#but i found all the extraneous visual noise (repeated username‚ &c) really fucking distracting

[aeide-thea]

From a thread by Twitter user @​mykola:

Ok, so, the following thread is going to be dense. I have a model of what I call "Identity Trauma" that is not exclusive to Neurodivergent people but so common among us that almost nobody can actually see it. Let me tell you a story.

When you are an infant, and you have needs that other people don't understand, nobody will be able to meet those needs. And so you grow up, from a very early age, with the empirical, evidence-based understanding that parts of you are not valid. Those parts don't shut up, tho!

Maybe you're an Autistic kid whose hearing is so hypersensitive that it's physically painful to you to be around your (large, joyful, boisterous) family. Maybe you're ADHD and your emotions are so strong that Everything! Feels! Extreme! Always! Whatever it is? It's not welcome.

And like, you try over your early life to communicate to people about this thing. And they don't believe you. They tell you "sometimes people are loud when they're happy, it's ok, don't be scared!" or they tell you "stop with the dramatics, you just want attention."

Every attempt to inhabit your full self is somehow curtailed, cut short, and you receive anywhere from a tiny bit to a WHOLE LOT of Shame for it. This leads to cognitive dissonance: do you listen to the part of you that says "this can't continue", or your caregivers?

(And remember, you're like six.)

The choice, for a sadly enormous percentage of us, is to trust our caregivers. They assure us we're fine. They assure us everyone deals with this, that if we just try a bit harder then we'll be okay. That part of us that's screaming? We start to wall it off.

It turns out we've got a lot of really useful construction material laying around in the form of shame. Every time that pain tries to get out? It gets shamed back in. So we just finish the process, seal it in.

Bliss.

Relief.

We can't hear the screaming anymore. We can now focus on making sure we trust our caregivers, instead. Except. By walling off that voice, that pain? We've walled off our relationship to our body. But something VERY IMPORTANT lives there: our identity.

Your identity is who you are. It's everything you know to be true, everything you value, everything you feel. It's the name for the sum total of the enormous Thing that you are. One part of that thing is letting you know about unmet needs. But it does so much more.

It answers every question you need to ask yourself. How does it answer them? By thinking about it? No. It uses embodied, somatic, axiomatic knowledge. This is important, read this a few times: It is not cognitive. It doesn't feel like thinking. It feels like feeling.

[…]

Emotions are one of the ways our body communicates with us. With one exception, emotions are signals from your body to your self. That exception is shame.

Shame is the only emotion that originates externally. Shame comes from other people instructing us to feel it. That's it. And if you are cut off from your body? It is literally the only emotion you are really in touch with. And so you organize your WHOLE LIFE around it.

Listen, this model I'm describing? This is codependency, right? Because what's happening: your "core" self, your embodied axiomatic somatic source of truth, is gone. So your identity is not grounded in your body. Where is it grounded? In the approval of those around you.

If you're dealing with this shit, I will now perform a magic trick and tell you something about yourself that you will realize you have always known but that nobody has ever pointed out before. There's a special class of relationship in your life. It's not friend, parent, lover or anything else you'll find a hallmark card for, although it frequently coexists with some of the people in these roles. But the special class of relationship you have is that set of people that you trust to tell you who you are. You have complicated feelings about them.

These are the people that you have tasked, often without their knowledge or their consent, to serve as the grounding for your sense of identity. They are your surrogate embodied self. And they hold unfathomable power over you. (This is why we are so susceptible to abuse.)

Healing is in part about taking back those parts of you that you have invested in other people. That was never a gift to them, that was not about love -- that was an abdication of your responsibility to be a PERSON. It's not your fault. You didn't know. Your self was taken.