#but in many cases it is healthier and less traumatizing for a child to be able to be reunified with a biological parent if that is possible

[tower-girl-anon]

Mars and what makes us angry

This is just a general and funny post about what triggers our anger according to our Mars sign or house since this planet can indicate that. As always, take this with a grain of salt, I apologize for any mistake and please don't repost or copy this without giving credits to the owner.

Aries/1st house: when somebody criticize your driven and competitive energy. When someone talks about your body or how do you present yourself. Maybe you like to dress more sporty, manly or informal but some people critise this, causing you to get mad about it. Another alternative is that you get mad when people notices and asks if you are mad or what, even if you don't feel like that at all.

Taurus/2nd house: when someone devalues you or treats you as if you're less valuable than them. When someone steals from you, take something borrowed from you (it can be money or an object) and return in a later date than they originally told or they don't even return it at all. When somebody steals you food?

Gemini/3rd house: when somebody talks dirty or gossip about you or anybody else (specially in relation to the ones you care). When somebody treats you as if you were stupid, slow learner or calls you stupid when you have bad grades. On the other side, being the 3rd house the ruler of brothers or sisters, maybe you have a conflicting relationship with him/her/them.

Cancer/4th house: when somebody insults your family. When somebody insults you, knowingly or unknowingly, in a points that hit your emotions or your inner self. Tell me, do you tend to cry when you get mad? Even if you don't want to? Maybe you get mad when you cry because you think you're reacting like a child. On the other side, you could have a conflicting relationship with your family, so you tend to get mad easily with them.

Leo/5th house: when somebody criticizes or insults our interests, hobbies or anything creative that fulfilles you, that makes you proud, that keeps your inner child happy and makes your self-confidence (ego) arise in a healthy way. Maybe you get mad when people doesn't approve the man/woman that you tend to date.

Virgo/6th house: when you get mad, or stressed, does it affects your health in any way? Maybe you get mad when people asks about too much your health or gets involved too much in that area. I am thinking about a sometimes annoying voice that reminds you that you should remember to take that medicine even though you already know that. Or that you should start exercising more or eating more healthy even though you feel good. On the other side, if you have health issues, maybe you get mad when healthier people doesn't aprreciate the bodies they have or doesn't take care of it with the care it deserves.

Libra/7th house: one word: injustice. Unfairness. When people take advantage of either a persons or of a situation that is going to affect another person. Especially if it's negative. Hypocrisy, manipulation, lies, exploitation or the abuse of somebody else are the themes that really keeps the blood of these natives boiling with anger.

Scorpio/8th house: they get mad when they, or others, loose the control of a situation, being it about an intimate relationship, money or wathever. When somebody confronts them, questions or doesn't recognize the power or authority of the person. If you receive money or a inheritance, you could get mad if you don't receive the money you deserve to receive. On another level, you can get mad when you face some life changing, transformative, and sometimes traumatic experiences. Like the death of a family member or friend for example. Because you tend to question your own power, the system or even life over these changes that, in many cases, you can't have always the control. Your anger can be transformative and even deadly.

Sagittarius /9th house: when someone questions your belief systems, your religion or your knowledge. When someone discredits you for not having a university degree or studying in a place that is not part of the universities elites in the world like Yale or Cambridge. When someone mistreats you because of the place that you come from. The same can be said about the jokes some people makes in relation to some stereotypical things about the culture you come from.

Capricorn/10th house: when your efforts are not being appreciated or recognized either by others or in your career. You could either try to repress some of your frustration and anger (Saturn is a planet that restricts) or it is easily shown in your career since the 10th house rules our career and public persona. When the career you choose doesn't motivate you enough, or doesn't have the inmediate results that you expected, that can be another scenario of your anger.

Aquarius/11th house: your anger or rage can be explosive and unpredictable, especially with Mars in Aquarius. You may get angry with themes such as society in general. Perhaps when the TV or the internet shows violence, disgraced or injustices through all parts of the world, you feel mad towards these situations. Another theme here is friends, so you could very well get mad when somebody talks trash about your friends or even someone who is labeled as strange or different.

Pisces/12th house: this is the most complex one in my opinion and I write this with a intuitive feeling only, but I have the sense here that those who have either of these aspects, especially the 12th house, get mad but doesn't know the reason on why are they feeling like that. They just feel it, but they don't, consciously, know that they're mad and maybe that's because that the energy comes from their inmortal soul whom is larger than the physical body. Maybe it comes from another life. On the other side, if they have it in Pisces, they could very well be empathetic to other people's anger so they could absorb more anger whitin themselves.

This is all I have for you today. I hope it resonates with you.

Love and light to all of you

Tower Girl Anon

[junsongs]

Also in regards to my last post people are allowed to want their own biological children and yes there are many children that do need homes but I would maybe look into info from adoptees because many of them advocate for rare adoptions. Adoption shouldn’t be treated as a last minute consolation for not being able to have kids if you cant have them yourself. Adoption is extremely traumatizing to the child even in infancy and many adoption agencies put children in abusive situations because they work for profit not the benefit of children. Adoption in general effectively works like a legal form of human trafficking.

And on top of all of this not all people are suited to be good adoptive parents and women are socialized to believe our only purpose to be wives and have children so god forbid a woman find happiness in something shes been told she should have in order to be a “real woman.” And yes there is another conversation about how awful that conditioning is but disparaging women who have a desire for bio children does not fix that and it does not make you above anyone it makes you an asshole.

[crackcrocs]

DEATH WILL ONLY BE THE BEGINNING #9

This is to narcissistic mothers/ parents & anyone who is willing to understand.

(Written by me-for and through the lens of my dear friend, i wish you nothing but freedom from her chains. i wish you TLC)

Their ability to make everyone think they’re loving parents.

Their ability to make their kids believe that abuse is normal.

Their ability to make you believe you owe them everything.

Their ability to make themselves believe that they are right.

Their ability to turn the tables and make you believe that it was your fault.

All of this rings so true.

They do make you feel crazy; they suck the energy and ability to reason logically right out of you- and, by very nature of their narcissism, it never occurs to them that *they* might be the problem.

You can’t expect a relationship to happen with someone highly dysfunctional. how do you stoop down to the level of someone who aside from work & put all energy into keeping up an appearance can only abuse substance, speak to empty friends & post garbage.

In truth, I think the alcoholism is a symptom of her larger mental illness or narcissistic personality disorder- but it’s no excuse. Her parenting is unreliable, inconsistent, and unpredictable. There never is a sense of safety and consistency, allowing me to thrive.

I’m told to forgive & keep peace & ignore all your craziness. All the advice I've been getting on dealing with a narcissistic mother has been saying to avoid her as much as possible, or to try communicate & ‘keep peace’ as if I haven’t tried to communicate, as if I’m purposely singling her out from our already empty relationship. Well now I'm stuck at home all day, or every household or friend I bring over, she decides to involve. So much for distancing myself.  The worst part is she isn't even doing it herself, she just sits around watching tv, having friends over & phoning everyone while Im expected to clean up after her and "contribute" to the family/ financially support my self for college.

- Yes, absolutely, I am the crazy one. You know what, I’m not even going to deny it, I probably have a ton of issues, most of them mental. But guess where they came from? Guess who made those problems worse and maybe even helped create them? No mom, you’re not to blame for everything or the “war in Iraq” as you so eloquently put it. But you are to blame for some it, at the very least. it’s time to take account & I will no longer be made to feel like the obligated for for an entitled narc.

I feel your claws sinking in less and less.  You no longer have me in chains, I will break free from your emotional bondage even if it takes me seeming boring & silencing myself around you to not endure & tolerate your nonsense. Your words no longer fill me with despair like they once did.

This year long cold shoulder would have once filled me with anxiety but now all I feel is bliss. I no longer feel jealous when others talk about their seemingly perfect parents because I may not have that luxury but what I do have is a chance to be a "perfect parent" myself potentially one day. To be everything you couldn't and wouldn't somewhere far away and isolated from your poison.

I wonder how you feel...  but I simply can’t understand or pretend to care anymore. I’m tired of putting energy into a source that doesn’t put out. When children don't talk to you unless prompted- it’s because there is nothing to be said after the plenty opportunities given to converse truly & openly.

No I don’t want to speak to your 9th friend on the phone today again about surface level things just to please you. No I don’t want to come socialise with your drunk friends & be spoken to like a child

When you have to tell yet another lie to yet another friend to mask the evidence of a broken home When you look in the mirror and only see insecurities When you realise there's no one around you and can't figure out why When you tear down someone close yet again, to feel good about yourself  I wonder how you feel, I wonder if you feel, I wonder if you can...

my mom pushes me away but doesnt wanna let me leave. she doesn’t want to take into account that she pushed me to this extent. part of growth is being able to communicate your emotions properly. how can a whole 43 year old be unable to do so? I Vocalize when I’m not okay with something. Communication helps people avoid being uncomfortable, easily triggered, hostile, or passive aggressive with people. her communication is one sided and I’m the only one who gets to listen while she’s the only one who gets to talk, otherwise I’m ‘answering back’ or ‘telling a woman what to do’ even though I talk sense and out of respect in my responses or when I do try speak.

Worse yet I have to go BACK to the emotionally abusive situation that I basically fled.

What really bugs me is when you’ve given someone so many chances to do better and change. But then once you get tired of their antics, you try to move on and they continually try to reel you back in. Not even trying to change, but instead *trying* to reel you back in for their benefit. It’s unhealthy and traumatizing to say the least.

I guess i should be glad your swinging moods and emotions taught me to manage mine from young. I should be glad that I had to teach myself not to care about what you said to me and what you thought about me. I should be overjoyed that the side effect was me not caring about what anyone said or thought and basically becoming an inert emotionless void. I should be thankful that I always look fine even when I’m in pain and feeling like death and I’m capable of putting up with things that would send any sane person off the edge.

relationships are so much healthier when the goal is to experience life together and not to try to make the person into who you want them to be or to make them do what you want them to do. In my case my mother has de masculated me over the years making me soft and obedient, for her own selfish gain of having a man worship her. she decided since she doesn’t have a man, or never managed to find someone stay at home that’s he truly connected to, she’s decided the man that’s going to worship her will be me- her son. Since I resemble my father who she was in love with, she will always talk bad on me as she resents my father for not wanting her.

through gaslighting me over the years, it’s become harder to speak up, I even feel embarrassed to tell my dad even though that’s probably the only thing that will make her open her eyes and get clean. my pot is boiling though. Independence is obviously healthy but when it gets to the point where i find it challenging to actually be able to even admit that i might need assistance in this situation,  problems arise. And for what? Why I’m I protecting her image? I’ve been taught to & I’m a respectable young man who won’t take joy from her exposure, but I don’t take joy from preserving information & keeping it all inside to deal with myself. I’ve become so hard on myself and still pushing through-it’s not easy, people still expect me to be a super heroe all the time. I have a hard time opening up, allowing people to help me in whatever I’m doing. I hate even admitting I need help most times. I wish I’d been taught early what my mother learned late, thankfully I was observant, self taught & still willing to learn- thankfully I’m not a follower & I know right from wrong.

The worst part about looking at the future and trying to imagine it full of hope, light and emotional health is knowing that you'll always have the scars. Emotional abusers aren't supposed to leave scars but mine managed to. And in my mother's usual style it can even be passed off as unintentional. In my case it was actually supposed to a kind act which ended badly in the way that only events in my life can seem to end.

All the phone calls to your friends, you continuously fake talk about me on a nonexistent relationship. it’s sad how you need to phone 100 people in a day and can only hold the same surface level chats. I wonder if you can grip the fact that nobody ever wants to help you with anything. you’re lucky they even listen and you’re lucky they only know your side of the story every time. you’re a great potter & can mould situations.

It’s sad that if you sense the slightest hint that people do not approve of your estrangement and they are not going to be there for your nonsense, you stir the pot and involve and buss peoples names, further spinning your web of lies.

All the pity you came to relish over the years as single mother warrior extraordinaire would simply dry up. Any attempts to paint me, your only child in a negative light would seem simply monstrous if I exposed you, but I maintain respect, bite my tongue & hold my head up because my real mother figure taught me that.

But really you have to keep up the pretense to your friends, that I was an insubordinate, ungrateful bitch of a problem child and you were a glorious brave single mother at her wits end just trying to make things work. even with the mural I painted, you forced me to mention the single mother narrative; as if that had anything to do with my art piece. I mean how selfish can you be? the art peace was to represent Sheku Bayou & the BLM movement, I didn’t even want to put my real name- I wanted to put my instagram page associated with my art because business is business and personal is personal. but to toot your horn, I added a whole separate paragraph because you wanted your name to be connected to my art piece as though I’m some sort of celebrity and it was my claim to fame. the single mother narrative is bullshit, I know tonnes of single african parents that know how to step up when it’s time to be a mother, but that’s something you’ve never known how to do. I remember you drunk the day I came here and I will never forget the words ‘I will drink myself to death if I want to’ I don’t have sympathy anymore and I’m not a saviour, I have tried and tried through hiding alcohol, attempting to converse & get her to cut down; but you can only bring a horse to the water not to drink it. how is a teenager meant to know how to stop an alcoholic junkie? I’m her son you say? If she truly cared and wanted to fix up, I would be one thing to stop her I thought.

my mother is an alcoholic. an addict. she refuses to wear those labels, but this has far exceeded the occasional ‘binge’ ‘sesh’ or ‘Prosecco party’ .Throughout middle school and high school, I would guess that half or so of the days out of the year she spent in a wine haze. Even my constant begging her to stop drinking did not stop it. Pouring her wine down the drain or hiding it made her angry and transitioned to mental and phsyical abuse. She became increasingly angry and I aged and entered high school but she was always this way since I came really. It was during this time that I would lock the doors to my room and try to hide from her in there. I still barricade my room door to this day just for my own peace. Despite all the horrendous things she did, every once in a while she did give me money, and this gets dangled over my head RELENTLESSLY... as if money buys love.

I needed to get some outside reassurance that I'm sane. Thankfully now I know and all I can do is try stay in my lane, can’t argue with a supposed adult with a brain that resembles a wall or a child.

People who were emotionally abused have spent far too long defending themselves. Justifying their own feelings. Trying to make others see and understand what they went through is a task. Abusive parents are very good at manipulating. that’s why I have ceased contact with this toxic person, i do not owe anyone an explanation.Doesn’t matter if they are a family member or close family friend. Doesn’t matter if they are a friend or acquaintance of yours. I’ve learned just to be boring , save everything interesting and beautiful about myself for those who deserve it.

[silverjirachi]

Do u rly 100% believe ur not a woman? If u dont mind sharing how did u figure that out? How can u separate urself from ur body like that? We r our bodies! I cant wrap my mind around it even tho I have dysphoria. Also women are the most oppressed class of people 2 this day so it seems really really stupid 2 let our oppressors claim womanhood. We r all born from vaginas. How do people ignore history & reality? Is pretending ur not who u r a coping mechanism? Wouldnt accepting ur body b healthier?

Hi there!  I considered not answering this because I don’t want to fan flames or stir discourse because I don’t want other people to get wrapped up into something that is 100% about me. I try really hard to cultivate a positive, lighthearted environment in all of my online presences.  But honestly your ask isn’t worded hatefully, and I think what I have to say is important and might help someone else, so I’m going to answer it. But I probably won’t answer anything else and there better not be any funny business in these notes.  If there is, I would like to politely ask people not to engage with it.  Please leave me, and everyone else in these notes, alone.  I am writing this for me, to answer your question about me, and I’m writing this in case there’s a baby enby out there who is exactly like me who who needs to read this today.

With that disclaimer aside...,

Yes, I really do 100% believe I am not a woman.  I unfortunately cannot easily explain how without falling into the traps of words like masculinity and femininity.  But it’s the same as any other identity.  How do you know you are a woman?  Is it something that you identify with, feel a personal relationship with?  Or does it ultimately only come from your body alone, and you feel absolutely no connotations or connections to it whatsoever?  Did it come to you through your body?  I know people who 100% identify with their assigned gender, but can’t really articulate how or why without falling into these same binaries.  And I know people who 100% DON’T identify with their assigned gender and cannot truly articulate how or why.  It doesn’t even have a lot to do with masculinity or femininity.  A lot of our language just doesn’t have the words to describe such an internal experience.

It is true that there is a very specific type of oppression that comes with being born in a female body- or a body that would otherwise assign you female at birth.  From what I can tell, that’s what a lot of this really relies on.  I don’t think anyone who is AFAB and nonbinary or ftm is really denying that, at least not from my experience.  I’m sure they’re out there.  But we, by and large, HAVE had the experience of discrimination in some way or another because of our “femaleness-” our ASSIGNED femaleness.  (Something that got thrown at me was the idea of female socialization- it’s true, I was socialized as a female bc that’s what my body “looked” like and that’s just what our society assumes).  But just as there is a very specific kind of oppression that goes along with being AFAB, there is also a very specific kind of oppression that goes along with being mtf, and there is a very specific type of oppression that goes along with being a poc and any of those other categories.  That’s at the core of intersectionality.  Different parts of our identities interact with each other in different ways.  People experience oppression and privilege in different ways and at different times depending on where they fall in this mix of race/class/gender/ability etc.

I also have body dysphoria, and it’s true our bodies can define a lot of our human experience (after all if I didn’t have a body I wouldn’t have dysphoria, right?? Godddd what a life).  But also because I have dysphoria, I do not think that our bodies should be the defining characteristic of our identities.  Bodies and presentation can cause a lot of our social interactions- including oppression- but I think to say woman and woman’s experience = female body is quite a limited summary of the issue with little nuance, and it’s also quite limiting with the way our society is changing.  This is why I heavily prefer terms like assigned female at birth.  This can imply that such a person may have had a socially female experience (like me) in part due to their body, and thus was socially assigned to be a female, but just... also isnt a woman for some reason or another.

I also think that what we strive to do is not to ignore history (I think very few people are denying the way women have been treated in history, and are still treated to this day) but we hope to build from it.  I think that’s why feminism and gender studies get lumped together.  A lot of feminist activists/scholars (many were both at the same time) led our current strides into gender constructivism.  I studied a lot of gender essentialism when I started my thesis, and to be honest, I saw the point behind it in the context of the time, but we’ve shifted in understanding and context since then.

And, in full disclosure, at the start of this whole adventure, (and i am SURE this will be used against me) I really did identify with being a woman.  I thought it was awesome to have the body I had and when I started witchcraft I did actually fall into that really easy trap of tying the female experience to magic.  (Honestly because I HATED my body and looking back that was probably a way to cope with DYSPHORIA and not the other way around).  And isn’t inherently harmful to have a working magical relationship with your body like that, but it is harmful when you think and say that’s the only way people can exist and the only way people can be magical.  But over time, I just started to change.  Nothing traumatic happened, I’ve been incredibly fortunate and privileged my entire life, it’s not a coping mechanism, I just started to identify with womanhood less and less, for no real particular reason- nothing about me personality or preference-wise changed.  Just my own internal view of myself.

I also got the words for gender euphoria.  And I noticed more and more that, if I was being honest with myself, that that was always how I had truly felt.  While it’s true gender roles shouldn’t exist, just like any other role or label, it’s different when someone chooses that role for themselves versus when they have it thrust upon them.  As a child, like many other AFAB children, I had the idea of womanhood thrust upon me, with all the roles and stereotypes that went along with it.  It’s fucked up in the first place, don’t get me wrong, but I knew people who embraced these fullheartedly, I knew people who didn’t.  But some people who didn’t still identified with womanhood, others became ftm, others became mtf.  I had “woman” thrust upon me, didn’t identify with it, rebelled against it, tried to rationalize it by accepting that I could be a “woman” without falling into gender stereotypes because there is no ONE correct way to be a woman (which there ISN’T), still didn’t feel right, did a full 180 and started buying pink lingerie and worshipped Aphrodite, that worked for a while and was overall a positive experience that helped me hate myself a little less, but at the end of the day, no matter what I did, I still did not identify as a woman.  What does happen to me, however?  I get a burst of euphoria when I am called a boy.  That makes me feel like I’m being really seen.  I actually resonate with that after years of not resonating at all with womanhood no matter how I sliced it, and that’s why it feels so fucking good.  I tried to identify as a woman. Believe me, I tried like all fucking hell.  Even though my presentation is still read as mostly female (I would disagree strongly with it but alas society and their fucking gender roles), I am quite the feminine boy-something to me, and I don’t have to justify that to anyone.

So TL;DR no it’s not a coping mechanism, I have lived a life full of very accepting, open-minded people and I won’t deny that I have that privilege, but in spite of that i STILL did not view myself as a woman, no matter how hard I tried.  I’ve actually generally accepted my body except on the days my dysphoria makes me want to throw my boobs across the room, I don’t think it’s denying history if we’re building from it, gender roles are fucked up.  I recognize that my experience being AFAB- and others who are AFAB- comes along with a particular type of oppression, but that’s why I prefer the term AFAB because it indicates the experience you’re talking about while also leaving it open to considering other experiences like my own and the experiences of other trans and nb folks.  In a few years AFAB might be outdated as a term and then we’ll find more terms to help figure this whole mess out.

TL;DR;DR no it’s not a coping mechanism and anyone is welcome to think that this is simply part of the horrible fallout of female socialization, and anyone is welcome to think that i’m mentally ill for identifying like this. people can think or say all they want about me but it won’t change the fact that I’m a boy-something and it won’t change all the years I struggled trying to figure that out.

Thank you for allowing me to write this all out, I think I really needed to.  This is something that had been floating in my brain forever, and explaining it all to you actually made my thoughts that much clearer.

Now everyone who sees this- please respect my wishes and please don’t clown in these notes if it spreads.  I’m tired enough about this as it is today.  I’m tired enough about fucking gender as it is.  We’re all fucking tired.  What I’ve shared today is about me and me alone and I want to keep it that way.

[scripttorture]

I've gone through a couple posts, so I'm not sure if you covered this. If a person is exposed to torture from a young age, would they be desensitized to it and see it as normal and thus not bat an eye? Would their reaction be different if they were the victim instead of a bystander or perpetrator? You mentioned in another post that child soldiers tend to participate in torture as well due to their environment, however you also stated many times that humans are empathetic beings.

I think this depends on what you mean by ‘desensitised’. Because someone can see an experience as normal and still be damaged by it. A trained lack of external response does not necessarily mean a person is unmoved.

 And, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d suggest that that is the most common experience of children exposed to torture from a young age. They think it’s normal. They accept it as a part of life. And it makes them ill.

 Unlearning that takes time, social support and a healthier environment.

 We can be moved by each other’s pain and still not know how to react to the world without violence.

 And- this is part of what makes rehabilitating child survivors really hard. They’re ill, they’re traumatised. That’s difficult enough with an adult. On top of that they don’t have a lot of other life experience to look to, they don’t know what ‘healthy’ is.

 And they can be violent.

 One of the really awful things that’s come out of the lack of response to Daesh is- this sudden flood of children who are traumatised, angry, without a support structure and struggling against years of being taught violence is the ‘correct’ response to the world around them.

 Introducing these children back into a community that’s traumatised often leads to other survivors viewing these kids as aggressors. They reject them.

 I can understand why. If you’re dealing with your own trauma, your own pain, it’s hard to take on someone else’s. When that someone else echoes things torturers said, when they’re sporadically violent or seem aggressive, that can be too many complex problems to expect another survivor to ‘fix’.

 Children in these situations need intensive, professional help. Generally they don’t get it.

 Essentially all of the things you’ve mentioned can be true for child survivors at the same time.

 Recovery is possible. There are a lot of cases of child soldiers, and other children who survived torture or genocide, being reintegrated into the community. These children can grow up to live full, happy lives.

 If you’d like to read about someone who survived that kind of childhood then I recommend looking up Aki Ra, who did his level best to remove all of the land mines he was forced to lay as a child.

 As with other survivors recovery does not mean the absence of symptoms. It means learning to manage and live with symptoms in a way that doesn’t interfere with what the survivor wants out of their life.

 Most of the positive outcomes I’m aware of for child soldiers involve kids who didn’t have access to professional help. What they had was constant, consistent community support. They were welcomed into a pre-prepared support network, often a religious one. And after years of hard work, support and good parenting they improved.

 Now- when it comes to a character’s reaction to being a victim, witness or torturer, well the answer depends on what you mean.

 The symptom set is the same across these categories regardless of age. There are behavioural differences in children, ie they tend to express their symptoms in different ways to adults. But I don’t know much about childhood development so I don’t feel confident speaking about differences based on age.

 A character in any of these categories could be traumatised. For a torture victim or a torturer trauma is guaranteed*, however when it comes to witnessing some individuals may be traumatised and others may not be. If a character has witnessed torture once and has experienced no other traumatic events a lack of symptoms is within the realm of possibility. But the more traumatic events like torture they’ve witnessed the more likely it is that they’d develop symptoms.

 But symptoms alone don’t really tell you much about a character’s emotional reaction and how they process or justify things.

 You asked about resistance specifically and given the context of the question I’m interpreting that as meaning opposition to torturers.

 This is a common response in both torture victims and people who witness torture. In political struggles it’s a powerful recruitment tool for the opposing side. I’ve not seen anything to suggest that changes with age. In fact a few of the survivor accounts from children kidnapped to be soldiers talk about witnessing torture as- the thing that made them decide to risk their lives and attempt escape.

 But torturers don’t express this. They don’t talk about having sympathy for their victims and they don’t seem to feel driven to oppose each other. Even though they’re clearly effected in the same ways, because they manifest the same symptoms.

 I’m not a psychologist so I’m not sure how well founded my suggestions here will be.

 That said- Based on a combination of what torturers say and what they do I think torturers spend a lot of energy denying their instinctive emotional and physical responses to torture.

 They re-frame brutality as proof of their strength, ‘toughness’ and dedication. They deny the fact they’re experiencing symptoms up until the point they collapse.

 This is exacerbated by the social structures they build up. Torturers don’t function alone. They work in groups. The toxic hyper-masculine subculture these groups build up means any sign of ‘weakness’ is dangerous.

 Torturers have a marked tendency to turn on each other because they see themselves as locked in competition with each other. This means they egg each other on to more and more brutality. It also means that any sign of sympathy or illness could be met with violence at worst and being thrown out of the social circle at best.

 Given the way they behave towards each other, well I suppose you could argue that torturers do act in opposition to each other. Not in ways that stop other members of the group from torturing or in ways that oppose torture. But they are competing, the comradery they display towards each other is understood to be fragile.

 They know that the group could turn on them at any point.

 And this makes any admission of the effect torture has on them a big risk.

 Ex-torturers do sometimes talk about the effect torture had on them in a way that is- almost sympathetic to the victim. They talk about things like recurrent nightmares and particular events or images becoming intrusive memories. They talk about finding particular things grotesque.

 But they tend to talk about these things in a way that’s at a slight remove. They acknowledge that what happened was awful but in a way that almost makes it sound as if they played no part in it.

 They talk about torture in a way that focuses on their pain, or regret or symptoms with no real consideration for the victims or reflection on the fact that they caused this.

 And like I said, I’m not a mental health professional. I don’t really know the underlying reasons why they do this.

 Perhaps it’s the only way they can keep themselves going.

 With child soldiers in particular we’re talking about a group of extremely vulnerable people who are coerced into participating in torture.

 I don’t have enough data to reach definite conclusions about their responses because they are often both victims and perpetrators.

 That said, from a few anecdotal accounts, there may be a difference between individuals who embrace the ideology/group that kidnapped them and those who don’t. The former group tends to survive longer in the group and that may also be a factor.

 But the older individuals who have participated in a lot of atrocities and appear to embrace the armed group they’re part of- my judgement of the interviews is that they sound more like torturers when they express their views on events.

 Younger individuals who escape (and I have access to more interviews of this type) tend to express regret, revulsion and a deeper understanding of the harm they inflicted. They also tend to emphasise that it wasn’t ‘their fault’ and that they were forced to act the way they did.

 There’s a sense in which both responses can be seen as a survival strategy: the former for life within the armed group and the latter for life in a group of survivors. That- is not a suggestion that either response is a conscious choice. Just an observation that both responses make survival more likely in one group and less likely in the other.

 I hope that answers your questions. It’s not a simple answer, or a short one. These are complicated scenarios.

 The question of when a child stops becoming a victim and starts becoming a collaborator has been plaguing us for- well since the advent of warfare. And the ‘correct’ ethical response is not a one-size-fits-all stamp-

 Perhaps if we had worked out a better way to deal with torturers we would have a better answer for these children, one that acknowledges both the harm done to them and the harm they caused.

 *We think that the mechanism that leads to torturers becoming traumatised is the same as the one that leads to witnesses being traumatised. But the intensity of the violence someone is exposed to makes a difference. Torturers do not generally see torture only once; they see multiple incidences a day, every day for months or years at a time.

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[funkymbtifiction]

The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Crain [ESTJ]

UNOFFICIAL TYPING by Bear

Functional Order: Te-Si-Ne-Fi

Judging Functional Axis:

Extroverted Thinking (Te) / Introverted Feeling (Fi)

Due to being in an Fi-grip after the slow and traumatic breakdown of her family system, adult Shirley behaves like an unhealthy Fi-dom - overly sensitive and paranoid, quick to anger, her unformed emotions controlling her rather than she controlling them, and leading her to making fatal errors in her business due to “heart” cases. However, behind this volatile Shirley, we see the organized and capable Shirley that is always focussed on the task at hand. She manages her family, pulling them all together, as well as being the most financially able, to get Luke into rehab the first time (and then again and again, until he oversteps her generosity for the last time), and then taking on responsibility for Nell’s funeral arrangements (“It’ll take too long to explain [to her assistant about cleaning Nell’s corpse]… I’ll just do it”; “I’m knee deep in our sister’s chest cavity…get Dad and Luke to the funeral!; Nell’s casket topples over, so she “needs her make-up fixing…I’ll go get my kit.”). As a child, she was healthier but still pragmatic and naturally direct - “if there’s a pony in there [the Red Room], it’s dead…we need more keys”; “we can’t leave the kittens out here…the dogs will get them!”. Olivia says she grew up fast, but she can also rely on Shirley in a storm, to take her younger siblings to go make some cocoa. She was also more amenable with her siblings, not holding them to unrealistic standards and being better with managing their emotions (“I don’t want to have a tea party right now - go ask Theo.”)

However, Shirley’s inferior Fi is her Achilles heel, triggered by her consecutive family tragedies and turning the innately kind and pragmatic Shirley into an unreachable adult, that pushes past her emotions of betrayal and grief with either outbursts or “icing people out”, out of touch with herself and the relationships around her. She succumbs to this psychological stress when she uncharacteristically has an affair, but she is so separate from what she has done she rejects it, which manifests itself in the ghost of the man she slept with. 

Perceiving Functional Axis:

Introverted Sensing (Si) / Extroverted Intuition (Ne)

Shirley’s Red Room in the house was a family room, which sums up on what Shirley constructs her identity; rituals, safety and security. This is in part what screws her up so badly, as her life out of her control takes each of those touchstones of familiarity away from her, most painfully her mother. However, as an adult she works the hardest of keeping their unit together, present at every family event, even though she lashes out at change, especially when her adult siblings deviate from the established code. She is hands-on and skilled in her craft in restorative work, which is physically returning ravaged corpses to a wholesome, even unrealistic image of the past - likewise, Shirley rebels against Steve mining Hill House for financial gain, as like their Si-dom father she wants to keep the image of their childhood, and of their family, whole, safe in her personal experience of the past. She is the one that most successfully builds a life for herself following their tragedy, including a reproduction of her mother’s Forever House. She is most concerned with what she can perceive (Nell and Steve laugh over her being the last to realize Theo’s sexuality) and suffers because she can’t understand why Nell wouldn’t ring her - she has little ability to conceptualize outside of actual events.

Shirley’s Ne is ill-serving; it over-idealizes Luke’s recovery, so that she is especially broken when he, as junkies do, relapse again and again, and also interprets Steve’s writing of the book as representative of his betrayal of the family foundations, far beyond what it is in reality. However, it isn’t completely non-apparent; she knew her mother was “acting weird” on the night they all fled Hill House, and is the only one of her siblings to interpret the themes of the house creatively (albeit morbidly), using the idea of “fixing” to reconcile herself with the death of her mother and helping others come to terms with their own loved ones’ deaths.   

Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff

Values: hard work, patience, loyalty, and fair play.

Even as a child, Shirley wanted to find a place to fit in, to make a difference. She started out by trying to open doors for her little sister. Then to raise kittens. And moved on, finally, morbidly, to running a funeral parlor where she can make the dead beautiful. Or at least, seem less dead to their bereaved loved ones. But somewhere along the way, due to her screwed up childhood, Shirley lost her natural compassion – at least where her family is concerned. It turned to judgment. And yet, she is always there for them, always willing to step in and be the dutiful one, always able to get the job done, which speaks to the heart of a Hufflepuff.

Enneagram: 1w2 sp/so

Tritype: 162 The Supporter [1w2 6w5 2w1]

Shirley does not want to think she’s a bad person. She refuses to admit to this so much, that she becomes a hypocrite – denying her own adultery, while accusing her husband of it. She criticizes and nitpicks everything her family members do, accusing Theo of “mooching” off her (instead of seeing the truth, that Theo is living there to “help” her cope with reality), standing in judgment of her brother’s drug addiction (his way of coping with their mother’s death, his best friend’s death, and the spirits he saw as a child), and insisting she have everything her way, which has to be perfect. She tries so hard to be good, that admitting to her faults is the hardest thing she ever has to do – and yet, at the end, she swallows her immense pride and faces the hard facts that no, she isn’t perfect. Her 2 wing manifests in how many of her decisions are motivated through a desire to help others – she reduces their costs so much, it forces her husband to take “blood money” (her words) from Steven just to stay afloat. Her 6 fix shows in how distrustful, suspicious, and negative-minded she can be, always leaping to the worst (and often inaccurate) conclusion about her loved ones, as if she’s expecting their betrayal. Her 2 fix can be quite manipulative at times, using all the “nice things” she’s done for Theo to attack her for trying to seduce her husband (with an attitude of “this is how you pay back my kindness?”).

[mnasclinic]

First Time Sex – 6 Things To Know

Everyone’s “first time” is different. But one of the most important parts of being prepared for sex is making sure you use birth control and condoms to help prevent pregnancy and STDs. Here’s what happens when you lose your virginity.

Losing your virginity can be a big experience and can be exciting as well as nerve-wracking at the same time. Its significance is different for everyone and there are no wrong or right ways to lose your virginity.  Dr. Roshita Khare is Best sexologist in Pune has given the best consulting for the sex problem, depression and anxiety problem. Making your first time a memorable experience is easy if you know and remember these 4 things:

·         Relax

·         It might hurt a bit

·         Go slow

·         Use protection

·         Closed and Familiar Place

·         Try once more

1.      Relax –

You might be conscious of your body or nervous about pain or pleasing your partner, but you need not be. It is natural to feel insecure and nervous, but communicating your reservations with your partner will clear the air between both of you, helping you level your expectations and relax.

Your first time is about exploring each other’s body and pleasuring each other, as well as an understanding partner, will help you relax and forget your insecurities.

2.      It might hurt a bit –

If you are a woman, intercourse for the first time might hurt a bit if your vagina is not well lubricated before you have sex. Also, you might feel some pain and/or bleed if your hymen tears, but it will not be excruciating pain.

Worrying about the pain is a lot scarier than the actual pain. Some women may not experience any pain at all. However, you should make sure you are well lubricated. Foreplay is a great way to get ready for intercourse and if it is still painful you could use additional lubricants to minimize discomfort and pain.

3.      Go slow –

If you are a man, help your partner be comfortable by going slow in accordance with their wish. Going too fast may hurt your partner if they are not comfortable and make your first time a traumatic experience. Try to gauge your partner’s reactions and proceed in a way pleasurable to both of you.

Penetrating too soon might cause you to ejaculate too quickly before your partner has climaxed. Indulge in foreplay so that both of you are ready. If your partner ejaculates too fast or is unable to hold his erection, do not feel rejected or angry, support him and help him get aroused again, as it is just an effect of nervousness and excitement.

4.      Use protection –

There is no truth in the saying that you cannot get an STD on your first time. It is completely possible and the only way to prevent that is to use condoms or not have penetrative sex. Women can get pregnant during unprotected sex and unless you plan to become pregnant, panicking about being pregnant for days after your first time will ruin your first time and peace of mind.

Use birth control and/or condoms to prevent an unwanted pregnancy after your first time, and both your partner and you will be able to enjoy losing your virginity without any worries. If you wish to discuss any specific problem, you can consult a Sexologist.

5.      Closed Space –

If you want to have sex but feel anxious about it, you would possibly remember doing it in an area you locate relaxed. When you are in an strange or uncomfortable region, your mind will be in two locations. This could make it hard to recognition on what’s happening and can make it tough to fully enjoy what’s going on.

6.      Try once later –

Not many humans have a first-rate first time. However, that doesn’t imply that intercourse will continually be horrific. Any variety of factors can contribute to a much less-than-great revel in. You can constantly attempt again later whilst you are feeling greater secure. However, you’re below no obligation to commit to a subsequent time, both. The pleasant time to have sex is whilst you’re positive you need it, now not whilst your accomplice wishes you to.

Say goodbye to depression, anxiety, stress, anger, mood swings, and boring sexual life. Move from frantic doing to calm being.

In case you have a concern or query you can always consult an expert & get answers to your questions! Dr. Roshita Khare at MNAS Clinic Baner, Pune is an eminent Sexologist in Pune who has an experience of 10 years in providing her patients with good health and well-being. She is exceedingly experienced in providing assessment and treatment for patients with mental health disorders and sexual disorders.

His aim in life is to pave a successful path where people have the freedom to talk about sufferings. She is the best sexologist in Pune who is constantly working in the direction of happy and healthier sex life. She is one of the best psychiatrists in Pune and also Adult Psychiatrist, Adolescent and Child Psychiatrist, Addiction Psychiatrist, Geriatric Psychiatrist, Mental Health Psychologist in Pune.

If you want to book an appointment call us Right Now -  +91 9545055753

[sexologistinpune-blog]

First Time Sex – 6 Things To Know

 Everyone’s “first time” is different. But one of the most important parts of being prepared for sex is making sure you use birth control and condoms to help prevent pregnancy and STDs. Here’s what happens when you lose your virginity. 

Losing your virginity can be a big experience and can be exciting as well as nerve-wracking at the same time. Its significance is different for everyone and there are no wrong or right ways to lose your virginity.  Dr. Roshita Khare is Best sexologist in Pune has given the best consulting for the sex problem, depression and anxiety problem. Making your first time a memorable experience is easy if you know and remember these 4 things:

·         Relax

·         It might hurt a bit

·         Go slow

·         Use protection

·         Closed and Familiar Place

·         Try once more

1.      Relax – 

You might be conscious of your body or nervous about pain or pleasing your partner, but you need not be. It is natural to feel insecure and nervous, but communicating your reservations with your partner will clear the air between both of you, helping you level your expectations and relax.

Your first time is about exploring each other’s body and pleasuring each other, as well as an understanding partner, will help you relax and forget your insecurities.

2.      It might hurt a bit – 

If you are a woman, intercourse for the first time might hurt a bit if your vagina is not well lubricated before you have sex. Also, you might feel some pain and/or bleed if your hymen tears, but it will not be excruciating pain.

Worrying about the pain is a lot scarier than the actual pain. Some women may not experience any pain at all. However, you should make sure you are well lubricated. Foreplay is a great way to get ready for intercourse and if it is still painful you could use additional lubricants to minimize discomfort and pain.

3.      Go slow – 

If you are a man, help your partner be comfortable by going slow in accordance with their wish. Going too fast may hurt your partner if they are not comfortable and make your first time a traumatic experience. Try to gauge your partner’s reactions and proceed in a way pleasurable to both of you.

Penetrating too soon might cause you to ejaculate too quickly before your partner has climaxed. Indulge in foreplay so that both of you are ready. If your partner ejaculates too fast or is unable to hold his erection, do not feel rejected or angry, support him and help him get aroused again, as it is just an effect of nervousness and excitement.

4.      Use protection – 

There is no truth in the saying that you cannot get an STD on your first time. It is completely possible and the only way to prevent that is to use condoms or not have penetrative sex. Women can get pregnant during unprotected sex and unless you plan to become pregnant, panicking about being pregnant for days after your first time will ruin your first time and peace of mind.

Use birth control and/or condoms to prevent an unwanted pregnancy after your first time, and both your partner and you will be able to enjoy losing your virginity without any worries. If you wish to discuss any specific problem, you can consult a Sexologist.

5.      Closed Space – 

If you want to have sex but feel anxious about it, you would possibly remember doing it in an area you locate relaxed. When you are in an strange or uncomfortable region, your mind will be in two locations. This could make it hard to recognition on what’s happening and can make it tough to fully enjoy what’s going on.

6.      Try once later – 

Not many humans have a first-rate first time. However, that doesn’t imply that intercourse will continually be horrific. Any variety of factors can contribute to a much less-than-great revel in. You can constantly attempt again later whilst you are feeling greater secure. However, you’re below no obligation to commit to a subsequent time, both. The pleasant time to have sex is whilst you’re positive you need it, now not whilst your accomplice wishes you to.

Say goodbye to depression, anxiety, stress, anger, mood swings, and boring sexual life. Move from frantic doing to calm being.

In case you have a concern or query you can always consult an expert & get answers to your questions! Dr. Roshita Khare at MNAS Clinic Baner, Pune is an eminent Sexologist in Pune who has an experience of 10 years in providing her patients with good health and well-being. She is exceedingly experienced in providing assessment and treatment for patients with mental health disorders and sexual disorders.

His aim in life is to pave a successful path where people have the freedom to talk about the sufferings. She is the best sexologist in Pune who is constantly working in the direction of a happy and healthier sex life. She is one of the best psychiatrist in Pune and also Adult Psychiatrist, Adolescent and Child Psychiatrist, Addiction Psychiatrist, Geriatric Psychiatrist, Mental Health Psychologist in Pune.

If you want to book an appointment call us Right Now -  +91 9545055753

[marcjampole]

The Trump Administration is never afraid to hurt children in its never-ending quest to create markets for its cronies

There always have been a limited number of ways for companies to sell more goods or services. The most obvious are to develop new products or to sell in new territories or to new markets, the latter being the point of global trade. Just as significant is to the creation of new needs for an existing product or service—new reasons to buy the same product from the company or industry, as when a pharmaceutical company finds a new use for an existing prescription drug. Sometimes, the economy or society itself creates the new need. A few old examples should suffice: In the 19th century, once states required many professionals to pass rigorous examinations that tested knowledge of standardized but highly specialized information, there was a new need to educate lawyers, physicians and other professionals which led to the rapid expansion of universities. During the same century, the consolidation of regional companies into national corporations created a new need for advertising. The rise of the fast food industry in the 20th expanded the market for throwaway plates, bowls and utensils enormously.

Most lobbying of legislatures and the administrative offices of the executive branch of state and federal governments is intended to make sure government either helps to create a new market or doesn’t do anything to shrink an existing market. An example of the former is to enter into an agreement with foreign countries that lowers tariffs on the products a company sells. An example of the later is to ban the use of a certain material, say lead in paint or gasoline. These governmental decisions result in companies and industries gaining or losing business. Almost since the founding of the United States, companies, especially larger ones, have made sure that elected officials understand that.

Unfortunately, all too often, our elected officials listen and respond with laws, regulations and policies that reward a few, typically contributors, at the expense of the many.

And all too often in the Trump Administration, the actions that create a new market for their cronies and contributors involve directly hurting children. We can see this most obviously in the recent policy to break up families that are seeking refugee status in the United States from countries south of the border, sending parents to one center and children to another. It is now well-documented that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has depended heavily on private organizations to process, house and feed the tens of thousands of refugee men, women and children nabbed at border crossings. Estimates of how much it costs to house each child range from $600-$900 a day, most of which goes into the hands of private companies that have courted Trump and Pence for years. Considering the accommodations, the profit margins must be phenomenal.

This week’s brouhaha over the United Nation’s World Health Assembly statement on breastfeeding is a virtual repeat of the decision to imprison everyone who tries to enter the country and take their children from them. Trump attempted to bully the UN and the rest of the world to help companies selling infant formula. But that policy hurts children. Virtually every expert agrees that breastfeeding an infant produces healthier and smarter babies who have fewer health problems later on and tend to live longer. But of course every baby who is breastfed is one less family buying infant formula, which, while a good substitute when breast-feeding is impossible or harmful to the mother, should for most mothers be a distant second choice to breastfeeding. We may not see the horrible photos of traumatized children and parents, but policies and advertising that steer mothers away from breastfeeding are nonetheless harmful to large numbers of children.

When the UN wanted to issue a strong statement recommending that mothers breastfeed, Trump officials went bat-shit crazy, pushing their weight around and threatening trade sanctions and withdrawal of military aid if any nation dare support a resolution at the United Nations. America officials wanted to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding.” The administration’s threats made Ecuador back down from introducing the resolution.

To quote the New York Times, “Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.” The reason the administration didn’t like full-hearted support for breast feeding was obvious to everyone from the beginning. The Trump Administration wanted to avoid narrowing the market opportunities for Abbot, Nestles and other makers of infant formula.

Unlike the fiasco at the border, the latest attempt to ignore science and put the interests of business first even though it directly hurts thousands of children, has a somewhat happy ending. One nation proved fearless enough to agree to introduce the resolution in its strongest version. For some reason, this nation didn’t fear retaliation from Trump. For some reason, Trump feared pissing off this nation and refused to threaten it in any way.

That country was Russia.

Yes, Russia became the hero of the moment, defending both science and the right of families all over the world to get accurate information and the best nutrition for their children.

Meanwhile, America continues to lose the respect of the rest of the world.

Especially appalling—and depressing—is that direct harm to children is the end result of so many efforts by the Trump Administration to create business opportunities for its cronies. Trump doesn’t seem to care if he creates a generation of PTSD sufferers by ripping children from their families. He doesn’t seem to care if millions of babies around the world could get inferior nutrition, which will shorten their lives. Trump and his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos don’t care that all the studies show that well-funded public schools produce better educated students than do private schools or charter schools. In all three cases, the Trump Administration believes the best interests of industry far outweigh the health or educational needs of children.

[theresabookforthat]

Psychology’s Top 12

Have you read 12 RULES FOR LIFE? It’s the bestseller from Canadian Psychology Professor Jordan Peterson, a widely cited scholar of personality. The New York Times’ David Brooks calls Dr. Peterson “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” The popularity of his book reveals once again the appeal of thinkers who make sense out of the uncertainties of the human condition, i.e. offer antidotes. Those of us in publishing know also the power of finite numbers, so we’ll take the number and run. Here are Penguin Random House’s current top 12 psychology titles. Recurrent themes of community, surviving trauma, solitude, brain science and their applications for professional and personal success are meant to assist you on your journey: 

 12 RULES FOR LIFE: AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS by Jordan B. Peterson

What does everyone in the modern world need to know? Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson’s answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research. Humorous, surprising and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us, among other things, why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street. 12 Rules for Life shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith and human nature, while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its readers. (Available as an audiobook on May 8th).

 ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: THE CASE FOR REASON, SCIENCE, HUMANISM, AND PROGRESS by Steven Pinker

“My new favorite book of all time.”—Bill Gates

If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.

 WHEN: THE SCIENTIFIC SECRETS OF PERFECT TIMING by Daniel H. Pink

Our lives are a never-ending stream of “when” decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it’s often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science. Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed.

 BRAVING THE WILDERNESS: THE QUEST FOR TRUE BELONGING AND THE COURAGE TO STAND ALONE by Brené Brown

A timely and important book that challenges everything we think we know about cultivating true belonging in our communities, organizations and culture. Brown argues that what we’re experiencing today is a spiritual crisis of disconnection, and introduces four practices of true belonging that challenge everything we believe about ourselves and each other. Brown writes, “The wilderness is an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.”

 LEADERS EAT LAST: WHY SOME TEAMS PULL TOGETHER AND OTHERS DON’T by Simon Sinek

Imagine a world where almost everyone wakes up inspired to go to work, feels trusted and valued during the day, then returns home feeling fulfilled. This is not a crazy, idealized notion. Today, in many successful organizations, great leaders create environments in which people naturally work together to do remarkable things. The best ones foster trust and cooperation because their leaders build what Sinek calls a “Circle of Safety” that separates the security inside the team from the challenges outside. Sinek illustrates his ideas with fascinating true stories that range from the military to big business, from government to investment banking.

 THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE: BRAIN, MIND, AND BODY IN THE HEALING OF TRAUMA by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

One of the world’s leading experts on traumatic stress explains how trauma affects people, its underlying neurobiology, and the many new treatments that are making it possible for sufferers to move beyond trauma in order to reclaim their lives.

 THE POWER OF HABIT: WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO IN LIFE AND BUSINESS by Charles Duhigg

The break-out New York Times bestseller The Power of Habit shows us that by understanding the three-step “loop” all habits form in our brains—cue, routine, reward—we can change our behavior and take control over our lives.

 QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING by Susan Cain

The book that started the Quiet revolution

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. After all, it is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.

 THE WHOLE-BRAIN CHILD: 12 REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES TO NURTURE YOUR CHILD’S DEVELOPING MIND by Daniel J. Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson

In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson offer a revolutionary approach to child rearing with twelve key strategies that foster healthy brain development, leading to calmer, happier children. The authors explain—and make accessible—the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. Complete with age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.

 GETTING TO YES: NEGOTIATING AGREEMENT WITHOUT GIVING IN by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, Bruce Patton

Getting to Yes has helped millions of people learn a better way to negotiate. One of the primary business texts of the modern era, it is based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution. Thoroughly updated and revised, it offers readers a straight- forward, universally applicable method for negotiating personal and professional disputes without getting angry-or getting taken.

 MINDSET: THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF SUCCESS by Carol S. Dweck

After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.

 MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Viktor E. Frankl, Foreword by Harold S. Kushner

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning”)-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

 For more on these  titles visit Top 12 Psychology Titles

[tanadrin]

Has anyone ever tried framing the benefit no-fault divorce in the language of market efficiency? I am 1000% sure this is not an original argument, but I wonder if it’s ever been used as a component of actual campaigns to legalize it.

In societies without divorce, abusive or malicious partners have less incentive to work on their abusive behavior, because once a marriage is solemnized, the spouse cannot leave (and in societies where women are expected to be dependent on their husband, the effect is strongly enhanced); therefore, an abusive spouse or a bad partner has little incentive to improve their behavior, except innate human empathy, which is clearly insufficient if they’re abusive or malicious in the first place, because it is difficult for their partner to leave them. In theory their partner could leave, but as a matter of law and interacting with the bureaucracy they’d be married, and significant social and legal difficulties would follow them because this personal status could not change.

Societies with stigmatized divorce (traditional Jewish divorce, many countries with divorce laws on the books in the period before they adopted no-fault divorce) have the same set of incentives, only partially weakened. The conservative argument that making it difficult or impossible to abandon a marriage (favoring the repeal of no-fault divorce or, e.g., the creation of marriages with special status, the “covenant marriage”) improves incentives for both parties to work on their marriage ignores situations where marital problems are asymmetric in nature, and the person whose behavior is making their spouse’s life difficult is content (or more content) with the status quo. Social pressure to behave well to one’s spouse is also insufficient, because abusers are, particularly, known to be able to present a charming front to other members of the community, to the point where targets of abuse are often disbelieved.

No-fault divorce (and later marriage, and economic freedom for women) makes it harder for bad partners to find mates. They still do, of course, because human relationships are complicated, but the primary effect of the factors contributing to “instability” in modern relationships is that, in fact, people are better able to sort their pool of potential partners, which is also bigger, since one doesn’t have to marry the first person they sleep with, and children don’t have to be had while the couple is very young. If you can be choosier, you can weed out the jerks sooner (in theory), and jerks will find less success in the dating pool.

Therefore, I would predict, if this theory were correct, that rates of spousal and child abuse would go down in the wake of the abolition or decay of traditional, patriarchal expectations around marriage and childrearing. Thus, modern marriage, though it still has faults like being an ad hoc welfare state of two, should be much better at creating an environment in which to raise children, and should produce children overall with less traumatized childhoods, than historically. Measuring this effect would be complicated by the fact that traditional societies, or conservative and insular religious ones (here I’m thinking of orthodox Jewish communities, or conservative Christian ones, or all of Europe and North America before, oh, say, 1950, or whenever this issue became incorporated into the feminist movement) are likely to not discuss and not report child abuse and spousal abuse to the authorities, if these actions are even illegal. The reported rate should actually spike as norms shift away from conservative attitudes to marriage, and people report abusive spouses to the police to protect themselves and their children. Once they can rely on such reports being taken seriously by the police, and their family supporting their decision to leave an abusive partner (or just a toxic one, but it’s not illegal to be a gigantic jerk), only then should we see a decrease in the statistics, which would have lagged behind the decrease in the real rate for some years. There are likely to be other additional variables which I have not accounted for that you’d need to account for to get an accurate view of how flexible family structures affect child/spouse abuse rates.

One potential objection: single-parent homes have worse outcomes for children; this seriously challenges the above theory. But has anyone compared the outcomes of children in single-parent homes with the outcomes of children in abusive two-parent homes? Because if the option is “suboptimal family arrangement” versus “abusive family arrangement,” the former seems preferable to me when it comes to raising children who are well-socialized and happy. A great deal of non-systematic literature has covered the idea, from the children of such homes, that parents who divorce because their relationship is extremely dysfunctional are preferable to parents who stay together and are miserable. The prevalence of single-parent homes is also closely tied to poverty, and no one has sufficiently disentangled the two statistically, to my knowledge, to produce an actually useful result, much less a policy prescription that amounts to more than “keep adults who no longer wish to be together in a relationship with each other.”

Being able to select one’s partner freely also has advantages where formerly functional relationships become dysfunctional; and as optimistic as the view is that improving an existing relationship is better than social instability, no one who has advanced that view seems to support, say, additional state funding for marriage counseling, much less having it covered by health insurance, or seems to be in support of state funding for additional social services to address the issue of child abuse or spousal abuse, which become far more serious when the abused cannot escape without serious social and legal disability--and, for women, who would normally be housewives in the idealized marital arrangement envisioned, economic disability. Nor do they advocate delaying marriage and childrearing, which seem especially important to me in societies where you get to choose a life partner only once; people in their teens and early twenties are not at all known for being able to make resilient life choices that stand them in good stead until the day they die.

Note: arranged marriages, I predict, should be even worse as childrearing environments from this perspective, since the person who makes the choice of spouse is not the person who has to live with it. The alignment of incentives is basically terrible--which reflects, in many cases, the history of marriage as a property transaction among men, not a childrearing arrangement between a man and a woman.)

Note 2: also, to be clear, I think even in suboptimal arrangements, most marital relationships are or can be mostly non-dysfunctional. That certainly doesn’t mean they’re optimal for human flourishing, to say nothing of the flourishing of children specifically. A functional marriage is not the same as a happy one, and a society even with many happy marriages is not the same as a society with many happy women, who, as the ones with the least economic freedom, are the ones who always seem to get the shortest end of the stick in these social structures.)

Final note: I’m sure there are interesting statistics on self-reported happiness in more constrained, traditional marriages. I also think it’s interesting, though, that violent crime in the U.S. has been declining since the 90s, 20-30 years after child abuse became a feminist issue, and the general availability of no-fault divorce. Lead is a persuasive explanation, but is unlikely to be the only contributing factor. Can’t find any good statistics on domestic violence over time in the U.S., but as I said above, I would expect the reported rate of that kind of crime to rise over time, even as the actual rate was falling. And I hope it is not controversial to observe that men abusing their wives tends to be more acceptable in societies with traditional and restrictive views on marriage. Poverty may be a confounding factor there--but I also expect that happier and healthier generations of children, less likely to pass on their parents’ dysfunction, are going to be better at leading lives with good economic outcomes, and thus that, over the long term, one of the ongoing contributors to economic growth is that we’re getting better at raising our children, and not routinely abusing and traumatizing them. Like, we forget this, but there have been ages of the world in which raping your wife, beating your children black and blue, forcing your daughter to marry someone against her will so he could rape her, and giving the baby a sparrow with broken wings to play with until it was crushed to death were all perfectly normal things to do, and that some of these things were perfectly normal in living memory in the Western world. And I could easily imagine that one of the reasons past societies have been more violent, poorer, more xenophobic, and more stagnant, was that everyone was by our standards constantly traumatized by their shitty upbringing. Is it a coincidence that in the 19th century, the temperance movement saw a society in which alcohol abuse was so rampant that it would be better to ban it altogether than try to convince people to use it responsibly. Now we think of them as hand-wringing moralists, but I think that their observations might have been pretty reasonable--but they only saw the symptom, not the underlying disease.

[problematiquecritique]

@sweets-books-and-anime replied to your post “Solangelo is just so bad??? And not healthy?? I absolutely love Rick Riordan but...”

Would you mind explaining why you think so? I've always thought they were really cute and I just wanted to know why you think that 

So I truthfully think that Solangelo has potential and could have been a lot better had Rick paired them the way he did. I've read some better explanations that I really liked and they go really in depth to certain aspects too and I'll link them because I recommend reading them.

My problem with Solangelo is what I think is a lot of anti-Solangelo's problem. The relationship is so rushed and it's not portrayed as the most healthy relationship in the world. Now, when I mean unhealthy, I don't mean that Will is out there actively mentally, physically, and/or emotionally abusing Nico or vice versa. By unhealthy I really mean it in the context in which their relationship happens.

Nico is a kid born in the 1940's where homosexuality was condemned and is not only struggling with his sexuality and his romantic feelings for his friend, he's also having to deal with his sister's death, his father's neglect and deceitful nature, isolation for being a child of the Big Three, and feeling put out for literally being from a different century. The boy is troubled and tortured and that's just from the events of Percy Jackson & the Olympians. That's not mentioning having to hide himself and become a social outcast for going back and forth between the Roman and Greek camps without tipping one off of the other, handling the revival of another sister, helping accomplish a prophecy, surviving Tartarus,  and being forcibly outed. The poor boy has gone through so much trauma and he just needs a warm blanket and years to rest himself emotionally and mentally.

That being said, I don't think Rick handled Nico's sexuality well. The Heroes of Olympus was a mess beginning with The Mark of Athena. There was so much focus on romance and the plot was unnecessarily complex due to all of the subplots and there were way too many characters to keep track of. I think I would have been much happier with five kids for the prophecy if not three. It would have been much simpler. But anyway, Rick didn't handle a lot well in the books, one of them being Nico's sexuality. Rick has Nico forcibly outed which while does absolutely happen to tons of closeted LGBT+ people, it was very painful to read. I kind of apologized it, though, as Rick trying to amplify the pain in Nico's life and trying to portray a realistic route that some coming out's have taken. What really made me uncomfortable, though, was the way Nico just so seamlessly accepted his sexuality after being forcibly outed within a few weeks? days? (it's been a while since I read the last two books so my timeline is off but so is Rick's and he wrote the books) by coming up to Percy and admitting his crush on him, saying that he's over the childish crush, and then quickly moving on from Percy to Will after a few moments of interaction. I think I reread the parts involving Nico and Will several times because I did not believe what I was reading. How the hell does someone who's been so tortured in life by everyone including himself, just suddenly accept something as big as sexuality within a few moments because he met a cute boy that told him (rather rudely) that he needs to get over it because he's being delusional?

What I really don't like about the relationship is just, Nico is suddenly accepting of his sexuality because Will told him to get over himself. Not only was Will's comment very rude and unnecessary, it's just so improbable that Nico would fully believe that he's accepted for being a son of Hades and that his sexuality is very much ok because Will told him to get over it and that he's just being an angsty teen. If someone told me something like that, I wouldn't even consider dating them and would probably isolate myself further from people as it would feel pretty obvious that nobody is fully accepting as they're not trying to understand what I've gone through.

Honestly, Will Solace used to be one of my favorite characters. After The Last Olympian, I basically devoured The Lost Hero in hopes of getting to read more about him and I was happy to have those small snippets of him in that book. And I actually still like Will, only the pre-Blood of Olympus Will as he might as well be a different character in Blood of Olympus and forward as his personality is entirely different. And I'll admit, I did, and still do, ship Will with another character (Nyssa Barrera, thanks toff.net) but I could get behind Solangelo if it weren't for how Rick treated the characters.

I don't like how Nico was just paired with someone for the sake of pairing him with someone. Just about every main character ends up with someone by the end of Blood of Olympus, except Reyna and Leo doesn't explicitly end up with Calypso but it's pretty much implied (upset about that because I very much ship Leyna and would have loved to see I believe two of four of Rick's only explicitly Latinx characters get together, plus I feel like they're pretty compatible for each other). And sure, fine, I'm a sucker for romance but Nico didn't need to jump straight into a relationship right after being forcibly outed. He needed what Jason gave him: friendship and support (and I am not a Jasico shipper btw, I know a lot of Solangelo shippers claim that anti Solangelo shippers are all Jasico or Perico shippers which isn't always the case as some of us are neither). I feel like it would have not only made more sense, but also been healthier for Nico to focus less on romance and instead try to find solace in friends, not in Will (no pun intended). Nico needed time to heal and accept who he is and then slowly get into a relationship. Nico has had so many people use and manipulate him, I highly doubt he would immediately jump into a relationship with someone he just met. I think I would have felt slightly more comfortable had Nico and Will known each other personally for a while but none of the books give us any indication that they had a real conversation before the Blood of Olympus. I would have been happier with Solangelo being hinted at in the end of the series and then several months later, with the appearance of Lester/Apollo, Nico and Will having finally gotten together in a relationship that started out as a friendship and slowly developed into romance.

I think that fanon Solangelo is so much better than canon Solangelo. I still don't ship it, just an a preference, but fanon Solangelo I have to admit is cute. It's very sweet and adorable and that typical light and dark trope that a lot of people love. However, it's just fanon. And I feel like people forget that fact. A lot of Solangelo shippers get caught up in all of the cute headcanons they make up and stuff but they forget what's actually canon and I think that's kind of bad. Will doesn't treat Nico well. He bosses and pushes Nico around and it's treated as a joke and you know what, it could definitely have been funny and cute had Nico not gone through all of the traumatic experiences he had gone through. He needs to be treated with kid gloves because if Rick hadn't botched his character, it would have been obvious that Nico could have a huge mental break at any moment, if he hasn't already. And I don't like Nico's compliance to Will. Sure, I love Nico's rather dry and dark humor in The Trials of Apollo, it feels nature and like his sense of humor considering everything he's gone through, but he's so accepting of Will's rudeness and pushiness and it doesn't feel right. I've had some people that had been in abusive relationships say that Nico's compliance reminds them of themselves whenever they would get pushed around by their abusers. Now, I'm not a psychologist and really know abuse from what Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has taught me, but it's telling when an abuse survivor tells you that a fictional relationship reminds them of their abusive relationship(s).

I really think Solangelo could have been such a great ship had Rick not handled it the way he did. It's just a lot of layers to why I don't ship it and if Rick had done things differently, Solangelo could have been such a great relationship for LGBT+ readers to admire. As I tend to say about a lot of things: great idea, terrible execution.I highly recommend asking @artem-ace, @billyxkaplan, and @nikthan as they can give you some really good anti Solangelo explanations that isn't just "I don't like them because I like x ship/they're toxic/I just don't like it" and really dig deep into the story, although I fee like some of them come off as slightly anti-Will, they’re very thorough and well-spoken. I'll link you at the bottom to a few of my favorite posts of theirs but definitely check out their blogs.

x x x x

[chucksandjeans]

A DECADE IN REVIEW & GOALS FOR BEYOND

PRECURSOR

This is a difficult post to write because there’s a lot to reflect on. Where do I start? Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth whether it makes sense to write these things down. It all started years ago when LiveJournal was popular. I wrote down daily routines and activities that I did during the week. It was remarkably diary-oriented with little thought put into what I wanted out of it. This Tumblr account started 11 years ago in 2008 when I arrived in Singapore to start my semester abroad. I started to document my exchange adventures, foods I ate, sights I saw. It was a means to write down my life so I would not forget it. In more recent times, I continued writing down travel blogs but moved towards using writing as a way to plan for the future. It’s interesting looking back and seeing that my younger self scribbled notes about daily events, then grew into my 20s writing things down to not forget them, and now using writing to plan for the future. I wonder what the next decade in review will look like.

2010-2019 AT A GLANCE

Overall, I give myself A- for this decade.

RELATIONSHIP - A

I spent the first few years of the decade lost. I came out of a long-term relationship and hurt people along the way, myself included. It was a difficult time in my life and I was jaded for a long time. Between the ages of 22 and around 25, I was a quintessential tool that did a lot of things that I thought someone in their early 20s should be doing. Going out, dating random people, not being honest with anyone to protect myself. It took a lot of courage to get out of that state and looking backwards, it was a state that I had to go through. Things changed when I met my wife who pulled me out of that slump and showed me that love could be all powerful. I am so grateful for my past relationships because they all brought me to where I am today. My marriage has evolved from a simple swipe to dating to moving in to signing the papers and soon having our first child. It’s crazy to think back to 2010, what I was doing and thinking back then, and fast forward to today. It’s magical to see what life has to offer and I am only beginning to appreciate all the small things. I started weak but finished the decade strong.

FAMILY - B+

My family is small in Toronto and North America. I love them deeply and when I look back, I don’t think I truly showed them that when I was younger. My parents brought me here, giving up their careers and community, so I could have a better life. I gave them a ton of grief as a teenager and could have done a better job in my 20s to take care of them. As I grew older, I understand why my dad use to say “you’ll know when you’re older”. I use to roll my eyes but now I understand. I hope I can pass this knowledge onto my child(ren) so that they can mature their thinking. Likely, they won’t understand until they are adults too but that’s just how the cookie crumbles. My extended family in Hong Kong - I neglected them for the most part. I spent my 20s traveling around the world and only went back in 2018, 10 years after my last visit. I can’t express how happy I was to see them and at the same time, seeing how the years have taken its toll on them. I hope I still have time to see them and create memories before the winters go by. 

FRIENDS - B+

The definition of friend has changed dramatically. I use to think friends were the ones who I partied with, drank with and ate with. I tried to have as many friends as possible and know as many people as possible. What a silly way to think? People came and gone and I struggled with that, in particular when the fake friends faded away. Real friends faded away too. I can’t say that it came as a surprise but it definitely came. I use to think friends lasted forever - the way we hung out, how often we hung out, how many movies we saw - but now I see, just like everyone said, parties will eventually end. I had to redefine what the word friendship meant to me. Sometimes I look at photographs and see faces of people that I never see or talk to. Friendships evolve and I am glad that there are a handful that I cherish deeply. New friends, old friends, it’s time to think about who are the real friends.

CAREER - A

The beginning of the decade marked the beginning of my career. I started at E&Y in September 2009 so January 2010 was still early days. I just finished the CKE and going into my first busy season before the SOA and UFE exams later in 2010. It was a long time ago but it feels like yesterday. I wonder if 2010 VLiu knew that everything would be okay, that 10 years later, he would be still clueless and figuring things out. So much has happened since then, from being promoted to moving functions to companies. I got lost in a big company and searched for meaning in my work. I learned how to work tools and technology, networked and built relationships. I screwed up, joined the wrong company and returned to a career that I knew was not my passion. I met great people, managed a growing team and launched a business. I did case studies. I learned that my skills defined me but I could learn new skills. I pushed harder than I ever thought possible, mentally and emotionally. This last decade was a blur. What a blur.

TRAVEL - A+

I did well here. After the exchange semester and Europe backpacking trip in 2009, 2010 onwards marked the most active travel itineraries that I could dream of. Years ago I already started jotting down my goals on where to globetrot and as this decade comes to a close, I am proud to have been to 6 of the 7 continents, hiked some of the world’s greatest trails, lived in tiny huts and tents to lush hotels. It was a decade to remember and a passport to cherish. I grew a lot as a person having seen so many things and as I think back, I am very lucky to have had the opportunities, money, time and freedom (and companions) to see these places. Travel is good for the soul, and this part of my soul is happy. I marked Norway as my 50th country with my wife and no longer am I chasing stamps. I am now chasing memories.

HEALTH - B

I am proud of myself for creating a healthy lifestyle for myself early on even before 2010. I have a certain friend to thank for this, but early on in first year university, he inspired me to take up weight training. Since then, I have been dedicated to this activity and it carried through to 2019. I can’t say that I work out as much anymore. From 2010-2015, I probably worked out 5 times a week for at least 60 minutes per session and ate a ton of protein shakes. In more recent years, this has dialed back for reasons I am ashamed to say as laziness. I still go 1-2 times per week but that’s still way less than before. However, I am choosing to eat healthier with less meat which counts for something!

FINANCE - B+

I have been notorious with saving and believing that paying myself first is always the best path forward. I don’t know what the future holds so having a steady contribution to investments was the approach that I have been taking. Hopefully it works. I trust finance theory.

PERSONAL - B+

I am proud of what I’ve accomplished between 2010-2019. I’ve grown as a person personally and professionally. I have matured in how I think about friends and family, and what it means to be happy. I made mistakes along the way and I learned from them. Now, I am in a good place with all aspects of my life. Overall, it was a good 10 years.

FAVOURITE MOMENTS OF THE DECADE

Everything Celine-related: meeting her, getting to know her, building a relationship, planning a wedding, having the wedding, and all the ups and downs in-between. I think back and cannot picture my life without her.

Road trip: the drive from Toronto to LA was monumental and solidified some lifelong friendships that cannot be replicated. The memories are so precious and I am so glad that trip happened.

Buying a house and decorating: the rush of signing papers, moving in and the fun of hanging paintings and measuring furniture. Ah, first homes!

Walking the Highline NYC with Celine: it was just so magical. The sunset, the city, the photo that captured it all.

Weddings: this decade was filled with many joyous celebrations of my friends getting married. It was so beautiful to see them tie the knot and celebrate with old friends. I know I complained about too many weddings, but now that I think about it, I will miss the weddings.

Revisiting Singapore: SG has a special place in my heart. Seeing PGP again too. It feels like a different me but the same me. I miss that part of my life a lot.

Darth and See Lai month: 2015 was a rough year as I chose a terrible boss and made a made career mistake. Luckily for me, I had a network to help me and I got through it. Darth reminds me that most importantly in any career, happiness comes first. Money is a byproduct. The one month spent at home was filled with mom-son time. I loved every second of it, even though I was recovering from a traumatizing experience.

Jamie: Jamie Anderson, the classiest man I know. His deep voice, decisive attitude, and gentleman’s classiness, I will never forget.

Corporate Development: this was a huge career accelerator for me. The people that I met and the deals that I worked on set me up nicely for the rest of my career. Project Laker will always be my pride and joy.

Ventures, Anthony and Derek: Joining RBC Ventures was a life-changing experience. I finally learned that I could learn new skills, and be friends with the people I worked with. I met two of my greatest mentors. It was the time of my life.

Norway: nuff said. Norway 2 aka. Iceland was also great.

Travel stuff: all the places I went this decade were so great.

Duncan and NWTS nights: some of these nights I dragged myself out. Now that I think back, these are the nights I can’t and still remember.

Living in condos: Pinnacle has a special place in my heart. Moving from 12 to 16 Yonge and to 33 Bay several floors. I had fun living in my own filth hehe and eating take-out everyday, walking to the Goodlife at 8pm to workout. Everything has a time and place.

Being a douche in the PATH: slicked hair, fitted suit. Every dude has to try it once!

Mom karaoke parties: always a fun time!

Music festivals: Veld, Swedish House Mafia, Digital Dreams. #awesomesauce

Hanging out at NWS townhouse and walking to BBT with Stella: the summers that I lived downtown had some fun activities after work. The summers were always filled with nighttime fun like bars and drinking and walking Bentley.

Passing UFE: it was pretty cool studying for the exams and passing them!

Cube: club nights.

2019 AT A GLANCE

I am very happy with 2019. My wife and I came out of 2018 with gusto with new energy and dreams. This year had a fair share of ups and downs which taught me resilience and the power of positive thinking. When Steve left the company, I was devastate and had to learn how to deal with it while managing a big team. Celine and I hiked Patagonia and we found out we were expecting a baby. Later in the year, I found a new career direction while preparing for the new baby’s arrival. It was an experiential year with so much to be thankful for.

RELATIONSHIP - A

This was the first full calendar year of marriage. Celine and I are growing day by day and moving on to the next chapter with the arrival of our baby in a few weeks. 2019 was a much “easier” year than 2018 now that the wedding and the house costs are behind us, so we spent a large part of the year enjoying each other’s companies. We spent our honeymoon hiking in Chile, visiting family in Vancouver, and explored Italy, Slovakia and Hungary. We ate at amazing restaurants and created unforgettable memories. A few weeks ago, we ate at Patria, the restaurant where we had our first date, to close a chapter in our lives as a couple and welcomed the next chapter as a family of three. We are ready.

FAMILY - A

I really enjoyed this year because we had the chance to visit family with my parents in Vancouver. It was a very fun trip and one that was long overdue. Without the pressure of the wedding, 2019 was more of a breeze.

FRIENDS - A

We had a fair share of dinners and hangouts this year. Celine also hosted a few DTL sessions at home which was great. I also strengthened friendships with some old friends and new friends, which I am particularly proud of. 

CAREER - A+

There were a ton of ups and downs this year. From Steve leaving the organization to an unnamed person on the team who was a pain to manage, this was year marked with learning how to deal with things. My career was predominantly smooth sailing except for the grief that I cause myself mentally but this year was truly a test on my character and perseverance. I was lucky to have great mentors and friends who coached me through the hard times and I came out the other side a stronger person. Later in the year, I found happiness in a new career direction. I saw this as a culmination of my many sleepless days and nights thinking about what’s next, and an outlet for my trapped ambition. I am at peace with all the bumps that I encountered to get here because now I am here, and I love it.  Earlier in the year, I set out to find a role where I can develop new skills, stimulate my brain, gives me a strong network  and provides a leverage a brand. I can truly say that 2019 was a defining year for my career.

TRAVEL - A

Celine and I flew a fair bit this year from Chile to Vancouver to Europe. Chile was a beauty and brought me back to our road trip days in Norway and Iceland. Hiking in Patagonia, trekking the Atacama and sleeping in a rusty shack near the Magellan Strait are going to be memories of a lifetime. Vancouver, another great trip with family. Europe was a different feel and it was Celine’s first time in the Eastern side of the continent. The cuisine and history was super awesome and I’d go back in a heartbeat. From a work travel perspective, I had the chance to go to New Orleans for a few days and then San Francisco for 11 days for orientation. It was my spending so much time in San Francisco and I am thankful that I had the opportunity to experience it. Now I know that I shouldn’t pick a hotel in Tenderloin to stay in. I did not do well in setting a new travel goal however. After I hit 50 countries, it’s been challenging to think of a tangible target to run towards. I need to do that this year.

HEALTH - B-

This was an average year for health both physically and mentally. Physically, I’ve been going to the gym less and less, maybe 1-2 times per week. I did complete the RBC Race for the Kids 5km though in a pretty decent time, but next year, woooobooooyyy not sure. I spent many nights stressed and sleepless because of the ups and downs at the office so that was not great. However, Celine and I started doing affirmations first thing in the morning and before bed. It’s a chance for us to think about what we are thankful for. It’s become routine for us now, and it’s helped a lot.

FINANCE - B

We did well this year. Aside from being a big under the water after the basement and backyard renovations, which we had to do, we kept our spending in check and continued to save throughout the year. Celine and I are both aligned on how we view finances which is good, and a testament to how a rough 2018 year prepared us for 2019 and beyond (especially with a new baby coming soon).

PERSONAL - C+

I spent the last few years thinking about my career and very little on how to improve myself outside of that realm. I don’t know how much that has impacted me, but I can say at a minimum that it’s kept me up many a nights thinking about my career. Now that my career has been realigned, I should spend more time thinking about my goals from a personal perspective. In 2018, I did accomplish my goal of reading 3 books and writing in my journal 2x per month. These now seem like easy, attainable goals though so nothing to celebrate.

FAVOURITE MOMENTS OF 2019

Celine telling me that she’s pregnant: unspeakable happiness.

Hearing my baby’s heartbeat for the first time with my ear: this was so mind-boggling to me. For the longest time, the baby did not hit me as reality as much as Celine...since she was carrying Leia and all. But hearing her heartbeat changed it all.

Seeing my Uncle 1 and Auntie 1: I haven’t seen them for years...or a decade. I can’t remember now but it was warming to see them again in the same house years later.

At Stephen’s Basilica rooftop: the sunset was beautiful atop the church looking over Budapest. It was not quite Aksla, but it was indeed captivating.

Cuernos and Patagonia: the views, experience, air and water. The hike, although rainy, was perfect.

Borago: World’s 50 Best does not disappoint. My favourite was still the rainwater from Patagonia.

Windy shack in Punta Arenas: the town was lame but the tiny hut that called itself an Airbnb was memorable. The Magellan Strait is very windy and shook the house until Celine and I worried that the roof would fall onto us. Hah.

The day we almost died: Patagonia at its finest.

Steve leaving: this was a rough day for me and the beginning of a rough week. My world fell apart piece by piece and I did not feel career disappointment like this before.

Me leaving: the decision to leave Butter/Ventures was difficult and I weighed the pros and cons. I chose to leave under my criteria which was easy, but actually leaving was very hard. Luckily for me the relationships that mattered are still strong.

Various case studies: LOL.

Interview at Square: I got the first email when I got back from Europe in early September. From then until the final interview on Wednesday, October 23 was a rush. I received the offer verbally on Friday, October 25. I accepted the Saturday. It all moved so quickly.

Seeing NWS super happy about escape rooms: I rarely see NWS that excited and it was fun to see on Ryan’s birthday. Board games and escape rooms - it was more like NWS’ birthday.

GOALS FOR 2020 AND BEYOND

RELATIONSHIP

I will support my wife in her personal and career endeavors. I will encourage her to be creative, ambitious and honest with herself so that she can achieve her maximum potential.

I will be an attentive and caring husband, and try to be positive in the most difficult situations. I will listen first and offer an opinion after if suitable in the situation.

I will be cognizant that my wife is stressed from taking care of the baby and try to relieve her stress as much as possible.

I will recognize milestones and also everyday events because life is short.

Stretch: I will create and capture more memories outside of Instagram, through writing, photos or videos.

By 2029: I will be a model husband that knows how to cook, clean and take care of my wife and family. I will continue celebrating the big and small moments with my wife, remembering anniversaries and birthdays, and continue being the young-love that we have today.

FAMILY

I will be a great father, whatever that means! I don’t know yet but I promise to be a great one.

I will be more present in gatherings and create a balance where possible to bridge the various groups.

I will maintain a strong relationship with family overseas.

Stretch: talk to at least 1 overseas family member once a month

By 2029: I will be the father to 2 beautiful children. I will be supportive and understand them as much as possible, and try not to be a lame dad. I will have great relationships with my family and my in-laws, and maintain a strong connection those overseas. I will be back in HK at least 2 times in this decade.

FRIENDS

I will build on strong social bonds by reaching out, staying in touch, physically going to see friends, and recognizing special moments.

I understand that this aspect of my life may change with a new baby coming but I hope to maintain a relationship with at least my closest friends. I will not be non-existent to friends.

Stretch: hang out with 1 friend per a month

By 2029: I will be a great friend to a small group of people. I will celebrate their big and small moments, and try my best to keep the group close.

CAREER

I will think about my career more critically and plan out my path. Now that I have started a new path at Square, it is important to think about what I am learning here and map that out against where I want to eventually get to. This allows me to think about my career in a more structured way.

I will consistently evaluate my skillset and upgrade/up-skill where I see a gap, through reading books or taking a course.

Stretch: meet at least 2 new people every month who can help me in my career or gives me new ideas and add an international aspect to my experiences; discuss international opportunities with Square

By 2029: I will be managing a small, high-performing team in a career of my choosing. This career will pay well, have great people and culture, and grant me the flexibility to work the way I want to to suit my lifestyle. I will have international work experience.

TRAVEL

Find a new goal that revolves around travel and cultural exploration. I want to love travel immensely again.

Go to at least one place with the new baby on a plane.

Stretch: Take Celine and the baby to San Francisco for a few weeks.

By 2029: I will have been to 60 countries and went on 2 more big hikes (which could mean something like Patagonia). I will have been back to Africa somewhere, Asia and Australia. Europe is fine too but it will have to be Scandinavia or Eastern Europe. Our baby will be well-traveled.

HEALTH

I will choose to eat healthy food more often. In particular, this means more fish, chicken, vegetables and legumes, and less red meat, fried foods and dairy products.

I will eat more fruits and drink more water (at least 2L daily).

I will workout at least twice a week.

Stretch: drink 3L of water daily, workout thrice a week and run one organized 5km-run.

By 2029: my kids would be old enough by this time so that I can go back to a regular gym schedule. Between 2020-2029, I want to maintain a healthy body and mind, great sleep, and no need for drugs. I will have healthy cholesterol and X levels to be able to eat what I want and exercise the way I want. I will look good.

FINANCE

I will continue shifting the finances on a monthly basis to ensure that Celine and I are tracking towards our retirement goals.

I will spend less money on products and more on experiences.

I will cut back on impromptu purchases.

I will continue saving money for myself, Celine and the baby.

Stretch: plan for investment property

By 2029: we will have 2 investment properties and a sizable investment portfolio suitable for our stage in life. We will be have financial freedom defined as having enough money to do what we want largely without financial limitations.

PERSONAL

I will find out what it means to be a husband and father.

I will dedicate time to self-improvement through reading, listening to podcasts, thinking about the future and philosophical topics, and documentaries where I can learn something.

I will focus on what I can control and push out things that I cannot control. I worry too much so this will help me reduce mental stress.

I will be a better listener and only dish out tough love sparingly.

I will continue documenting my career ambitions and philosophies in my journal at least 2x a month.

I will clean the house once a month. This means wiping the windows, vacuuming and mopping the floors, bleaching the sink, etc.

I will not leave my shoes and jackets everywhere, and will not leave the lights on if I don’t have to.

Stretch: I will read 5 books this year.

By 2029: I will be happy.

[iamuberfrau]

#Metoo, Katz, Intent and Impact

My thoughts on the #Metoo thing as well as The Jackson Katz quote.

There is a lot here.

Regarding #Metoo, bear with me:

First and foremost is the relevancy of the thread that runs through this (and so many other) exercises highlighting intent versus impact. Exercises based in good intentions have the ability to spin wildly out of control. This is does not have to be a bad thing, especially when these moments result in conversations that are based in an effort to broaden people’s perspective and help them see or understand a broader, more inclusive view.

A Few Examples:

ABORTION –  in 2004, Planned Parenthood launched the “I had an abortion” T-shirt campaign, with the intent (supposedly, as I was not present at the inception) of demonstrating how many women have had abortions, to attempt to reduce the shame associated with the decision, reclaim power by reclaiming the word / message and to generate conversation, etc.

People lost their minds.

People read into it that women were wearing it as a sense of pride and a badge of honor: flaunting their abortions. Now, while I do not personally see a problem with that particular message, the opposition’s focus of shaming women did interrupt the sale of the shirts as well as the intent of the campaign. However, while probably not achieving PP’s intended goals, women who may not yet have shared their stories finally did. Women who endured decades of listening to family and friends denounce “those women” who had abortions now provided a familiar face to associate with that conversation, healthier conversations happened, and healing ensued (not for all, of course, as is the case with complex decisions).  Most importantly, women who were not ready to share their stories did not, and that was/is fine as well. There was no intention of shaming those who chose to remain silent, though that was not necessarily the impact / outcome.

TAKING A KNEE – It is nearly impossible to wrap one’s head around effects and outcomes of CK’s oh-so gentle yet oh-so powerful action. What we do know, however, is that people took it to mean what they wanted and needed it to mean, which, of course, became a twisted and bastardized version of what it meant for him. Moreover, as we know, those interested in understanding and learning more about his motivation and intent did so, and from that came exquisite reflections, conversations and (hopefully) the beginning of healing processes.

MOTHER’S DAY – What could be more simple, non-political and less traumatizing than wishing someone a happy Mother’s Day? Quite a lot, actually. There is a lot of pressure on women to procreate; the value of women is often measured by whether or not they have procreated, women who choose to not procreate are selfish, those who have lost children are to be either pitied or vilified, and the pain of those who are unable to parent (either through genetics or politics) is real and profound. Creating a loving space for and being conscious of the complexities around reproduction does not have to be difficult, yet it is. It is not uncommon for people, prior to wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day, to ask if I have children. I am blissfully child-free and am MOST fortunate that this particular issue is not a trigger for me, though I am surrounded by women who, in the right moment, can become crestfallen and be reduced to tears by that particular question. Having those conversations and helping people to understand the impact of that seemingly harmless gesture and to be more thoughtful / inclusive helps to generate reflections, conversations, and (hopefully) the beginning of healing processes.

Which brings me to  

#Metoo – For me, I found the simplicity of the statement to be powerful, to be the sharing of a bond, to connect with people on an additional level, and to support other who chose to step into that place. I had flashbacks to that awesome Valentine’s Day Vagina Monologues show at the Masonic, where, draped in red boas, the audience accepted Eve Ensler’s invitation to everyone who felt so compelled, to stand in unison. As we saw with #Metoo, many people chose to post a more specific message regarding female survivors of sexual assault and sexual harassment, some chose to include a broader message that included a less gendered population, men participated in posting and sharing their stories.  And many chose to remain silent, which carries no judgement (or at least was not and should not be the intent).

What have we learned?

We have learned about Tarana Burke.

Conversations regarding intersectionality and white feminism surface to remind us that no matter our intent, we can do better.

Reminders to be specific in our messaging regarding those who chose to remain silent: that we have their backs should they not (now or ever) be ready to speak more publicly.

We have been reminded that we have more in common than what divides us.

We have been reminded that we have the strength in numbers that we need to burn this shit to the ground.

And most importantly, (with any luck) is that from this comes exquisite reflections, conversations and (hopefully) the beginning of healing processes.

As for Jackson Katz, I am sure that he is a very nice man with the best of intentions. And yes, his statement and perspective are fairly spot on.

Here’s the thing.

Women have been saying this for forEVER, but now that a man has said it people hear it?

Haven’t women been asking for decades, let’s stop asking victims why they stay and let’ ask men why they abuse?

Haven’t women been trying to point out that women don’t “get themselves pregnant?”

Haven’t women been pointing out for centuries that rape is not a result of what a woman wore or how much they drank but because a man made a conscious decision to rape them?

So while I choose to believe that his INTENTIONS are good, don’t come to me looking for a cookie, a gold star or a pat on the back. Yes, men, you need to step up. You need to be having this conversation with each other, and you need to be holding each other accountable and you need to be calling each other out on your shit and you need to address toxic masculinity and if, within the guise of Jackson Katz you have found something that make sense and you can FINALLY hear the messages that women have been screaming throughout the centuries, then run with it. Step up. Do you job. Get your shit together. But don’t hold him out a some great messiah because you now choose to hear the message.

[bizarropurugly]

Quicky summary of Zed and Candler’s lives under cut 

tw for rape mention, pedophilia mention, child abuse, pregnancy mention, etc

Zed first:

Zed was given up for adoption as a baby by his parents because of traditionalist values they had about fertility, and it had been determined zed would never be able to have kids. They gave him to a demigod named Nanny who took care of kids without families, and he was her last child. He had a pretty happy childhood in which he knew Candler briefly (Candler would soon after be put up for adoption by his abusive family), and he was homeschooled but still had plenty of socialization.

He had a girlfriend for a while as a teen but when she found out he was unisex (everyone in his race has the same body parts) she broke up with him over some cissexist crap, which made him realize he wasn't really interested in relationships at the moment? Instead he focused on his studies, having decided he wanted to be a baker. He was a good student so he got into advanced placement stuff, and started college early.

That's when his sister Zen found him, who was excited to reintroduce him to their family and invited him over to her apartment. But it turned out to be a trap, she had lured him to a hotel and sexually assaulted him repeatedly, implying she was going to kill him. She dehumanized him severely by stating his lack of fertility made him not a person anymore, and kept calling him slut/whore/bitch during the act. He managed to escape but in the process fell off a balcony so he was sent to the hospital by bystanders, but nobody saw her and he refused to turn her in. After that he became incredibly docile and passive and an easy target for cruel people, and didn't get into relationships at all, period, not even friendships. This was compounded by the fact his sister kept finding him and tormenting him further.

But he managed to become a successful baker and bought a building that was a cafe on the ground floor and a home on the second floor. Some time later he heard about a local craft shop that was under threat of closure, and he sent them some goodwill and money. Turns out it was a shop Candler had opened to sell candles and other wax items, and he came to see Zed and was incredibly excited to meet with him again. However he had a unhealthy obsession with Zed and was often a harassing nuisance more than anything, constantly hitting on him, having no idea about personal space, etc. But he managed to worm into Zed's heart at least enough that, when it came time again that Candler had no money, Zed invited him to live with him so he wouldn't have to be doing the dangerous things he was doing for money.

After some time of living together, Candler realized Zed had been sexually assaulted because Zed had a shut down from Candler's pestering, recognizing his own behaviour in Zed's lack of response, and made a promise to pull back the shenanigans while also swearing to find his assailant and killing them. Not long after, Zen tried to attack Zed again and Candler walked in on it, and managed to get Zed away from her and beat her up. From Zed's point of view she never bothered him again after that and he assumed she had finally become a better person, but in reality Candler kidnapped her and left her for dead among his gang mates.

After that the two got closer, with Candler not only being less abusive but also just in general learning gradually about all the things that are Not Okay that he had internalized, and that what he was doing wasn't really love, but obsession. He became a much better person, which was when Zed finally started getting more feelings for him. But of course, it was freaking him out because of the years of repression, the history of abuse, etc, he had never really had a sexual interest in his life. A lot of confusion and awkward stuff happened but eventually Zed confessed his feelings and they got together. Still more confusion and awkward stuff for a while, though, as they both work towards a healthier idea about relationships and stuff.

Some drama happened in which Candler tried to escape the gang he was in, which then attacked Zed, which lead to Zed being told that Candler had killed people, including Zed's sister, and supposedly had assaulted people, which made Zed question their entire relationship of course, but before he could really deal with that, Candler was hospitalized and put into a coma over the rescue attempt, and Zed discovered Candler had been planning to propose, which made things... a lot harder to deal with. When Candler comes to, Zed demands he talk about literally everything in his life, which meant confessions of violence, though the sexual abuse was actually "by proxy" (as in, he was being forced with physical violence and death threats, and this all happened while he was a teen, so *he* didn't actually do it). For a while it was very awkward between them, it was difficult to wrestle with, but in the end Zed forgave him.

They get married soon after that, and soon after that they discover Zed is pregnant, which turns out to be twins, and that was some incredible hardship for both of them but everything turns out. The reason Zed became pregnant was literally a miracle - the god of their world, Tito, has a mortal disguise of which Zed and Candler knew personally, and the demigod Nanny was created by Tito as a way to take care of himself, and so as Nanny's last kid he decided to grant Zed a brief moment of fertility as a "wedding present". Of course they don't know he's really a god and that he did that, they just know there was a miracle and they couldn't be happier. 

And now Candler:

Candler was born into an abusive family. His family was also traditionalist with his race's values of having as many kids as possible, and they also always have twins, triplets, etc, but his parents had a hard time conceiving. Candler only had 3 older siblings, and was born with a stillborn twin. They treated him terribly, basically taking out their frustrations on him, including not letting him go to school and leaving him alone at home, and not getting him any toys or clothes or anything. In fact, the first time they left him with a babysitter, he was genuinely afraid they would never come back - because they would definitely be back for their stuff, but if he's not at home then they have no reason to come back.

But it was when he was being left at a babysitter's that he met Zed, and Zed was basically the only kid who was nice to him and actually wanted to be his friend (because the other kids took from the adults, who took from his parents that he was a problem child). He developed a crush on Zed, but never got to express it because he was so painfully shy. After his little twin sisters were born, they all three got dropped off at an orphanage.

The orphanage was really awful and this was when he first experienced sexual abuse. The man who ran it took an interest in him and basically forced him to be around him all the time, and the man was an evil, violent man that exposed Candler to sex as well as murder in one instance. The nurses of the orphanage had been preparing a case against him to get the place shut down and him arrested, but he was warned before the raid and kidnapped Candler, while Candler's little sisters went to a proper home. They'd be separated until he was an adult.

The man left him with a poor family that he had power over so that he knew they'd never turn him in for child abuse and kidnapping. Out of fear of the man, they didn't let Candler attend school or even go to the doctor's. In fact, they often dealt with any time Candler was sick with a fake doctor that was conning them, often making Candler sicker and messing with him bad, which is how Candler developed his phobia of doctors, needles, and medicine. Originally I had written this was how he got ridiculously tall and other hormonal problems but that seems far-fetched.

His hypersexuality started emerging and the orphanage man found out and was disgusted by it, cutting the family off entirely for "ruining" him, putting them in more financial straits but at the same time relieving them of this evil man and letting them parent Candler at least a little more securely, though they were still afraid to let him go to school. Eventually he starts wandering and is preyed on by a guy who claimed to just be "teaching" him how things work, and that leaves him more reclusive and unsure how to handle his sexuality, and he doesn't want to talk about it.

He gets picked up by a man in the gang he would eventually join, who skews his idea of sexuality even further by hammering in the whole "if your body reacts then you like it and it's not rape" and basically making him his sex slave throughout the rest of his teen years, particularly through keeping him on a choke chain and demanding he wear it whenever he was with him. Through this man he would be made to "perform" for others in the gang, be used as a bartering tool, be attacked in other violent ways, be forced to attack others, etc. He developed anger issues, violent tendencies, suicidal thoughts, the idea that sex is bad/gross, etc and wound up leaving his family and within the same week killing the man, both in a fit of rage. The messed up hierarchy way of the gang meant this let him "move up" which meant less traumatic events happened after this, but he had to develope some wits in order to avoid getting back in that position, and it didn't always work...

Through this gang and sex work he was able to purchase an old, old storefront that... basically was just two rooms, a big front room and a back room, and lived in it, only a bed and a toilet and a little refrigerator. He learned candle-making from his adoptive family and tried to make a "decent" living, but couldn't keep his hours, or stay neat, and the place was pretty... run down and creepy looking. So he never really got to leave that gang as it was his only place of finances... until Zed sent him some money as a show of goodwill, and he found his childhood friend again. Through all this trauma he had been using memories of Zed to cope with it all. Which is how he developed his unhealthy obsession with Zed. So when he realized this was the same Zed he had known as a kid, he was through the roof happy.

But then he still couldn't maintain his finances, and Zed had learned about that he was doing dangerous things to make money, so he offered him a place to live so he wouldn't have to, which was incredibly shocking to Candler because he had never had anyone be so genuinely caring to him, and he had kind of gotten the idea that he wasn't a person either. So even though he had idolized Zed this whole time, it was still shocking. And this is where we converge with what I said about Zed's backstory. Except it's a bit more emotional from his end because he never really thought he'd live past the age of 30.

(As an additional note here: Candler’s name is actually Marcellus, but he went by Candler since he started living with his adopted family as a false name, and only his twin sisters knew his real name, until Candler finally told Zed, after which he no longer went by it from anyone. He does not like nicknames at all because of all the trauma he went through under his false name.)

[prosecutormiles]

Edgeworth & Mental Illness

In honor of May being Mental Health Awareness Month, I thought I would talk a little bit (spoiler alert: there is nothing “a little bit” about this post) about the different mental illnesses that I write Miles with.  Keep in mind that I'm not a medical professional by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm going on my own research and experience for a lot of this.  This is, of course, my own personal interpretation.

This is not a comprehensive list, and it's bound to shift and change as I develop my writing.  Please be aware that this isn't fun stuff.  I'll put a full trigger list under the cut.

#child abuse #trauma #suicide attempt #suicidal ideation #self harm #addiction #drug use

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

PTSD is a mental disorder that can develop after a person is exposed to a traumatic event.  According to the ADAA, the disorder is characterized by three main types of symptoms:

Re-experiencing the trauma through intrusive distressing recollections of the event, flashbacks, and nightmares.

Emotional numbness and avoidance of places, people, and activities that are reminders of the trauma.

Increased arousal such as difficulty sleeping and concentrating, feeling jumpy, and being easily irritated and angered.

Miles canonically experiences symptoms of PTSD.  He has flashbacks triggered by earthquakes, he has recurring nightmares, and he avoids elevators.  Within blog canon, he also suffers from insomnia, panic attacks, and hypervigilance, particularly under times of high stress.  He is also claustrophobic and experiences anxiety from things that restrict his breathing, such as tight ties/shirt collars and swimming underwater.

It should be noted that Miles' PTSD stems not only from witnessing his father's murder, but also the abuse he suffered under von Karma.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

GAD is a mental disorder characterized by persistent and excessive worry about a number of different things, coupled with the inability to control that worry.

This is something Miles had since childhood, but he had a decent support system when he was young.  It was exacerbated greatly by his father's death, and further from training under von Karma.  A lot of this overlaps with his PTSD, but I do hold that it is alongside rather than a part of it.

A lot of his anxiety is stemmed from his triggers, but he has developed a good deal of smaller worries concerning (mostly) unrelated things: ladders, large bodies of water (such as oceans, not lakes), thunderstorms, etc. He also has a crippling fear of failure and losing control.

Major Depressive Disorder

MDD is a mental condition in which a person suffers at least one major depressive episode in their lifetime.  The qualifications for one of these episodes involve a certain set of symptoms being persistent for at least two weeks and generally will interfere with one's ability to perform their normal everyday activities.

Miles experienced a major depressive episode following the State vs. Skye case (Rise From the Ashes), although he had been spiraling since before the State vs. Edgeworth case (Turnabout Goodbyes).  Before that point, he likely would have been diagnosed with Persistent Depressive Disorder (PPD), which is a less severe version of MDD but generally lasts longer than a single episode.  Miles has had major depressive episodes before the one that ultimately saw him leaving his job and disappearing for a year, but they were less severe.

The symptoms he experiences include feelings of extreme guilt and hopelessness, loss of pleasure of things he normally enjoys, decreased appetite, insomnia, fatigue, lack of concentration, and suicidal ideation.

He was likely predisposed to MDD, but it manifested because of his trauma and abuse history.  He might have it without those things, but the severity would likely be a bit lower.

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder

I'm a bit hesitant with this one because personality disorders are a whole different category, and diagnosing them is really complex. Personality disorders are called such because they are rooted within someone's personality, sometimes due to years of maladaptive patterns of behavior.  It often has to do with using juvenile coping methods and never really learning to use better ones.  Miles does fit a lot of the patterns, but I'm not sure it's the perfect diagnosis for him because it's difficult to tell if it's a part of his personality or some sort of chemical imbalance (believed to be the cause of many mental illnesses that are not personality disorders).

OCPD, which is also called Anankastic Personality Disorder, is a kind of personality disorder that is characterized by perfectionism, need for control, and cognitive rigidity.  It is similar in some ways to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but it is considered a separate diagnosis.

Miles' symptoms include preoccupation with orderliness and organization, obsession with rules, perfectionism to the point where it interferes with productivity (i.e. he may not sleep the night before a trial because he feels the need to prepare for every single possibility that may come up in court, rather than not getting his work done on time), rigidity and stubbornness, and inflexibility about moral issues (i.e. everything is either good or bad, black or white; there are no gray areas).

While the exact cause of OCPD is unknown, it's likely that this was influenced greatly by von Karma.

With this cocktail of mental illnesses comes certain behavioral patterns and coping mechanisms.  Due to the fact that Miles is a functional member of society with a high stress job that he is very, very good at, it's clear that his coping mechanisms are working for him, at least for the short term. However, he has a distinct lack of a social life and not very many friends, along with the fact that his abuser is still a part of his life after he moves out.  Without treatment and removing the severely negative factors in his life, it's likely a major depressive episode was inevitable.

Miles' coping methods were effective in the short term, but they were not positive coping methods.  Here is a non-comprehensive list of his coping methods:

Distraction. He will bury himself in work to avoid dealing with his emotions. (Note: this is not necessarily a negative coping method, but being as he never actually deals with things, it's not a positive one either.)

Self-medication. He abuses prescription benzodiazepines (like Xanax or Ativan).  However, there is a stipulation to this:  he has a legitimate prescription, and, while he almost always takes at least one a day, he will not resort to breaking the law to get extra.  The last few days before he is allowed to refill his prescription are days you want to stay very far away from him.

Self harm.  Although less prevalent in adulthood, he was a cutter the entire time he was living under von Karma's roof.  His cuts are very well hidden, mostly on his thighs.

Avoidance. He actively avoids situations that will spike his anxiety, to the point where he climbs twelve flights of stairs every single day so that he doesn't have to take the elevator.  (Also not necessarily a negative coping mechanism, except for the great lengths he'll go to to avoid certain things.)

Aggression. While much of the time, his reprimands to subordinates are due to a lack of competency on their parts, he also sometimes derives pleasure from putting other people down.  This is especially true in the courtroom, where he can generally outwit a defense attorney.

So, what can he do about it?

This blog's canon is that Miles started receiving psychiatric treatment after leaving his suicide note and fleeing the country.  I'm not sure if this happened because of an actual suicide attempt or for some other reason.  With official diagnoses and proper therapy and medication, he was able to rebuild himself into the man we see in the later games.

He also got Pess while he was in Europe, who is a certified service dog trained to help him deal with his PTSD symptoms in particular.  She is more than an emotional support dog, although she performs those tasks for him as well.  What makes her a service dog is that she is trained to get him to safety in earthquakes, protect him in the event of a full flashback, wake him up from nightmares, etc.

She is the absolute light of his life, and he adores her.  He takes her just about everywhere, although he doesn't always need her services. The main place she does not go with him is the courthouse.  But she has a doggy bed in his office and strolls around the twelfth floor most of the day.

Just because Miles is in treatment and on medications doesn't mean he is magically better, though.  Many of the things he deals with now, he will be dealing with the rest of his life.  The difference is that he is getting the resources he needs to deal with these things in a healthier manner.  There will still be bad days and weeks and months, and there are still things he hasn't addressed. For instance, his addiction to benzos is still something he won't admit to needing to deal with and is very good at hiding it from his acquaintances. He still hasn't completely processed the idea that his life was so incredibly influenced by a man who was setting him up for failure from the beginning.  He still has trouble admitting that what happened to him was abuse.

It's a long process, but he is finally on the right path.