently failed to recall where I saw it. Basically, if you could replace your disabled character with a lovable pet who might need a procedure to save them, and it wouldn’t change the plot, that’s something to look into.

Disability activists speak often about infantilization, and this is a big thing of what they mean- a lot of casual ableism considers disabled people as basically belonging to, or being a burden onto, the able-bodied and neurotypical. This doesn’t necessarily even need to have an able neurotypical in the picture- a personal experience I had that was extremely hurtful was at a point in high school, I decided to do some research on autism for a school project. As an autistic teenager looking up resources online, I was very upset to realize that every single resource I accessed at the time presumed it was talking to a neurotypical parent about their helpless autistic child. I was looking for resources to myself, yet made to feel like I was the subject in a conversation.

Likewise, many wheelchair users have relayed the experience of, when they, in their chair, are in an environment accompanied by someone else who isn’t using a chair, strangers would speak to the standing person exclusively, avoiding addressing the chair user. 

It’s important to always remind yourself that at no point do disabled people stop being people. Yes, even people who have facial deformities; yes, even people who need help using the bathroom; yes, even people who drool; yes, even people whose conditions impact their ability to communicate, yes, even people with cognitive disabilities. They are people, they deserve dignity, and they are not “a child trapped in a 27-year-old body”- a disabled adult is still an adult. All of the “trying to learn the right rules” in the world won’t save you if you keep an underlying fear of non-normative bodies and minds.

This also has a modest overlap between disability and sexuality in particular. I am an autistic grayromantic ace. Absolutely none of my choices or inclinations about sex are because I’m too naive or innocent or childlike to comprehend the notion- disabled people have as diverse a relationship with sexuality as any other. That underlying fear- as mentioned before- can prevent many people from imagining that, say, a wheelchair user might enjoy sex and have experience with it. Make sure all of your disabled characters have full internal worlds.

Poor sickly little Tiffany and the Red Right Hand

A big part of fictional ableism is that it separates the disabled into two categories. Anybody who’s used TVTropes would recognize the latter term I used here. But to keep it brief:

Poor, sickly little Tiffany is cute. Vulnerable. How her disability affects her life is that it constantly creates a pall of suffering that she lives beneath. After all, having a non-normative mind or body must be an endless cavalcade of suffering and tragedy, right? People who are disabled clearly spend their every waking moment affected by, and upset, that they aren’t normal!

The answer is... No, actually. Cut the sad violin; even people who have chronic pain who are literally experiencing pain a lot more than the rest of us are still fully capable of living complex lives and being happy. If nothing else, it would be literally boring to feel nothing but awful, and people with major depression or other problems still, also, have complicated experiences. And yes, some of it’s not great. You don’t have to present every disability as disingenuously a joy to have. But make a point that they own these things. It is a very different feeling to have a concerned father looking through the window at his angel-faced daughter rocking sadly in her wheelchair while she stares longingly out the window, compared to a character waking up at midnight because they have to go do something and frustratedly hauling their body out of their bed into their chair to get going.

Poor Sickly Little Tiffany (PSLT, if you will) virtually always are young, and they virtually always are bound to the problems listed under ‘failing the heartwarming dog’ test. Yes, disabled kids exist, but the point I’m making here is that in the duality of the most widely accepted disabled characters, PSLT embodies the nadir of the Victim, who is so pure, so saintly, so gracious, that it can only be a cruel quirk of fate that she’s suffering. After all, it’s not as if disabled people have the same dignity that any neurotypical and able-bodied person has, where they can be an asshole and still expect other people to not seriously attack their quality of life- it’s a “service” for the neurotypical and able-bodied to “humor” them.

(this is a bad way to think. Either human lives matter or they don’t. There is no “wretched half-experience” here- if you wouldn’t bodily grab and yank around a person standing on their own feet, you have no business grabbing another person’s wheelchair)

On the opposite end- and relevant to your question- is the Red Right Hand. The Red Right Hand does not have PSLT’s innocence or “purity”- is the opposite extreme. The Red Right Hand is virtually always visually deformed, and framed as threatening for their visual deformity. To pick on a movie I like a fair amount, think about how in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the title character is described- “Strong. Fast. Had a metal arm.” That’s a subtle example, but, think about how that metal arm is menacing. Sure, it’s a high tech weapon in a superhero genre- but who has the metal arm? The Winter Soldier, who is, while a tormented figure that ultimately becomes more heroic- scary. Aggressive. Out for blood.

The man who walks at midnight with a Red Right Hand is a signal to us that his character is foul because of the twisting of his body. A good person, we are led to believe, would not be so- or a good person would be ashamed of their deformity and work to hide it. The Red Right Hand is not merely “an evil disabled person”- they are a disabled person whose disability is depicted as symptomatic of their evil, twisted nature, and when you pair this trope with PSLT, it sends a message: “stay in your place, disabled people. Be sad, be consumable, and let us push you around and decide what to do with you. If you get uppity, if you have ideas, if you stand up to us, then the thing that made you a helpless little victim will suddenly make you a horrible monster, and justify us handling you with inhumanity.”

As someone who is a BIG fan of eldritch horror and many forms of unsettling “wrongness” it is extremely important to watch out for the Red Right Hand. Be careful how you talk about Villainous Disability- there is no connection between disability and morality. People will be good, bad, or simply just people entirely separate from their status of ability or disability. It’s just as ableist to depict every disabled person as an innocent good soul as it is to exclusively deal in grim and ghastly monsters.

Don’t justify disabilities and don’t destroy them.

Superpowers are cool. Characters can and IMO should have superpowers, as long as you’re writing a genre when they’re there.

BUT.

It’s important to remember that there is no justification for disabilities, because they don’t need one. Disability is simply a feature characters have. You do not need to go “they’re blind, BUT they can see the future”

This is admittedly shaky, and people can argue either way; the Blind Seer is a very pronounced mythological figure and an interesting philosophical point about what truly matters in the world. There’s a reason it exists as a conceit. But if every blind character is blind in a way that completely negates that disability or makes it meaningless- this sucks. People have been blind since the dawn of time. And people will always accommodate their disabilities in different ways. Even if the technology exists to fix some forms of blindness, there are people who will have “fixable” blindness and refuse to treat it. There will be individuals born blind who have no meaningful desire to modify this. And there are some people whose condition will be inoperable even if it “shouldn’t” be.

You don’t need to make your disabled characters excessively cool, or give them a means by which the audience can totally forget they’re disabled. Again, this is a place where strong worldbuilding is your buddy- a handwave of “x technology fixed all disabilities”, in my opinion, will never come off good. If, instead, however, you throw out a careless detail that the cool girl the main character is chatting up in a cyberpunk bar has an obvious spinal modification, and feature other characters with prosthetics and without- I will like your work a lot, actually. Even if you’re handing out a fictional “cure”- show the seams. Make it have drawbacks and pros and cons. A great example of this is in the series Full Metal Alchemist- the main character has two prosthetic limbs, and not only do these limbs come with problems, some mundane (he has phantom limb pains, and has to deal with outgrowing his prostheses or damaging them in combat) some more fantastical (these artificial limbs are connected to his nerves to function fluidly- which means that they get surgically installed with no anesthesia and hurt like fuck plugging in- and they require master engineering to stay in shape). We explicitly see a scene of the experts responsible for said limbs talking to a man who uses an ordinary prosthetic leg, despite the advantages of an automail limb, because these drawbacks are daunting to him and he is happier with a simple prosthetic leg.

Even in mundane accommodations you didn’t make up- no two wheelchair users use their chair the exact same way, and there’s a huge diversity of chairs. Someone might be legally blind but still navigate confidently on their own; they might use a guide dog, or they might use a cane. They might even change their needs from situation to situation!

Disability accommodations are part of life

This ties in heavily to the previous point, but seriously! Don’t just look up one model of cane and superimpose it with no modifications onto your character- think about what their lifestyle is, and what kind of person they are!

Also medication is not the devil. Yes, medical abuse is real and tragic and the medication is not magic fairy dust that solves all problems either. But also, it’s straight ableism to act like anybody needing pills for any reason is a scary edgy plot twist. 

(and addiction is a disease. Please be careful, and moreover be compassionate, if you’re writing a character who’s an addict)

3. Be mindful of cast composition

This, to me, is a big tip about disability writing and it’s also super easy to implement!

Just make sure your cast has a lot of meaningful disabled characters in it!

Have you done all the work you can to try and dodge the Red Right Hand but you’re still worried your disabled villain is a bad look? They sure won’t look like a commentary on disability if three other people in the cast are disabled and don’t have the same outlook or role! Worried that you’re PSLT-ing your main character’s disabled child? Maybe the disability is hereditary and they got it from the main character!

The more disabled characters you have, the more it will challenge you to think about what their individual relationship is with the world and the less you’ll rely on hackneyed tropes. At least, ideally.

-

Ultimately, there’s no perfect silver bullet of diversity writing that will prevent a work from EVER being ableist, but I hope this helped, at least!