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bigskydreaming · 4 years

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TFW you realize you relate more to a fave character than you ever actually consciously realized, lmao.

So I was just having a remote therapy session, and we were focusing on just some mental pain management techniques since my stupid metabolism makes most pain meds largely useless and my head has been waging all out warfare on me for the past week and a half, lololol. And we were delving into one of my personal fave rants, which is the fact that so many people - including vaunted medical professionals - just fundamentally don’t seem to get that having a high pain tolerance does not mean you don’t like, FEEL pain unless its really a lot or intense. Its just that you’re hard-wired/trained/geared via stuff like an abusive childhood, lol, to not SHOW or DISPLAY any visible or audible pain cues unless the pain reaches a certain high threshold where its impossible to hold them back.

But particularly over the past four or five years, with my ongoing medical shit, its super obnoxious trying to get your doctors to display a sense of urgency about your condition because they’re just fundamentally not grasping the degree of chronic pain you’re dealing with every day, since, y’know....I can literally be sitting there in the doctor’s chair and conversationally talking about the fact that no, I definitely am currently feeling like, an eight or nine out of ten on the pain scale, please don’t be confused by the fact that I’m literally LOLing as I describe this to you rather than gasping and moaning in a more obvious indication of it.

Its like, I’m not TRYING to undersell it or anything, its just, when you grow up since the time you’re like five or six years old, knowing damn well that the only appropriate response to someone asking ‘oh am I hurting you’ that won’t earn you MORE pain is a completely casual or cavalier sounding ‘nope, I’m fine, all good here, no problems.’......like, at a certain point in your development, that becomes pretty hard-wired in, like, you can’t shake it just because you consciously WANT to. (Though it is one of the things I’m trying to unlearn and ‘rewire’ in therapy now, via EMDR techniques aimed at like, literally reprogramming my nervous system and how I react to various stimuli. Its.....slow progress, lmao, but I mean there is some progress so its all good).

But point being, when you’re a physically abused kid and your physical abuser doesn’t want to believe or accept that they’re hurting you, and so they tended to just get angrier and MORE dangerous if they thought you were indicating or even just ‘implying’ that they were in fact hurting you.....you get pretty damn good at not showing even the slightest hint of pain or distress unless its literally a level you’ve never experienced before and thus have no practical experience in hiding or distracting yourself from.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t FEEL every bit of it. It doesn’t mean you’ve found a magical off-switch that means you can just mind-over-body yourself from acknowledging or being aware that you are in fact in a shit ton of pain. You just.....have learned the importance of masking it, and found ways to do that by necessity.

Except, even much later in life when you are in a safe place or more control of your situations or surroundings, there’s no easy way to just....stop putting that mask on by default, the second you’re experiencing any type of pain. And so even when dealing with medical professionals, too many of them just don’t GET that their vaunted ‘tell me how much pain you’re in from one to ten’ scale isn’t really the be-all and end-all of pain measurement, because its subjective and arbitrary as HELLLLLLLLL.....and one of the defining parameters for what that pain scale looks like and feels like for YOU, is....your personal history with pain and how you’re ‘comfortable’ displaying evidence of it. (And I know there’s a ton of people and even groups of people who can relate to this for entirely different reasons, I just can only speak to my own of course).

But its definitely frustrating and invalidating as hell to be in more pain than many people ever experience in their lives, and TRYING to convey that as openly and honestly as you can.....and literally being able to SEE the doubt and dismissal in doctors’ eyes, because all they’re seeing is the visual cues you’re putting out there and which they equate to ‘can’t possibly be in THAT much pain, not if he’s acting this casual about it’.....

And so the frustrating irony is that you end up dismissed as like, a pain ‘lightweight’ who is complaining about an apparent degree of pain that’s barely anything in their ‘professional’ estimation. And thus they’re disinclined to take your requests for heavier or more effective pain medication seriously, or not impressed by your attempts to imbue a greater sense of urgency in their approach to your treatment plan or procedures, etc......when in reality, the only reason you’re showing those cues of not being in that much pain is because you’re MORE used to and familiar with even extremely high degrees of pain than anything a lot of them are accustomed to.

Its invalidating as hell, being treated as though you have no idea what you’re talking about when you say “I am actually in a shit ton of active, ongoing pain, hey thanks, can we maybe do something about this,” when actually, the disconnect comes from you having MORE experience with MORE pain than some of them can even fathom. You just....also have more experience with reasons not to SHOW that pain, if its at all avoidable to any degree whatsoever.

THAT’S what high pain tolerance actually means, and the sheer volume of medical professionals who just flat out don’t get this, or worse, just don’t care or are too proud to reassess their viewpoints on this matter if that carries the implication they don’t actually know as much as they think they do......god, it grates.

(Once, when I was around twenty-three or twenty-four I think, I got caught up in the periphery of a bar fight that resulted in me getting a shard of glass embedded in the back of my forearm. Still have a pretty sizable scar from it. And it absolutely hurt like fuck, but I was conscious as paramedics arrived on scene and when going to the hospital to have it removed and stitched up, and like......kinda cracking jokes about it the whole time because I was uncomfortable as hell and didn’t really know what else to do or how to react, y’know? I mean, I had a few inches of glasses jutting out from the top of my forearm, lol, what the hell are you supposed to do or say about that? There’s not really a protocol, lmao. Problem was, they took one look at me sitting there with this spear of glass sticking out of my arm and making dumb jokes about it like it was no big deal......and they decided this meant I was in shock and kept trying to treat me accordingly. And it was just like.....useless, because lol no I wasn’t in shock, I had none of the physical symptoms of being in shock and benefited from none of their assumptions that I was.....I was just a dude with a shard of glass in his arm that hurt like fuck and I really wanted it out as soon as possible, and I was in full awareness of what had happened and everything I was feeling, I just didn’t know how to convey this in a way that they would believe, because I couldn’t come up with anything to say or do other than laugh about how fucking surreal the whole situation was.)

Anyway, so circling back to the point, or as much of one as I ever have, so today I was just learning and practicing various mental pain management/coping techniques with my therapist and discussing my issues with doctors and the High Pain Tolerance Quandary. Basically like, I would really truly like to know or learn how to display the ‘expected’ physical and visual/audio cues for being a person who is experiencing a ‘4′ on the pain scale, versus a person who is experiencing a ‘7′ or a ‘10′.....so they can stop fucking treating me like I’m only at a 4 when I’m actually at an 8 or 9, just because I look and sound like a person who really is only at a 4 no matter what they actually CLAIM to be feeling.

Course, easier said than done.

But yeah, so as she was coaching me through various techniques and surveying what I was doing with my body and facial expressions and cues, etc, she pointed out something that I had literally never noticed about myself before, even though once she DID point it out I could recognize that its something I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, well back before I was ten and no doubt stemming from smack dab in the midst of the worst of my childhood abuse.

So, y’know on Teen Wolf, how Scott and Liam and various others are at times shown digging their claws into their palms and drawing blood to ground themselves with the pain? (And ironically, how I was just talking the other week about photo doubling for a similar such scene with gashes in the character’s palms, lmfao). Well, obviously I don’t have claws, and part of why I’d never really paid much attention to when I was doing it is because even my therapist wasn’t comfortable classifying it as a kind of self-harm or anywhere near punitive enough to carry that kind of weight or associations.....

But like, I’ve always kept my fingernails fairly trimmed but not completely. Like, just enough of an edge to them that at times, particularly when I’m in physical pain or distress already, I’ll just like....dig my fingernails into the pad of other fingertips, and use that little familiar spike of pain to not ground myself but rather distract myself from whatever else I was feeling. Like, she wasn’t comfortable calling it a self-punitive technique because as we got into it, it was clear I was never doing it to CAUSE myself pain....rather, its something I only do when I’m already in pain, usually far more pain than anything that brings up.....but by deliberately doing that and creating a focal awareness around it, even just a largely subconscious one......I’ve apparently long been using that to hook my attention up to a very specific, very manageable sensation/focal point of pain that lets me and my ADHD brain relegate whatever other pain I’m feeling (even if its much much worse) to the back of my mind for at least a little while, as I distract myself by focusing on this more obvious and consciously directed bit of lesser pain.

And a big part of why I probably never noticed I was doing this, we eventually concluded, is because as a kid I probably came up with it as a kind of survival technique specifically BECAUSE it was something I could do to distract myself/manage my pain covertly, without drawing my abuser’s attention to what I was doing either. And by extension, without the fact that I was doing it at all 'betraying’ that I was in pain or trying to manage or cope with painful sensations in the first place. A lot of other pain management techniques, like even just deep, deliberate breaths, tend to be a lot more obvious and noticeable, and thus would have been counter-productive for my specific purposes. No matter how much they helped me manage whatever physical pain I was feeling, they would have at the same time inevitably drawn attention to the fact that I was trying to do that at all in the first place....and thus only invite more pain.

Merely digging my fingernails into my fingertip pads, not enough to draw blood or make me cry out or anything like that, but rather just to distract myself and deliberately focus me on a source of pain I could deal with and more easily handle, as well as being ‘low in intensity’ enough that focusing on it didn’t bring any other obvious visual or audio pain cues to the forefront.....that I could do without anyone noticing. And thus this is likely why it came to be my go-to move whenever I was in any kind of pain at all, as just a quick and easy way to wrap my head around my physical sensations and shift focus to something more easily dealt with or managed (even if it didn’t actually dismiss or get rid of whatever other pain I’m feeling entirely). And just the low-key nature of it in general likely being a big part of why it became such an unconscious instinct for me until now, something that barely even registered in my conscious mind as I built up/hard-wired instinctive responses that incorporated it without me having to consciously direct myself to do that.

I mean, its still obviously not an ideal response, especially when I’m long past being stuck in any kind of external situations or need to fall back on that and the covert nature of it. So now its another of those things to just be aware of and work on rewiring on an instinctive level, making it a priority for me to focus on consciously using more helpful and positive methods of pain management.

But it was just interesting to me to have it pointed out as something I’ve been doing all this time, let alone being as unaware of doing it as I’ve apparently been. And its not hard to draw obvious parallels to when characters in media I consume do similar things even if for not quite the same reasons or in quite the same ways. So now I’m just kinda contemplating that and wondering how much even just some degree of unconscious awareness that I do that might have made me more alert to when characters or other people do similar things. Made me more attuned to noticing or even fixating on moments when they do things like that, that I related to even on an entirely subconscious level.

*Shrugs* Anyway, that’s all, like, literally not going anywhere with this, was just unwinding and felt like mapping my way through that all contemplatively, because oh no, inexplicable strangeness, therapy puts me in particularly contemplative headspaces, whodathunkit, lmfao. *Shrugs* Just struck me as particularly interesting, so felt like sharing for anyone else who can relate/see similar parallels themselves.

Or just chalk it up to random anecdotal wtf-ery from your friendly (err, mostly. okay sometimes. FINE ideally, let’s go with that) neighborhood over-sharer.

#that last bit is just to head off the usual 'friendly concerned advice giving anons' I tend to get after posts like these #plz stop doing that #i know i over-share its not a secret and I do it with full knowledge and intent because I feel like it #it suits my purposes #my purposes do not have to be your purposes nor do they require your approval #if it makes you uncomfortable thats where the beauty of tumblr being a largely opt-in experience comes from #there's the door #i can understand the confusion - its not actually a big blinking EXIT sign but rather an 'unfollow' button #its really that simple lmfao stop being so concerned with what Im doing particularly in posts where Im not even interacting with anyone #and for the love of god please stop assuming that everyone on tumblr is TRYING to post from a state of being on #an emotional plateau of zen #nah - some of us literally use the medium to vent and unpack stuff we dont have a ton of room to vent about or unpack in our offline lives #and like the relative(ish) anonymous nature of it combined with the potential for at least some kind of validation via #like-minded or experiencing individuals in a pseudo-communal setting #our purpose/usage does not need to be yours and it does not require your condoning #and I would just like to suggest that maybe people who put a ton of emphasis on telling others (like survivors) to do a better job of #curating what content they experience/are exposed to online #might be well served to put a little more focus on curating what content YOU experience if you find yourself uncomfortable with particular #posting habits #there's a bajillion other people out there to follow #you dont need to be here if you dont actually want to be or arent actually comfortable being here #BUT I DIGRESS

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weirdponytail · 6 years

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I couldn’t resist.

The begining of ‘Like Father, Unlike Son’ always gives me such a laugh. Why?

Well, first you have Dante practicing kung fu/generic martial arts in an age old ‘sea plateau with crashing waves’ cliche, looking concentrated, powerful and very zen.

And it zooms out and scrolls over to the side to Zhalia, and...well...

She is...less than pleased...with the continued time on the island.

It’s the grumpiest I’ve ever seen anyone on a beach, and that’s sayin’ something if you’ve lived in Florida for 21 years. The change in emotion and intensity level is just hilarious to me.

Dante’s background text in Zhalia’s pic:

*Super Karate Chop!*

*Background Zen*

“What sound does an electric monk make?”

“Hollywood Trainers hate him!”

Zhalia’s smaller texts, top right then in logical reading order from right to left and skipping ‘i fucking hate this place’:

I will suckerpunch anyone who tries to speak to me.

Rest assured, murders are being planned.

I fucking hate seaguls.

Who the fuck is humming mantras?

Holy fucking shit, LET’S GO ALREADY!

BONUS POINTS TO WHOEVER CAN TELL ME THE SOUND AN ELECTRIC MONK MAKES!

#huntik #crackpic #just having fun with the team #like father unlike son #thAT EXPRESSION THOUGH #dante vale #zhalia moon #goof

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nancygduarteus · 5 years

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How Buddhism Became Therapy

Dressed in flowing gold robes, the bald female meditation teacher told us to do nothing. We were to sit silently in our plastic chairs, close our eyes, and focus on our breath. I had never meditated, but I’d gone to church, so I instinctively bowed my head. Then I realized that, since this would last for 15 minutes, I should probably find a more comfortable long-term neck position.

This was the first of two meditation sessions of the Kadampa Buddhism class I attended this week near my house in Northern Virginia, and I did not reach nirvana. Since we were in a major city, occasional sirens outside blasted through the quiet, and since this was a church basement, people were laughing and talking in the hallways. One guy wandered in to ask if this was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The more we focused on our breath, the teacher assured us, the more these distractions would fade away.

After we had meditated for 15 minutes, the teacher shifted focus to the topic of the class: Letting go of resentments. This was the real reason I had come to this meditation class, rather than simply meditating on my own at home with an app. I wanted to learn more about Buddhism and how its teachings might be able to improve my mental health—and that of the myriads of other Americans who have flocked to some form of the religion in recent years. These newcomers aren’t necessarily seeking spiritual enlightenment or a faith community, but rather a quick boost of cognitive healing.

The people I spoke with were young and old, but rarely Buddhist by birth. Perhaps some have just run out of options: Mental-health disorders are up in Western societies, and the answer doesn’t seem to be church attendance, which is down. There’s always therapy, but it’s so expensive. My meditation class was $12.

As she opened a book on Buddhist teachings, the teacher told the class it’s harmful to hold grudges. Resentment feels like holding on to a burning stick and complaining that it’s burning us. And yet, being harmed by someone also hurts. So, the teacher said, the question was this: “What do I do with my mind if I feel like I’ve been harmed by someone?”

Americans everywhere seem to be asking themselves variations on this very question: What do we do with our minds?

The forty-something dad in Los Angeles was plateauing. He had achieved most of his career goals, rising to the level of senior manager at a large company. But the competitive nature of the work had taken its toll on his marriage, and he was in the process of getting a divorce. He rarely saw his grown children. “In short, I am going through a midlife crisis,” the dad told me via email, a few days before I attended the meditation class. (He asked to remain anonymous because his divorce and other struggles aren’t public.)

Last year, this dad turned to traditional psychotherapy for a few months, but he didn’t see as much of a benefit from it as he had hoped. He felt like he was mostly being taught to justify destructive emotions and behaviors. His therapist did, however, recommend two books that were helpful: How to Be an Adult in Relationships, by David Richo, and The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield. Both authors work in Buddhist themes and ideas, and earlier this year they introduced him to the practice of meditation.

Hungry for more, the dad recently attended a Buddhist meditation class in Hollywood, where he learned ways to deepen his own meditation practice and to change his approach to relationships. Now, he feels more open and is willing to be more vulnerable around his family and friends. “As a Catholic, I struggle with some of the religious concepts,” he says, “But it doesn’t prevent me from adopting the Buddhist techniques and philosophies.” Besides, he told me, it really does seem like the universe is putting Buddhism in front of him now.

Though precise numbers on its popularity are hard to come by, Buddhism does seem to be emerging in the Western, type-A universe. The journalist Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True became a bestseller in 2017. Buddhist meditation centers have recently popped up in places like Knoxville, Tennessee, and Lakewood, Ohio. There are now dozens of Buddhist podcasts, which doesn’t include all the apps and playlists that are geared specifically toward personal, non-Buddhist meditation. Four in 10 American adults now say they meditate at least weekly.

Hugh Byrne, the director of the Center for Mindful Living meditation center in Washington, D.C., says the local meditation community has “blossomed in the past few years.” As I stress-Ubered from meeting to meeting in D.C. recently, I noticed a few “meditation spaces” have opened up where far more consumerist establishments used to be. Academic research on mindfulness meditation has also exploded, making what in the West was once an esoteric practice for hippies more akin to a life-hack for all.

Buddhism has been popular in various forms among certain celebrities and tech elites, but the religion’s primary draw for many Americans now appears to be mental health. The ancient religion, some find, helps them manage the slings and arrows and subtweets of modern life. Many people are stressed out by the constant drama of the current administration, and work hours have overwhelmed the day. There’s something newly appealing about a practice that instructs you to just sit, be aware, and realize nothing lasts forever. Perhaps it’s simply comforting to know that the problems that bedevil humans have been around since long before Gmail.

A few themes and ideas seem to unite the disparate experiences of the people I interviewed. The Buddha’s first “Noble Truth” is that “life is suffering,” and many of Buddhism’s newly minted Western practitioners have interpreted this to mean that accepting emotional pain might be preferable to trying to alleviate it. “Buddhism admits that suffering is inevitable,” says Daniel Sanchez, a 24-year-old in New Jersey. “I shouldn’t focus on avoiding suffering, but learn how to deal with suffering.”

In addition to meditating every morning and night, Sanchez reads the Diamond Sutra and Heart Sutra, texts from the early Middle Ages, and listens to zen talks. The sutras are quite a departure from the normal content of psychotherapy, in which one might ponder what truly makes one happy. Buddhist thought suggests that one should not compulsively crave comfort and avoid discomfort, which some see as permission to hop off the hedonic treadmill.

A Colorado life coach named Galen Bernard told me that Comfortable with Uncertainty, by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, has influenced his well-being more than anything, except perhaps his very first experience on Prozac. He says the book and its teachings have helped him avoid labeling certain experiences as negative by default. For example, transitioning to a friendship with an ex-girlfriend after a breakup was painful for him at first, but Chodron’s and others’ writings helped him see that “it might seem like too much pain,” he says, “but actually it’s just an experience I’m having that … can actually be a portal to joy on the other side.”

For decades, people have been attempting self-improvement through classes and seminars, many of which incorporated elements of Eastern religions. The Human Potential Movement of the 1960s influenced the work of the foundational psychologist Abraham Maslow and, perhaps less positively, the Rajneesh movement documented in the Netflix show Wild Wild Country. In the 1970s, the organization Erhard Seminars Training, or EST, offered courses on how to “take responsibility for your life” and “get it.”

What’s different—and perhaps comforting—about Buddhism is that it’s an existing religion practiced by half a billion people. Because relatively few caucasian Americans grew up Buddhist, they generally don’t associate any familial baggage with it like some do with, say, the Christianity or Judaism of their childhoods. While liberating, this also means that the practice of secular Buddhism often differs dramatically from the religion itself. All of the secular practitioners I spoke with for this piece are reading different books, listening to different podcasts, and following different teachers and traditions. Their interpretations of Buddhist teachings aren’t necessarily consistent with one another or with traditional texts.

I ran some of their insights by an expert in Buddhism, David McMahan at Franklin and Marshall College, who said some of these Western interpretations are slightly morphed from Buddhism’s original cultures and contexts. Buddhism carries with it a set of values and morals that white Americans don’t always live by. Much like “Cafeteria Catholics” ignore parts of the religion that don’t resonate with them, some Westerners focus on only certain elements of Buddhist philosophy and don’t endorse, say, Buddhism’s view of reincarnation or worship of the Buddha. Call them Buffet Buddhists.

Taken out of their Buddhist context, practices like meditation “become like a dry sponge,” McMahan said, “soaking up whatever values are around.” Traditional monks don’t “meditate for business.”

This so-called “secular Buddhism,” says Autry Johnson, a Colorado bartender and tourism worker who meditates regularly, “is a little more accessible to people that wouldn’t primarily identify as Buddhists, or already identify with another religion or philosophy but want to adopt aspects of Buddhist practice to supplement their current worldview.” (Indeed, many meditation centers emphasize that you don’t have to be Buddhist to attend sessions.)

Buffet Buddhism may not be traditional, but its flexibility does allow its adherents to more easily employ the philosophy for an anti-depressive jolt. Some people practice Buddhism and meditation as an alternative to psychotherapy or psychiatric medication, given mental health care’s cost and scarcity: Sixty percent of counties in the U.S. don’t have a single psychiatrist. “I have pretty good health insurance,” Bernard says, “but if I want support, it’s a month and a half to see someone new. Having a resource that I can pop open is invaluable.”

Some people turn to both Buddhism and psychotherapy. “There’s an overlap between the reason people will come to therapy and the reason they come to meditation,” says Byrne, the director of the Center for Mindful Living. Some therapists are even starting to incorporate Buddhist concepts into their practices. Tara Brach, a psychologist and the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C., offers meditations and talks with titles like “From Human Doing to Human Being” on her website. In Texas, the psychologist Molly Layton encourages clients to mindfully “sit with their thoughts,” rather than to “jump into the cycle of their thinking.”

Mary Liz Austin, who practices psychotherapy at the Center for Mindful Living, similarly helps clients see that “it’s the attachment to the outcome that really causes suffering.” Another favorite teaching of hers is Chodron’s aphorism that “everything is workable.” This means, essentially, that something good might come out of even the worst moments. “I’m having an experience right now with my father in law. He’s dying of cancer. It’s a shitty situation,” Austin says. “But what I’m seeing is that the fruits of this cancer diagnosis is everyone is by his bedside, everyone is showing amazing love to him, and that allows the people in your life to show up in a way that you see so much what matters.”

At times, it’s the meditation teachers who sound more like psychotherapists, offering practical tips for dealing with existential quandaries. Byrne, a meditation teacher, wrote a book about the power of mindfulness for habit change. He uses mindfulness meditation to help people understand impermanence, another Buddhist teaching. The idea is to see your emotions and experiences—including anxiety or pain—as constantly changing, “like a weather system coming through,” Byrne says. Everything, eventually, ends.

Cecilia Saad found this to be an especially attractive element of Buddhism. A close friend of hers was diagnosed with cancer three years ago, and Saad was impressed by how calm she remained throughout her diagnosis and treatment. “We’ve talked a lot about her outlook, and she always goes back to her Buddhism,” she says. Now, when Saad is stressed about something, the concept of impermanence helps her to imagine that she’s already survived the event she’s dreading.

At my meditation class, the teacher read from her book in her even, perfectly unaccented voice. The book told us to consider that there are two reasons someone might cause us harm: It’s their nature to be harmful, or a temporary circumstance caused them to act in a harmful way. Either way, the teacher said, it doesn’t make sense to be angry at the person. The nature of water is wet, so you wouldn’t rage at the rain for getting you wet. And you wouldn’t curse the clouds for temporarily having a weather system that causes a downpour.

“When are we compelled to hurt people?” she asked, rhetorically. “When we’re in pain. It’s easy, if you see the fear, to have some compassion.”

She asked us to close our eyes and meditate again, this time while thinking about letting go of resentment toward someone who had harmed us. I shifted awkwardly and wondered how the burly guy sitting in front of me wearing a “Lift Life” t-shirt felt. I was having trouble focusing on resentment, and my eyes flickered open involuntarily. It was 30 degrees outside, yet most of the seats were taken. The fullness was uplifting. Still, it was remarkable that so many of us were willing to stumble through the freezing dark just to take in some basic wisdom about how to be less sad.

In Sunday school, when you opened your eyes during prayer, other kids would tell on you, thereby implicating themselves as having opened their eyes, too. That’s how people are sometimes, I thought: They’ll burn themselves for the chance to harm someone else. I took a deep breath and tried to have compassion for them anyway.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/buddhism-meditation-anxiety-therapy/584308/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 5 years

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How Buddhism Became Therapy

Americans everywhere seem to be asking themselves variations on this very question: What do we do with our minds?

“When are we compelled to hurt people?” she asked, rhetorically. “When we’re in pain. It’s easy, if you see the fear, to have some compassion.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

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bigskydreaming · 5 years

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Hi, this is a vagueblog that is very very Vague and not at all a blatantly passive aggressive response to an anon comment on someone’s fic about a Certain Favorite Topic of Mine (aka Let Dick Be Angry About People Being Dicks To Him).

But arguing that Dick was entirely and solely in the wrong for how everything went down between him and Tim, on the basis that “and the idea that a 16 year old should be responsible in any way for not helping someone 7-8 years older than him grieve is ridiculous” is textbook woobification.

Know why?

Because we’re talking about Tim.

As in the character whose entire existence as Robin is predicated on taking it upon himself to help Batman in the wake of Bruce’s grief for Jason, due to how it was affecting both his violence against criminals and his own recklessness.

So it is categorically disingenuous and dishonest to act like Tim is some helpless little baby at age sixteen who its completely ‘ridiculous’ to expect to take even a single scene anywhere throughout his solo series in which he jets around the world, solo, having adult adventures against adult villains with zero adult supervision by his own choice.....

And think “hey, maybe I, the kid who at age twelve made it my literal mission to help Batman through his grief....could take five seconds to look at this other Batman and acknowledge....he needs help because he’s drowning in his own grief.”

This is the blatant double standard that annoys people about certain Tim stans.

Tim may have been sixteen, but we’re talking about a family of superheroes who have been doing adult acts since their preteens. We’re talking about a kid who’s helped save the world by this point, and how he responds to ‘being wronged’ by an older brother who in the most frequently referenced continuity was fired as Robin when hardly any older than Tim was there. Only Dick was actually fired, and by Bruce himself, and with the latter making NO effort to keep Dick from leaving, as opposed to Dick who made every effort to keep Tim from leaving. Tim left because he wanted to, despite Dick wanting him to stay. Dick left because he felt Bruce didn’t care if he stayed, because Bruce made no effort to get him to stay.

And yet time and again, the narrative is twisted so that Dick ‘fired Tim’ instead of calling him his equal (actual canon), kicked Tim out, instead of begging him to stay (actual canon), and asking other people to spy on Tim, follow him, and talk to him instead of handling it himself, when per actual canon....the reason Dick did all of those things was because he was still concerned about Tim and Tim wouldn’t allow Dick to talk to him and check up on him himself.

How do you hold someone responsible for not having a conversation that the other person literally refuses to let them have?

And yet, for over a decade, that is precisely what fandom has done.

And someone actually writes a story where in contrast to the dozens and dozens of stories that take the singular perspective that Dick wronged Tim and should grovel for his forgiveness, they instead suggest that Tim was mature and responsible enough at the time that he at least should have been capable of acknowledging that he wasn’t the only member of his family grieving and having a difficult time, and Dick wasn’t doing any of that to neglect or hurt him.....and this is what’s so objectionable to someone, they have to go on anon on that very story’s actual comment thread and argue that the author is being unreasonable and that Dick should be the one apologizing to Tim here, yet again, like the dozens and dozens of already existing stories posit?

Peoples’ issue with Tim and Tim stans and these stories aren’t that we don’t like Dick being criticized for his handling of the situation or people saying Tim was hurt by all of that....its that its treated as valid and factual for Tim in all these other stories to say things like “you’re never there for me” because the one time Dick didn’t support Tim exactly in the specific ways Tim wanted, despite years and years and years of dropping everything to rush to Tim’s side whenever he needed as Robin....

This apparently constitutes proof that Dick is “never there for Tim” instead of always doing his best to be there for Tim, except this one time he was literally overwhelmed and couldn’t be everything for everyone exactly as they wanted him to be. And yeah, unfortunately, he had hoped that Tim could pick up a little of his slack for a change.

And he still tried to be there for Tim, after Tim blew up at him, he just literally couldn’t be because Tim left and avoided him the literal minute after Dick did one thing he didn’t agree with.

And thing is, that’s not to suggest it was a LITTLE thing, by any means. That Tim didn’t have every right to be emotional and upset and hurt by Dick’s decision. Its not even that its wrong to say that yeah, ideally, Dick should have pulled Tim aside and had a conversation about what he wanted to do with Robin before Tim found out from Damian.

But that’s not what Dick’s condemned for in fandom, is it? The common refrain isn’t “well, I know it was a tough time for Dick as well, but he should have talked about it with Tim first”....its “Dick is such a hypocrite for doing the exact same thing that Bruce did to him and giving Robin to someone who didn’t deserve it after firing Tim despite everything he’d done to prove himself over the years.”

These are completely different levels of criticism, and its blatantly dishonest to treat them as interchangeable, or to object when someone’s clearly taking issue with the latter, and instead try to frame it as though Dick stans are just unable to accept Dick ever doing anything wrong at all on any level - such as with the former.

Like, when people can’t handle one story existing that suggests hey, they were both in the same situation of being brothers who’d both lost their second father and felt lost and grieving, and it might be nice for a change if instead of just seeing Tim erupt at Dick over and over for being so fucking flawed as a brother and a human being back then, Dick has a chance to for once say he feels hurt that his little brother didn’t seem to give a shit about what he felt at the time, or didn’t seem to want to acknowledge all the other times Dick had been there for him, at his own expense....

That is the kind of thing that makes people feel like Tim stans have a victim complex or an insistence on seeing Tim as perpetually victimized and never ever doing anything that might hurt his siblings as well.

I mean, I can acknowledge and understand why Tim was hurt by Dick’s choices and the way things went down....and why Dick was too overwhelmed to be as on top of handling everyone’s feelings as he usually is or likes to be. They’re not mutually exclusive.

It was a shitty situation. It didn’t have to mean that either of them were shitty people.

But you all have ZERO chill, and after years and years of one singular narrative that posits that Dick was operating from a plateau of emotional zen and all his decisions should be weighed and measured against his own peak performance standard of catering to his family’s emotional needs (when almost no examples of the reciprocal even exist)....

Like, sorry if some of us are exhausted of trying to be mutually understanding and are more interested in focusing on the viewpoint of the character who’s been bashed to hell and back by that one singular narrative. Ad nauseam.

Apologies to @octoaliencowboy for jumping in and I’ll happily delete this if they prefer, but I thought their story was fucking excellent and something that some Dick fans have long wanted to read for a change of pace.

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