#not to be mentally ill or passively suicidal on main but

[tommy-begins]

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[juliettedunn]

Luz’s Softness in Thanks to Them

We all knew Luz was going to have an angst arc in Thanks to Them. Her angst had been building long before then, and King’s Tide was the final straw.

Angst is popular in characters like Amity and Hunter, who act cold and mean as a result of deep pain on the inside. If they cry, it’s in secret, hidden away from anyone who might see through their confident persona. The “bad but sad boy” / “I act like I don’t care but I secretly do” type, to quote Luz.

That’s not what Luz does. Luz cries multiple times in  front of others in Thanks to Them, and even has an emotional outburst in front of her teacher in classmates.

It’s the classroom scene that has a lot of people saying Luz is being “cringey,” and that they have to cover their eyes from “second-hand embarrassment.” I’ve seen post after post mocking that scene, saying Luz needs to “sit down and shut up” and that she has a “y/n complex.”

Whether a vulnerable person gets sympathy or ridicule from others is based on mysterious standards of what are acceptable and unacceptable ways to act when we are at our worst. And what is acceptable for some isn’t acceptable for others (white favoritism, especially in the fandom’s response to Hunter’s over-the-top emotional displays vs Luz). 

Luz’s outburst in the classroom was highly impulsive and not something many would do, but Luz doesn’t know how to ask for help, not when she feels too guilty to confide in her friends and family.

Luz is at best passively suicidal in TTT. It’s actually one of the first times she DOESN’T see herself as the main character, she sees herself as the selfish villain, the “evil Lucy” rather than the good witch Azura. Her self esteem is at an all time low, to where she doesn’t think she truly deserves love.

It’d be so easy to lock herself away, bottle those feelings inside and turn cold. Many thought this was the direction her character was headed in. And Luz does indeed isolate and keep her inner feelings secret.

But she remains soft and tender-hearted, constantly cheering on her friends and supporting Hunter through his hardships even when she herself is at her worst. She even lets her silliness peek through, calling a possum a “little angel.”

Despite her low self esteem, she very clearly WANTS someone to help her and intervene. She wouldn’t have had the classroom outburst if she didn’t think there was some worth in making her feelings clear, some hope that someone might respond to her and perhaps tell her something different. Which makes it even more heartbreaking when the class gives her a weirded out look and then ignores her.

If someone behaves this way in real life, it should be taken as a serious warning sign, not as a “Oh my god that’s so cringe” moment. 

You can see multiple times in the episode Luz fighting her depression, like when she goes to cuddle with Camila. When she asks Camila to let her stay in her bed, it struck me how amazing she really is for being able to do that.

Luz feels she doesn’t deserve to live, yet she still desperately wants to. She wants to hold on so much that she manages to seek comfort, despite her guilt telling her she shouldn’t be receiving it.

When I was her age and in her mental state, I didn’t have the ability to do something like that. Seeking help when you’re in that kind of state is one of the hardest things to do, and Luz does it multiple times.

For people to call her a cringey embarrassment for having an outburst is in very poor taste, and a bad sign for how we view signs of mental illness in real life.

Not everyone who angsts will be like Hunter and Amity, becoming aggressive and/or cold towards others. Not everyone can hide behind thick skin. Some become softer and more sensitive, cry more easily. The latter is in fact the healthier and often more difficult option. 

Some expected a cold, withdrawn cynic, hiding away her emotions. Instead we got a messy, tender-hearted girl desperately seeking help in impulsive outbursts.

The fandom is finally starting to focus on her angst and trauma, but let’s not forget the strength that lies in her unfaltering softness as well.

Luz is a loving, kind, strong, beautiful disaster, and she deserves better from this fandom.

[charalysis]

Alice Liddle: American McGee's Alice

MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING: THESE GAMES AND THIS POST WILL BE DISCUSSING THEMES OF S.A, PEDOPHILIA, MURDER, MENTAL ILLNESS, SELF HARM, PROSTITUTION, AND MEDICAL ABUSE.

Alice Liddle of American McGee's Alice and its sequel, Madness Returns, is a severely mentally ill character in the games she stars in. She endures trauma after trauma, with next to no assistance, alone. In this post we will break down what happened to her, her reactions, and how she developed.

Disclaimer: Despite mental illness being the main theme here, I will not be attempting to diagnose Alice, as I am not professionally trained and she does not have an official, canon diagnosis of any kind. I will however make inferences.

For those unaware, American McGee's Alice is a horror twist on Alice in Wonderland, following the protagonist Alice. In this first game, you play as 18 year old Alice Liddle, who from eight years old to that point has been living in Rutledge Asylum in England. The game begins with the player introduced to the catalyst of Alice being in the asylum: a house fire.

In this fire, Alice is the only one to survive from her family, with her parents and sister, Lizzie, dying in the fire. This causes a massive snap in Alice's mind as she watches the house burn and townspeople surround her.

In this scene we are also introduced to the idea that Alice was likely already mentally ill, as when the fire begins, what wakes her isn't the smoke or screams, its Hatter and March Hare screaming in her dreams about the fire, begging her to wake up. (However, its likely it was just a framing device, but we do see its what woke her.)

From then on, Alice spent her time in the asylum, nearly comatose. She was catatonic and would only speak in shrieks and shrill screams. She'd have seizures and episodes of hysteria before falling unresponsive and mute again. Her doctor's notes also describe an incident where she "wielded a spoon like a knife and the orderlies, then turned the makeshift weapon in her own arms".

Needless to say, the fire that killed her family severely traumatized Alice, and she struggles heavily with possible PTSD and survivors guilt.

Alice in the first game also expresses suicidal ideation, or at the very least a passive desire to die. She's heard saying, "Save myself? From death, is that it? Is that why I've come here? I'm not afraid to die! At times I've welcomed death..."

And, "Everyone I love dies violently; unnaturally. I'm cursed! Why go on? I'll just hurt others."

The latter of these quotes is indicative of her guilt; it shows she blames herself for not just her her family's deaths, but others, and believes those she grows close to will also die horribly if they stay around her. She expresses she thinks people are better off without her.

In regards to Wonderlands occupants and how they relate to her fragile and broken psyche... American McGee has stated that all in some way represent her fragments mind and emotions. How, I don't think is explicitly stated beyond the Queen, but I have theories:

Cheshire: Her subconscious and manifestation of Dinah in her mind. Dinah lead her to safety in the fire, showing the way out. Chesh is guide that knows more than Alice consciously knows, but things she's got hidden in her mind. He tells her the clues she's seeing and picking up on subtleties she can't. That's why he uses riddles.

Hatter: Hatter is obsessive and rambling. He's a sort of representation of her doctor in the asylum, after all he runs one himself. He's paranoid and obsessed with time and loathes mechanical malfunctions. He may very well be a sort of ego aspect, where the Queen is super-ego. He could also likely be the manifestation of Alice's own paranoia and frustration surrounding her own "malfunctioning" mind.

Queen of Red Heart: She is Alice. She is the part of Alice that causes her the most grief and torment. She is what keeps Alice locked in her psychosis; a malevolent manifestation of super-ego. Cheshire compares her to a cancer in the body, which must be excised or Alice would die.

Jabberwock: A creature who taunts Alice and accuses her of not caring about her family. He is what taunts her about their deaths and says that she was, "in dream land taking tea with friends", and she, "couldn't be bothered". He is her guilt and self anger and he is there to remind her of this guilt constantly.

Caterpillar: He provides her wisdom giver. He takes things she sees and can help her recontexualize them. He is similar to Cheshire, but more to the forefront. He is also seemingly the calm part of her mind.

Tweedles: looking identical to the orderlies in Rutlidge, the Tweedles are cruel to Alice and lack any higher intelligence beyond orders. They are childishly cruel and likely have something to do with Alice's self punishment.

Rabbit: More obsessed with time than Hatter, Rabbit is a mostly absent guide who rushes ahead of Alice and he's very, very fidgety. He likely represents her conflict between anxiety and comfort. The comfort being from him being based on her favorite toy, and his face being easing to her. But he's very paranoid about time and danger.

Duchess: Initially a manifestation of the cruel nurse in charge of her, Nurse D, Duchess is a violent cannibal. It could be argued her outfit initially resembles a nurses outfit too. Later in the second game, she is seen in more revealing clothes and no longer eats people, and prefers pig now. Her "overbearing goodwill" and appearance now more represents her nanny, Nan Sharp.

While I do not believe these games are a 100% accurate depiction of mental illness and trauma, they do a good job showing the struggle between one's self and the inner machinations of their mind as they struggle with their mental health, and struggle to learn to cope on their own.

The second game is much better about the direct correlation between Alice's real struggles and Wonderland falling apart.

In Madness returns, we see an older Alice struggling in therapy as her doctor, Angus Bumby, tries to make her forget her past. She wants to forget everything rather than continue to struggle with it. We see she's still being abused and exploited by Nurse Witless, who's blackmailing her.

In Wonderland, we see the Corruption and the pollution destroying Wonderland piece by piece as the Dollmaker (Bumby's influence and brainwashing) takes over her mind bit by bit. We see her remembering her childhood and the past Bumby tried to erase, and we see her piece the truth together as she slowly banishes the Dollmaker.

By the end of MR, we see a confident Alice, the pieces of her fragmented life and mind put back together as Wonderland blossoms and Bumby dies via a train after Alice confronts him with his crimes.

Tl;Dr: While imperfect in their portrayal of mental illness, PTSD, and more, American McGees Alice And A:MR depict the grittiness, the despair, and the pain that can come with these things fairly well. It also depicts a woman struggling but succeeding in helping herself and bettering herself. These games revolve around facing your issues head on and healing. Their use of symbology is fantastic in my opinion.

[whirld-of-color]

hiiii welcome back to the gay people. the first image is based off of kiss by death by bruna kazinoti! gonna go on a very long ramble about why exactly blueberry and mango are Like This below the cut. before that here's some more textposts

okay! so the main thing About Them is that they're both very mentally ill. mango is so driven with purpose and revenge that he's gonna kill himself to get rid of minecraft. blueberry is so utterly empty and purposeless that he is constantly passively suicidal. if you throw two people like that at each other they fucking explode, right? yeah it's great. because they almost balance each other out, if you look at it right! blueberry tamps down on mango's preemptive self-destruction and mango cuts through blueberry's apathy to give him a reason to live. hypothetically they're fine. the thing is that they're still both super mentally ill

like, okay- blueberry keeps mango from working himself to death. what he doesn't do is ever try to dissuade mango from trying to destroy minecraft. because that's not The Point. the things that pull them together are the things that are going to destroy them. mango is attracted to blueberry’s calmness and apathy but that character trait only arises in the ways that it does due to blueberry's incredible depression. blueberry likes mango’s sense of purpose and internal fire except that fire is burning him alive and it's gonna drive him to try to kill an entire videogame's worth of sentient beings. the things that draw them together are going to kill them and neither of them are going to stop it, is the thing! why would they? like honestly as if they went into this relationship to get better? don't be ridiculous they don't even really have proper conversations about their problems, they just sort of pingpong off of each other and make each other worse

(literally any time one of them doesn't want to talk about something they just start making out. unofficial "shut up and kiss me" rule. this is really funny to me personally and it's a decent indicator of the way this whole ship functions)

so that's the main thing. it basically affects every single aspect of their silly little relationship. for example it's implicitly understood that there's a timer strapped to this relationship and all of this is temporary because mango's probably gonna go run off and destroy minecraft and die within a year or two (and then blueberry can sink back into his empty husk of a life and carry on until someday he finally slips off of a building and dies), so they're lowkey out here perpetually treating their relationship like a short-term thing even when they've been doing this for like, 8 months. i think they've only ever gone on one actual date pre ep-30

i will say that at some point within that time they do start genuinely liking each other for their personalities and not just their mental illness, which is neat! i should fucking hope they did! this is helpful for post ep-30 content because it means they'll probably get less toxic later down the line when mango gets redeemed

[branches-in-a-flood]

Sorry to be mentally ill on main.

But, like, how much mentioning of passive suicidal ideation it too much in a therapy session?

Because it has been made very apparent recently that I need to talk about this. But also I cannot afford to do any sort of in-patient type of thing for a multitude of reasons. If that's even a thing for this? I feel like it's more for *actively* suicidal ideation?

I've never done therapy before and have no idea how this works. Probably overblowing it?

[semper-legens]

56. My Heart Is A Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones

Owned?: No, library Page count: 439 My summary: Jade is not a troubled teen. Sure, she loves playing macabre pranks on her classmates, doesn't have any friends, and sees life through the lens of slasher movies - but with the life she's been given, who can blame her? The only Native girl in her little rural community, living with a deadbeat dad and a world that hates her, Jade has every disadvantage in life and nowhere to go. But when the signs line up that a real-life slasher is coming to Proofrock, suddenly Jade's life has a deeper meaning. She knows what this is. She's ready. And she's going to make sure that the right story plays out. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I kept picking this book up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down, not sure if I wanted to read it. There was, in fact, one thing that ultimately clinched it for me - the author. I read The Only Good Indians a while back and fell in love with its dark outlook, its complex politics, and the deep trauma that oozes from every page. This looked to be similar in style and tone, a dark urban fantasy with a killer on the loose, and only one girl who can stop it. But she's all kinds of fucked up and nobody wants to listen to her, of course. That's the way these things go. So how did the story pan out? Deeply engaging, strange, lyrical, and bloody as one might expect from a slasher tale. I enjoyed it, though it was by no means an easy read.

(Warning for mention of suicide, sexual assault and abuse, child molestation and incest under the cut.)

Jade is the main character and the main draw of this novel. A lot is riding on her as a protagonist, and I'm glad to say that she very much carries the narrative by being a deeply interesting character. Jade starts out bruised, wounded, latching onto her slasher-movie ideas of how the world works and fitting everything into that framework. She becomes fixated on Letha, a new and rich girl at school moving into the newly-built community of Terra Nova, because she is convinced Letha will be the 'Final Girl'. It's to the point where she reads really strongly as being autistic, with a hyperfocus that overrides everything. At various points, she wonders if going to the police about her concerns is worth it - she knows Letha needs to have certain experiences to set her up as Final Girl, and the police are useless in slasher movies anyway. Everything she does, she brings back to slashers. Interspersed throughout the chapters are essays she wrote to her beloved History teacher about slashers in lieu of homework, bringing her interest into the school subject. She's flawed, of course. Mentally ill, aware of her own strangeness, wrapped up in her own head, and hopelessly avoidant. But all of those flaws just make her a stronger character, and a very engaging one to boot.

This book is, largely, about trauma - both the specific trauma experienced by the main character and a more generalised trauma specific to Indigenous people throughout the US. (The characters universally use 'Indian' to describe Jade and her father, but I'm a white English person, so I'm going to use 'Indigenous' and 'Native'.) Jade is a very troubled kid. It's teased early on that something might have happened with her father - she hates him, and partially wants her life to be a slasher movie so that he dies. Letha suspects her father molested her, which she refutes; this turns out to be the case towards the end of the book, however. Jones' afterword to the book mentions that Jade as a character didn't start to solidify to him until after he read an article about a Native girl who killed herself after being abused by her father, and how widespread an issue that was in Native communities.

Jade herself starts the book with a suicide attempt, and throughout displays a lack of care towards her own life that is at the very least passively suicidal, if not actively trying to get herself killed. She's in denial, she's fixated on slasher movies both as a coping mechanism and as a refuge. Applying their framework to her life is how she rationalises and copes with the world around her. There's an underlying tension in earlier parts of the book as to whether there actually is a slasher killer on the streets of Proofrock or if Jade is drawing conclusions where there are none, wanting to protect girls from their fathers in a show of misplaced revenge. A lot of the more obviously slasher-y things we see only happen when Jade is alone, bringing into question her narration. That, plus the hazy, stream of consciousness first person voice really brings a dark and uncertain tone to the whole book.

And, of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how race and Indigeneity plays into the entire affair. Does Jade fixate on Letha because she's Black, the only other girl of colour in school? But more than that, race underpins everything. The lake the bulk of the action centres around is called Indian Lake, and one of the first signs a slasher is in town is the mass-killing of elk nearby, a motif that also appears in The Only Good Indians. Hell, the rich people building a new settlement in town call their home Terra Nova, literally 'New World'. And the slasher? A ghost, it turns out - a little Native girl whose mother was killed, who herself died in a cruel prank, and whose spirit cannot sink beneath the waters of Indian Lake because she is a 'heathen' in the eyes of the Church. It all comes back to the poisoning of Native land and Native lives by the settlers who would claim it as their own - no accident, then, that Jade is the only one who sees the truth. Trauma both personal and intergenerational, and all circling around Jade. Poor kid. But such a compelling character, and I'm so glad I finally picked this up and read it. It's harrowing, but it's a really good read.

Next up, from one horrible thing to another, as we take a look at a boy who drew Auschwitz.

[sleepy-moron]

I’m posting about Mike’s mental health again because people are still saying things aren’t that deep and it kinda drives me crazy.

Warning for discussions of mental illness and the cliff scene (so tw for su*cide mentions)

Not every single person with trauma will react in the same way to said trauma! The people saying Mike isn’t depressed would also probably think I’m completely mentally healthy because not everyone acts the same way. It took several years for me to realize I was having depressive episodes because I didn’t feel sad all that often. Some people with depression just become emotionally numb and pull away from other people instead. It’s really tiring to struggle with mental illness in a way that is not noticeable to everyone else. I actually really struggle to open up to other people and getting constantly told that you can’t actually have a problem because you’re “too functional” gets old fast.

I’m sure a lot of the people who have talked about the cliff scene and why it paints a really scary picture of Mike’s mindset have experienced that kind of passive desire to stop existing, because most people won’t pick up on that sort of thing unless they know from personal experience what it’s like. @aemiron-main has a really good metaphor about this, people look for signs of struggling they can recognize so the people not struggling in a visible way aren’t given the support they need because they’re clearly doing “fine”. A lot of Mike’s s4 behavior: being disorganized, struggling academically, strong hatred towards school, general emotional detachment, short temper, “acting out” and poor self esteem are pretty textbook symptoms of depression, yet most people probably wouldn’t make that connection because they believe depression should be “more obvious” than that.

Sure you could dismiss the cliff thing as being a spur of the moment decision because Mike is going through a lot emotionally, but for someone to be like “okay guess I’m going to jump off this cliff so Dustin doesn’t get his teeth cut out” when upset kinda suggests this is something that has been on the person’s mind. Even if Mike is 12, the fact he feels like dying is probably his best option is the kind of thing that gets people put on suicide watches in real life, especially when they’re that young. Mike is so used to having his feelings invalidated whenever he tries to open up by s4 that it’s unlikely he stopped having similar thoughts. He physically tries to shield Will during the shootout and feels like he isn’t needed by the people he cares about, which suggests he still doesn’t value his own life as much as he should. The books aren’t canon but Lucas literally says Mike locked himself in his basement with video games for weeks after the Byers left.

Mike is an uncomfortably relatable depiction of “invisible” depression and the passive desire to just die already, and as someone who struggled with both in my early teens I think it’s important for people to know what that looks like because it could literally save someone’s life.

[parasite--girl]

Anybody sensitive to EDs, mental illnesses, passive and occasionally active suicidal ideation, etc. etc. please be SO CAREFUL on my page. I frequently bounce from remission to relapse and I treat this blog as my diary throughout. There will also be plenty of unrelated content as well, as this is my main blog and I like to show all parts of myself equally

[our-ladys-tears]

TW: Manipulation, Mentions of Suicide, Mental Health Issues, and Depression

It’s been a while since I was here. To any of my friends from when I used tumblr regularly, I’m sorry I fell off the face of the earth with little to no warning. I have had a lot going on in my life lately. More so than ever before. Just know that now I am okay, I’m doing better.

I’ve been taking charge of my mental health and it was recommended to me that I write out the main issue from recent past to a place that I can’t lose it as a reminder of why I decided to do better for myself. I remembered this tumblr and figured, well, I had posted about my life in the past, and wrote stories and drabbles based on some painful times in my life.

Maybe I’ll turn this into a drabble too, because it can be cathartic, but for now it’s just the situation as I lived through it. Names were left out, certain details and exacts of the situation were not included for privacy’s sake. And after writing it all out, I do feel better.

This post is primarily for me, but like the last time I shared a very sensitive part of my life, I share it publicly because maybe, just maybe, someone is going through a similar situation and needs the courage to leave. If it has the potential to help someone, anyway, feel empowered to change their life for the better, then I want it to be shared for them. Everything else from this point on will be below the cut, because it’s an incredibly long story.

I left some people behind when I moved. Specifically, someone I cut contact with for my own benefit because he was not respecting me, my boundaries, or my needs when I was at one of the lowest points in my life. I hold no ill will towards him. I genuinely hope for the best for him. Does that mean I will ever want him back in my life? I doubt it. After everything we went through, I didn't feel like his equal. I wasn't able to spend time with my other friends without him being passive aggressive with me. He would always get jealous of the things I would get, the people I have in my life, any form of attention I'd receive, or even gifts from my own boyfriend.

He has claimed before that he didn't want to say anything because he knows being jealous of me for things like that is out of my control and that I deserved the good things I got. But then he would still get upset and passive aggressive with me. He'd complain that he couldn't get the things that I got, or he would start giving me one word responses if I was excitedly talking about how my boyfriend got me food. When I got a car with my boyfriend's help he kept saying "I wish I had someone who wanted to fuck me enough to buy me a car." And more things like that when I got anything nice from someone.

Beyond that, I felt like his personal babysitter, but one that never got to clock out. He has mental health problems, and due to that I ended up being the one to take care of him because he couldn't take care of himself without prompting, even though I never wanted that responsibility, but I wanted him alive and healthy more. The main thing was that I went over to his home every week to make sure he was taking his pills and refilling the pill organizer because he would forget if he took them or not if the pill organizer didn't get refilled every week.

Do not get me wrong, he did a lot for me in that time. I will always appreciate what he did do for me, but that does not excuse the manipulation that I went through at his hands. I don't believe he intended to be manipulative, but, well... The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so regardless of what he INTENDED to do, it's not what ended up happening.

The final straw was when I told him about my move. Before then he had been really pushy and insensitive about my need for space and to only have contact with specific people because they are the only people that would be able to help me out of the depressive hole I had been slowly burying myself in. I had told him that I cannot handle his problems as well as my own, so I needed to focus on myself for a while, because he has a lot going on all the time and I could not carry the weight of his issues at the moment. He didn't take that well, but I knew if I were to be around him in that state of mind, we would have ended up hating each other's guts. I would not have been able to be nice to him, I would not have been able to be the supportive friend I always tried to be. I was not in a place to be able to handle anything that is on his plate because mine was overflowing and cracking under the pressure.

When I told him a few days later about my excitement because I was finally preparing my move out of the state, he was trying to tell me how lonely he was going to be. How me leaving meant he would have no one there for him (because his husband didn't ever count because, apparently, "he had a lot going on so I don't want to bother him with my problems because I know it's a lot", yet it was perfectly acceptable to burden me with it, even when I never volunteered and said I couldn't handle it?) I didn't respond much to that beyond a "I wish there was something I could do."

According to him, there was a lot I could do. I could spend time with him, go over and hang out at his house, play games, talk to him, give him human interaction. He told me all the ways I could have been helping him, but how I had shut him out instead. How me not being more sympathetic towards him and his troubles hurt him because it wasn't what he needed from me. I had tried to be calm, and ended the conversation shortly afterwards. I wanted to give us both space to calm down and discuss the matter when there weren't heated emotions.

But then he went to my friend. My highly mentally unwell friend. The one that ACTIVELY wants to die. He's never tried to kill himself, but his doctors and family are so worried about him that he has to have his medicine locked away so only the nurse aid he has can get it for him so he can't have access to them if he ever gets to the point of wanting to take his own life. He said to this friend of mine "We could take a bunch of pills and get so high that we don't know we're dying."

That was the last straw for me. I was hoping and praying that he was making a really dark, distasteful joke because he uses dark humor as a coping mechanism. He was not joking. I was informed a while later that he thought I was calling his want, his attempt, at dying a joke. I was hoping that him trying to take someone with him was a bad joke, because I thought he was better than to suggest to someone who is actively wanting to not wake up anymore that they should die with him.

I couldn't handle that. I will not accept that from someone I call a friend. I told him as much. Something he always asked for was communication, so I told him what I was feeling, how he was gaslighting, guilt tripping, manipulating me, not listening to my boundaries, and how he was crossing a line by saying something like that to my friend. Then I blocked him. I blocked him on everything I knew he would be able to easily contact me on. My discord, facebook, tiktok, roleplaying sites, anything that I knew of his accounts on that I had access to.

When I cut him from my life I was informed he threw a huge tantrum and a pity party and even said he had half a mind to show up at my front door before the move. At that point I would not have put it past him to do so in a desperate, manic attempt to speak to me when I no longer wanted any contact with him. I no longer felt safe. What should have been half a year or more until my move North ended up being rushed to merely a month and a half, two months later at most, because I was afraid every time I walked out the front door.

I changed my and my daughter's entire routine while we were still living in Louisiana because I was terrified he would take the knowledge that he had of our schedule and use it to ambush me outside of my home, or outside of my daughter's doctor or therapy offices. I looked outside before I let me or my daughter leave the house to make sure he wasn't there. I would lock my car doors and roll up all windows before I pulled back into my driveway in case he was waiting for me to get home. If I had to go somewhere I knew he could possibly be I was always on the verge of a panic attack. I didn't feel safe knowing that he could show up any day at any time because he was 5 minutes away from where I was living at the time.

Since moving over 10 hours away I no longer feel so anxious. I don't talk to him, I don't have any contact with him, he is no longer a part of my life in any regard, and I finally feel at peace. I don't have to walk on eggshells and watch what I say about the things and people in my life. Me ending my friendship with him and then explaining everything that had been done and said to me by him has lost him quite a few of our mutual friends as far as I am aware. I do feel bad about that, but that was their choice. I never asked them to remove him from their lives, but I was not going to lie to them about why I did not want any contact with him or for them to contact me on his behalf.

Sometimes I wonder how he's doing, but I know it is in my best interests to not reach out to him, because he showed me that the reasons I stopped talking to him when we were kids in high-school were still problems that he refused to work on, even when he was told what he did wrong. He would refuse to listen. Make excuses. And then he would claim "I'm not making excuses I'm just EXPLAINING" Or if he was told that he needed to fix a behavior, specifically dumping all his problems on everyone else, he would actively just refuse to do it, because "If I do it that way, I'll never get to vent to anyone. But if I just DO IT ANYWAY, then they have NO CHOICE but to respond to it." And I never liked that.

I hope he is doing better. I hope he gets help for his problems. A saying I like is "Just because you lost me as a friend, doesn't mean you gained me as an enemy. I still want to see you eat, just not at my table." I want his life to get better, truly I do, but I can't be there to try and help. I won't let him keep ignoring my needs and boundaries and manipulate me the way he did.

For those of you that read this far, thank you. I hope my story can help someone build the courage to remove toxic and manipulative people from their lives, for their own sake. 

Good luck, lovelies. Stay safe. Stay happy. Stay you.

[falling-hand-in-unlovable-hand]

hee hoo! cactus, aloe vera, and papyrus for the ask gaem ♪(´▽｀)

cactus ⇢ something you’re currently learning (about)?

the giant squid💀

aloe vera ⇢ what’s something (mundane) you really want to experience in life?

so- uh this is lowkey depressing but- i wanna be able to not be quietly dreading when i'll stop wanting to keep dealing with everything, and to see a life ahead of me that i'm excited to live

papyrus ⇢ if you put your ‘on repeat’ playlist on shuffle, what’s the first song that comes up? what do you like about it / associate it with?

Rise to Me by The Decembrists

uh so- when i first listened to it i distinctly remember being like 'huh that's gay lol'

[dreamsclock]

why c!wilbur was never c!dream’s vassal; an analysis post

VASSAL, n. a humble servant or subordinate; one devoted to the service of another. (oxford english dictionary) 

okay, so in this thread, i’m gonna be analysing three key phrases/words from this definition - ‘servant’, ‘subordinate’, and ‘devoted to the service of another’.  i'll then delve into what this means for this scene and wilbur + dream’s relationship, how this has twisted some views of the two, and what this could mean going forward in the plot with these two. the parts in bold are the important points to make it easier to read :)

also, assume every ccs name i mention is regarding their smp character !!

warnings: manipulation, mental illness, toxic relationships, death, mention of suicide (c!wilbur)

cut for length (3k words)

let's start by looking at THIS TRANSCRIPT i made of the vassal scene (link is safe and leads to google doc transcript)!! the important parts have been highlighted light blue, though i'd recommend reading the whole doc: it's an interesting conversation. i'll get into individual quotes in a minute, but i wanna look at the terms that come from the definition of vassal specifically. servant, subordinate, service - all these terms indicate a power imbalance; a powerful person that the vassal is in subordination to.

in this conversation alone, one which many claim is wilbur being manipulated by dream, we can see that dream is just,, not the one in charge at all here. not in the ways that matter - emotionally, verbally - despite being physically intimidating with his armour, weapons and TNT.  

the thing about dream as a villain is that he looks the part. he's the scary soldier with overpowered armour and weapons, he's got stacks of TNT; compared to wilbur, who is armourless, weaponless, who seems mad, he's appears physically capable of villainy and manipulation.

this is where a lot of people go wrong. power and control comes from words, too, words and verbal presence and subtler manipulation, and wilbur, standing with no visible weapons, manages to keep his main weapon, his words, hidden. it's always been how wilbur works - words, not weapons, because when they're in his arsenal, they can be more powerful. 

we see this constantly in the transcript: wilbur telling dream where to meet (wilbur: dream, i'm waiting outside pogtopia), dream giving wilbur his resources (wilbur: i understand you have a lot of TNT / dream, quiet: i do...),  wilbur making the plans (dream: if you need any help, just- let me know).... wilbur being the one in control of the situation, wilbur deciding what is going to happen despite it being "dream's will". dream is so passive in this he's practically a shadow - physically, he's intimidating, but verbally? when it matters? he doesn't hold a CANDLE to wilbur, and both of them know it. the interesting part is, wilbur speaks FOR dream here:

"dream, i appreciate… i appreciate- ‘cause the thing is, tommy, tommy, what you’re not understanding is, dream only gave you that gear so you could cause this conflict. you see? that’s what this is all about! dream doesn’t want us to win! dream just wants both pogtopia and manburg to be weak! that’s it!"

dream instantly goes to refute this, saying he agrees with that, but that he wants l'manburg to be "something" (which i'll touch on in a minute), but the damage has already been done. in tommy's mind, and in our minds, dream has been branded a character of chaos, a mastermind puppeteering two sides to destroy them both for his personal gain. if we listen to dream, though, we see him in a slightly different light: someone between a rock and a hard place, who wants to save the place he saw only MONTHS before as his opposition, but this is ignored in favour of what wilbur assumes of him. and honestly? i think this is exactly what wilbur intended. 

because he isn't dream's vassal. dream is his.

if dream told wilbur not to blow up manburg, wilbur would have laughed in his face and made the explosion twice as bad. wilbur was not doing anything for dream that he wouldn't have already done. wilbur is not dream's servant: nothing in his actions or words suggest this.

but dream? who supplies wilbur with resources, who protects him in front of tommy, who is told the plans and thanked for his services ie. providing TNT?? it becomes more obvious here that it's DREAM that's the vassal for wilbur - and we see this even in recent canon !! dream has a line from doomsday that eerily mimics wilbur's "unfinished symphony" metaphor -

DREAM: in all destruction, there is a new beginning. beautiful. you know, the unfinished symphony, right? the server will be at peace now.

we KNOW that's not a c!dream thing to say. l'manburg is wilbur's unfinished symphony, forever unfinished, and dream saying this line here sounds like wilbur more than anything.  in the same way, dream wants to bring wilbur back to free him from prison. doesn't this seem "devoted to the service of another" as per the definition of vassal?? this is not an act of dominance; it’s an act of subservience, in that he needs wilbur, who absolutely doesn’t need him, as we’ve already seen in canon.

AND, while wilbur might not have stopped at dream's request, the same cannot be said for dream if wilbur had told him not to blow up l'manburg. dr3 has a good thread on this (ONE here, and TWO here - both lead to twitter!) but dream in season one has his worldview completely torn apart twice.

the first is after the l'manburg revolution, when he begins to accept he might have been in the wrong. he goes away and comes back after a long period of time, supporting pogtopia from the shadows, telling them he's against manburg, even writing TYRANT: a name he was once called.  

dream, here, accepts maybe tommy and wilbur ARE the good guys, and in vain, tries to 'redeem' himself by working with them, all the while unnecessarily risking himself and his lands to do so. he wants l'manburg to be something, he wants it to thrive like it had been before, despite having been against them in the war. he even says "i had a change of heart", and that change of heart was accepting what i call "the l'manburg narrative" - aka, the view that l'manburg was good, dream + his lands were bad + tyrannical, a simple story of good and evil (i’ll also probably make a post sometime talking about the l’manburg narrative, because it interests me so much).  and this moment we see? the vassals scene? dream’s worldview is torn apart AS WE WATCH. 

 dream doesn't like schlatt. we know this. he says it himself:

DREAM: schlatt is ambitious and that’s a bad thing. he wants power, he wants land, he wants to expand. 

he sees schlatt as bad, and wilbur/tommy as good, all but outright stating that wilbur is better than schlatt. and THEN we have wilbur's pivotal line:

WILBUR: dream, this has made me ambitious! dream, if i’m taking power again I will be ambitious, dream! that’s what i’m saying. let me blow it up! let me destroy it all!

on the surface, not much seems wrong with this quote. you'd be forgiven for being more concerned with wilbur's laugh, which sounds unhinged (cc!wilbur soot giving us fucking awesome acting as usual) !! but if we look closer, we understand what he's actually telling dream under the surface of his words.

wilbur calls himself ambitious should he come to power again. this is instantly a red flag, because dream claimed schlatt was ambitious, and used ambitious to signify schlatt's greed for power + land + expanding his country and a synonym for danger regarding schlatt. this isn't just what this word means in terms of a dictionary definition, but wilbur uses it here to communicate that he is going to end up EXACTLY like schlatt, if not worse, if he ends in charge of l'manburg - he's telling dream that l'manburg cannot exist like before, because wilbur will end up worse if he is president again. 

we know already that wilbur was miserable as president - he was overworked and cried himself to sleep and was corrupt enough that he tried to run a one-party election. he uses “ambitious” as a term here to throw it back in dream’s face, to force him to realise that no matter what anyone wants, l'manburg could never be "something", as dream wanted it to be. it had to be destroyed.

on top of this, he then uses the verb phrase "taking power". "taking" isn't a passive, polite word: it's forceful, it's aggressive. if you're GIVEN something, it's something earned/a gift - if you TAKE something, there's an automatic force there, one wilbur knows his presidency will be born from should he end up in charge again. he will be TAKING presidency from schlatt, and l'manburg will be founded AGAIN on violence: something wilbur didn't want at all, even back in the beginning. 

and this is the moment dream understands that his worldview is wrong. again.

his sense of wilbur/tommy being 100% Good and schlatt being 100% Bad crumbles at this sentence, and dream is silent for SO long here while wilbur and tommy talk: because he was travelling? probably. to process what he's learned?? also probably.

wilbur indirectly tells dream in this scene: "schlatt and i are too similar. if we save l'manburg rather than blow it up, i will destroy it anyway. i need to blow it up because it cannot exist in the state of peace and happiness that it should." and dream hears that message loud and clear. it's why he gives wilbur the TNT: it's why, after this, he grows more chaotic and deviates from side to side. he makes the deal with wilbur to blow everything up, he works with schlatt to get the book, and tells tommy he was never on his side, because in his eyes, he has no fucking clue WHAT side that is. "good" and "bad" aren't sides in his mind anymore: all he knows is that tommy is pro-l'manburg, and therefore, dream isn't on his side. dream's morals are so skewed because his concepts of good and bad have been ripped from him so many times and rebranded into something unrecognisable each time.

and this isn't to say he doesn't understand the concepts of good and bad: i think he does, to an extent. it's just that his understanding of those two things as a dichotomy, as opposites, doesn't exist anymore: i think he sees wilbur as a person who does "bad" things for a "good" cause (ie. blowing up l'manburg). it's why he's so adamant in prison that a) wilbur will save him and that b) wilbur is "awesome". dream has so many interesting quotes on good and evil, and never seems to think he himself is evil: "evil is in the eye of the beholder",,, he doesn't bother arguing that he isn't a monster with tommy,,, i think he understands he's doing bad things, but for a good cause - i think, from looking at the two, he thinks he's following in wilbur's footsteps (to an extent).  that wilbur would be Proud of him doing awful things for what he sees as a good cause. 

BUT BACK ON TRACK BC I HAVE A TENDENCY TO GET DERAILED LMAO: wilbur, in the vassals conversation, was manipulating tommy and dream, and hell, even the audience. he puts words in their mouths, dictates the events of both the talk and the festival plan, orchestrates things to go exactly as he wants them. wilbur is the one in control of the conversation, and the most fascinating part about it is that he doesn't need weapons to do it. he doesn't use violence, he's not even overt in his manipulation. everything wilbur does is careful and covert, because he knows dream will pick up on it: and dream does. 

dream's moments of "agreement" with wilbur are resigned, reluctant - he tells tommy "i have to" about providing wilbur with TNT and says, when defending wilbur "i have- i'll have to step in". "i have to" is not an admission of masterminded triumph. it's unwilling, it's almost begrudging: dream sounds lost and resigned when speaking to tommy - the person who sounds like they've won is wilbur. with the viewpoint wilbur is the one in control of the conversation / that dream is wilbur's vassal, we can also see two things: 1, how the original view of dream being in control twists our understanding of those two characters now, and 2, what this could mean for the future.

wilbur’s portrayal of dream as a mastermind/puppeteer orchestrating events for chaos + personal gain is something every character buys into: including dream himself (in the prison he calls himself a puppeteer: because a puppeteer would OPENLY admit that, dream /sarcasm /lighthearted).

hell, even the audience buy into it — and for good reason!! though wilbur is dead, his words still linger on and have the same power over the server as dream’s presence does despite being in prison. wilbur’s words shape the narrative: for characters themselves and the audience. it’s after wilbur’s death we see people “fall into role” more than ever (aka, fit the role wilbur sort of ‘assigned them’), most notably dream as the villain, tommy as the hero. 

(i could do a whole analysis here about how wilbur wanted tubbo and tommy to fall down the same parallels as him and schlatt, and how it was only by realising wilbur was not as great a person as he thought that tommy managed to avoid this, but i’ll avoid it for now dhkdbd.)

what’s important is that we know wilbur’s words and how wilbur sees people holds a LOT of  influence over the audience and characters themselves. and honestly? it’s why it’s so easy for some people to make dream irredeemable. it’s why it’s so easy to see him as a monster, a puppet master. it’s easy to view him through wilbur’s lens when wilbur is a protagonist and dream is not — looking through wilbur’s lens, dream has ALWAYS been the tyrannical puppeteer, controlling all of them for his own gain. there was never a time when this was different, in the l’manburg narrative — though we know that’s not exactly true.

in the same vein, we misunderstand wilbur when looking at him through his own twisted narrative: it’s why i’m so sceptical that wilbur and tommy are working together from the void against dream. it misunderstands A Lot about wilbur as a character.

wilbur is suicidally destructive. he doesn’t only want himself wiped off earth, but everything he deems as “his”. HIS l’manburg, HIS country, hell, even HIS brother (in the form of tommy, not biological). anything he sees himself as shaping, anything he sees himself as an influencer over, he wants it gone (dr3 twitter thread here!!).  wilbur wanted to die with l’manburg, and he doesn’t want to come back to life. we see it in the void — he’s still the same manipulative, destructive bastard (affectionate) as he had been before. he tells tommy “WE weren’t good for that server” in the same way he included tommy in his quote “are WE the bad guys?”, painting + implicating tommy in a light tommy later admits he’d never ever wanted. 

BACK ON TRACK!! wilbur is not the tragic hero turned self destructive “villain” that his narrative portrays him to be. and THAT is the tragedy of his character.  here is cc!wilbur’s very recent quote about his character— 

"i’m the president of a nation losing it due to my own insolence, short-sided naïveté, disregard for my fellow citizen who i claimed to love so much, and a dark twisted understanding of what is possession...”

this is Not the tragic hero many of us thought him to be back in pogtopia. the tragedy of wilbur (character again) comes from the fact he doesn’t live up to his own ideal narrative: none of them do. l’manburg doesn’t, and in his mind, it has to go. HE doesn’t,, and it’s why he dies too. it’s why i think it’s interesting when people separate vilbur, l’manbur and alivebur into “separate” versions of him: the beauty is that he’s a twisted mix of all three, and none of them are what he makes them out to be. separating them is exactly what he would WANT. dividing these three become three tragic iterations of one far more tragic shattered man, and the whole is something i don’t think wilbur wants anyone to see: splitting himself into a tragic hero, a fallen hero-turned-villain and alivebur, is what he wants.

wilbur is such an interesting character and the vassals conversation where he runs verbal loops around everyone + dominates the talk only lets us see a part of that !! he’s got a constant influence on how we as an audience read characters — he’s the most powerful in that way. 

this isn’t supposed to come off as character wilbur negative or critical: i ADORE the bastard and cannot wait until he comes back :’) i’ve just seen some posts talking about wilbur being a “good person” and having been manipulated in this conversation, so thought i’d make this !!

where do i think his character could go with all this in mind?? so many ways. he could very well be the next big bad villain TM (a la schlatt in season one and dream in season two), because i can see him wanting the whole server destroyed. he could break dream out and promptly stab him in the back when he doesn’t need him anymore; he could work with quackity and gain power through las nevadas, he could join the syndicate and tear the server apart through in-fighting, who knows !! what i DO know is that wilbur is gonna come back with a BANG (perhaps literally) and fuck things up on purpose LMAO

but tysm for listening to my scatterbrained TED talk, pls check out dr3 (@/dr3amofagame)’s threads on twitter because they’re wonderful + pls lemme know what you think if u wanna !! i love analysing dream and wilbur as characters and this was SO fun haha :) here are some interesting links if you’re still interested :]

WILBUR’S SPEECH IN THE SEASON ONE FINALE [NOTE: it doesn’t directly back up any points, but i thought it was very interesting he doesn’t mention dream as being a director of the explosion]

TWITTER THREAD ABOUT SAME TOPIC

tysm for reading my rambly analysis on minecraft block men :D 

[chlodohh]

Hello tumblr! I don’t post often and this is a little late to the party, but I would like to make an argument in favor of Dear Evan Hansen in light of its recent slander. Be prepared.

Everyone is shitting on Dear Evan Hansen, especially with the movie coming out, and say that Be More Chill is much better. DEH and BMC share a very similar premise; the geeky main character (both weirdly known for their striped shirt) compromise their identity in pursuit of popularity and their love interest, ultimately doing terrible deeds against others. As someone who has seen both on Broadway, I think the hate on DEH is a little overdone. Note: this is not to trash BMC – I enjoyed both, but personally connected much more with DEH.

One of the main arguments against DEH is how they portray Evan in a sympathetic way, although his lying scheme is absolutely atrocious and extremely harmful to the Murphy family and the other characters. It is true that he consistently does worse and worse things throughout the show that shouldn’t be overlooked, but one of the big themes of the story is how everyone is imperfect: Jared’s insensitivity, Alana’s perfectionistic coldness, Mr. Murphy’s overbearing strict attitude, Mrs. Murphy’s passivity, Connor’s anger – these are all flaws in the characters that influence each other, yet make them human. No one in the show is a “villain”. Even Pasek and Paul emphasize how Evan’s actions, while having bad consequence, are always done to try and help others – his first selfish act is showing the “suicide letter” to Alana, by which then he has already spiraled too far into his lie. After things fall apart, you see Evan reflect on his actions, understand the purpose and harm behind them, and ultimately begin to repair the relationships he’s damaged along the way. The conclusion provides an open ending – you see a resolution where Evan finally “steps into the sun”, taking the first steps to heal, yet it also still accepts that his issues and his wrongdoings cannot be magically fixed in one song. After the events of the show, his character still has room to grow and improve.

In contrast, Jeremy’s actions in BMC are first and foremost for his own benefit (I’m not even gonna mention the book – he’s just terrible in that). He similarly does things throughout the show that hurt the characters close to him, but the consequences are instead tied to the SQUIP. Although Jeremy makes the conscious decision to abandon Michael, use Brooke as a stepping stool for popularity, and reject his true self, it is supposedly under the influence of the SQUIP, putting less moral weight on Jeremy. The climax of the conflict portrays Jeremy as a “hero” that defeats the “villain” SQUIP, saving the characters from the super computer even though he was the one to cause the conflict in the first place. The conclusion brushes over his apology to Brooke and Christine, and there is little remorse shown for his actions. To me it feels like a shallow, classic happily ever after where Jeremy gets the girl and learns to accept himself, but faces little repercussion or remorse for the harm he’s done.

Both musicals also are targeted towards a similar audience of teens and young adults, touching upon topics most relatable to our up and coming generation – mental illness, isolation, and social media, among other topics. While DEH mainly focuses on Evan and his downfall into his lie, it hints at other serious issues and follows through with them. Each character has a function in the story, and are fully developed. With Heidi, you see the difficulty of single parenthood, the concept of trying your hardest and still being unable to provide. In Zoe, you see bitterness and spite, yet also a yearning for affection rooted so far in her that she deliberately wills herself to believe a fantasy. Even Connor, who we barely see his actual self alive in the first few minutes, serves to show the alienation and crushing defeat of mental illness and suicide. All these smaller motifs are explored and fully developed, making the story much richer.

BMC also hints at really serious topics that are important, but ultimately fails to follow through on them. Here’s a good example: a huge motif in the musical is the idea of being a “side character” and being insignificant – Jeremy’s character repeatedly addresses this in multiple numbers like More than Survive and Loser Geek Whatever. And yes, the feeling of being insignificant and wanting the spotlight is something many teens face – it’s a valid issue. But then we see Michael, the canonical “player 1” of the best friend duo, only treated as a side character. Michael in the Bathroom, arguably one of the most iconic numbers in the show, shows him completely shoved aside, small, insignificant, invisible to his best friend. Yet he loyally returns to Jeremy, Jeremy’s apology is treated as a gag, and he remains a side character made only to benefit the main character – he gives everything for Jeremy, and receives nothing back. For such an important role, Michael was surprisingly absent for much of the show. Michael as a character had so much potential, and was terribly mistreated. Some other things: Jeremy literally gets sexually assaulted, and it’s never brought up again until he APOLOGIZES to Chloe and Brooke – an apology which is more genuine than the one to his best friend that he completely erased from his perception; In Upgrade, you see a glimpse of all the characters in turmoil, yet it’s swept over and none of them are fully developed; AND, Joe Iconis casually throws out that none of the characters are straight, but other than Rich randomly revealing that he’s bi, it holds no significance to the show at all, making it feel suspiciously like token representation and a last-minute cop-out appeal to the LGBTQ+ community. BMC hints at a lot of important issues that relate very deeply in our generation, so it’s a little disappointing to see it all swept aside in favor of the “nerd boy gets girl” trope.

These are just my opinions on the two. And I know that I criticized BMC a lot here, but I actually really loved it and it was a huge phase for me for a long time – I really just want to use it as a comparison to DEH. Of course, you are all allowed to have your own opinions on the matter that differ from mine, but I just think the DEH slander has gone too far. Though I think we can all agree, Ben Platt does look a little silly in a wig.

[maggiecheungs]

atots as a disability narrative

finally posting my mini essay about atots and disability one (1) hour before episode 4 airs. putting this under the cut because it’s long. cw for discussions of casual ableism, suicidal ideation, death, disability, mental health.

(note: throughout i refer to tian’s disability, which we obviously don’t know the details of; i mainly mean it as a catch-all term for the health difficulties he faces, unlike most abled people, which continue on even after his transplant)

after episode 1 i remarked on how i read tian’s story as a disability narrative, but i wanted to wait to get a bit more info before i expanded on that. after episode 3, i think i can take a bash at outlining the main things that struck me--but there’s so much more i could say about this topic, so feel free to ask for clarification. also i obviously haven’t watched episode 4 yet, so that might change things! and of course, tian is filthy rich so his experiences with the practicalities of disability are somewhat mitigated/different from most experiences of disability... but in an ableist society, there are obviously some basic similarities in the way disability is perceived and experienced. so far, here are some of the main themes that i’ve noticed in atots:

the space between wellness and unwellness

in our society, wellness is constructed as part of a binary. one is either well (perfectly fucntional, capable of working) or unwell (ill enough to be incapable of functioning in a ‘normal’ manner). the default state is, of course, wellness; people get ill sometimes, of course, but they return to that default. however, people with disabilities and long-term health conditions can’t do that--and in the society in which we live, there aren’t accomodations for this sort of existence. 

tian has spent the past few years living in the space between wellness and unwellness. it’s the space of hospital waiting rooms and people treating you like you’re fragile. it’s the space of always waiting for something to happen; waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the people around you to get tired of you. in tian’s case, waiting for death.

tian has spent the past years stuck in this liminal space: ostensibly well enough to live a fairly normal life, but not enough to do so properly. he--and everyone else around him--is just waiting, and it prevents him from forming any close emotional connections or long-term plans. even if he could forget about it for a while, others remind him through their behaviour and treatment of him. before his surgery, he isn’t allowed just exist on a day-to-day basis. his very existence is overshadowed by the threat of its end. 

being stifled by others

in episode one, we get a glimpse of the near-complete erosion of personal boundaries tian has undergone over the past few years. after his operation, his mother panics when he leaves the house; she and his father stifle his freedom. at the same time, their fixation on ‘keeping him safe and healthy’ prevents them from seeing what he actually needs on an emotional level, which can be just as dangerous.

tian doesn’t just have to deal with his own feelings; he has to deal with his mother’s anxieties about him. he has to act well to assuage her fears. (tbh, neither of them handled the situation in the best possible way but... there isn’t really ‘a best way’ for this sort of situation? it’s more just limiting collateral damage.) similarly, his father blames him (or appears to blame him) for the suffering his mother is going through. 

it turns into a thing where he feels as if he owes them wellness (or the appearance of it). he doesn’t feel like he can be vulnerable around them. he puts on a similarly blasé act with his friends, because he doesn’t want them to treat him the same way his parents do--like he’s made of glass. which leads to....

pushing himself beyond his limits

tian feels like he has something to prove. he wants to prove that he’s not a burden... which becomes the characterising theme of his stay in the village.

in going to stay at the village, tian’s managed to mostly escape the spectre of ‘unwellness’ that has haunted him for so long, as well as all the people who stifle him. now that he’s free, he wants to learn to stand on his own two feet; to prove it to himself and to everyone who doubted he could (his parents, phupha, etc.).

however, while this is great for him on one level, it’s not great on another. because in tian’s mind, his disability is equated with being a burden. (this is not unsurprising, given that we live in a hugely ableist society and given his own experiences with his parents.) now that he’s out of the stifling environment of his past, tian feels like asking for help or taking care of himself would be a concession of weakness/burdensome to those around him.

that means, when other people unthinkingly hold him to ableist standards which his body literally cannot accomodate, tian will push himself to the limit rather than admit that he ‘falls short’. this is something that could have grave--potentially fatal--consequences.

HOWEVER! this seems to be changing! he seems to be growing past his feeling that ‘disability = burden’. in episode 3, he voluntarily told kalae about his having to take medication, and actively equated taking care of oneself with maturity/strength (”kalae, i also take pills. grown-up men have no problem taking pills. do you want to be a child or a grown-up?”)

i’ll be interested to see how this progresses. hopefully when/if he discloses his condition to phupha, it will go some way towards helping him move past all the self-directed ableism he’s internalised. also it should stop phupha from inadvertently pushing him to exceed his limits. (i predict that one area of tension between them will be phupha’s worry about tian--if their relationship is to succeed, phupha needs to be aware and accomodating of tian’s needs without stifling him/treating him like he’s made of glass as his parents did)

survivor’s guilt

a lot of this might be unconscious, but... tian has, in his mind, done nothing with his life--unlike torfun. while tian was alive and being a burden on everyone around him, gambling his few remaining years away, torfun was being one of the best, kindest, most generous people in the world. inevitably, living in her house and interacting with her people, he compares himself to her at every turn. she could help the villagers where he cannot. she should be here, not him. her heart is wasted on him.

but this is changing! in the most recent episode (3) we can see him building bonds with the villagers on his own merits. in the first few episodes i was worried that tian’s journey would be represented as but a shadow of torfun’s, but he’s forging his own indivdiual journey. similarly, his relationship with phupha seems to be individual to him, rather than a copy of the relationhship with torfun (but i guess we’ll find out more in the next few episodes). 

suicidal ideation

as mentioned above, tian has spent his entire life waiting for death. now, that looming spectre has disappeared, but it’s still a part of his identity. for years, he’s shaped his sense of self around that fact: he is going to die, so it does not matter what he does or does not do (this post sums it up really well!) he’s reckless because why the fuck shouldn’t he be? even if he’s not necessarily actively suicidal, for a while he seems to be passively suicidal.

this is also starting to show signs of change--as he overcomes his survivor’s guilt, builds genuine connections with the people around him, and feels like he’s contributing to something bigger than himself.

which leads me to the overriding theme of the series: tian’s going to have to learn to love himself, disabilities and all. he’s starting to build himself back up in the village, but he can’t treat it only as an escape. at some point, he’s going to need to face all the things i’ve mentioned in this essay and work through them. hopefully phupha will be there to help him, but this isn’t a ‘love cures all ills’ situation. loving phupha won’t ‘fix’ him; tian needs to love himself.

but... honestly, i have faith. i was really cautious after watching the first episode, because i’ve seen so many shows handle disability badly. but atots has exceeded my expectations in every other way so far, and i am truly excited to see where it goes next <3

[gothamblacka]

cognitive assessment.

bold all that apply to your muse’s current mental state; italicise any that apply to your muse’s past mental state — repost don’t reblog !

alcoholism: or alcohol use disorder ( aud ), is a broad term for any drinking of alcohol that results in mental or physical health problems.

amnesia: a deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease, or psychological trauma.

anxiety: a mental health disorder characterised by feelings of worry, anxiety, or fear that are strong enough to interfere with one’s daily activities.

appetite loss: a reduced desire to eat.

binge eating: a psychological illness characterised by frequently eating excessive amounts of food, often when not hungry.

co-dependence: dysfunctional and maladaptive relationship reliant on another person’s dependence on the affected individual.

cynicism: an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self interest ( scepticism ), or to question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile ( pessimism ).

defensiveness: the tendency to be sensitive to comments and criticism and to deny them. to constantly protect oneself from criticism, exposure of one’s shortcomings, or other real or perceived threats to the go.

depersonalisation: a state in which one’s thoughts and feelings seem unreal or not belonging to oneself.

depression: a mental health disorder characterised by persistently depressed mood or loss of interest in activities, causing significant impairment in daily life.

derealisation: alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that it seems unreal.

devaluation: defense mechanism used when a person attributes themselves, an object, or another person as completely flawed, worthless, or as having exaggerated negative qualities.

displacement: an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new object or goals felt in their original form to be dangerous or unacceptable.

dissociation: is any state of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experiences, such as a disconnect from reality.

drug abuse: the extreme desire to obtain, and use, increasing amounts of one or more substances.

dysphoria: a state of unease, or generalised dissatisfaction with life.

emotional detachment: an inability to connect with others on an emotional level, as well as coping with anxiety by avoiding certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as “ emotional numbing ” or dissociation.

flashbacks: an involuntary recurrent memory, is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual has sudden, usually powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of said experience.

flat affect: a severe reduction in emotional expressiveness. they may not show the signs of normal emotion, perhaps may speak in a monotonous voice, have diminished facial expressions, and appear extremely apathetic.

guilt: a cognitive or emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realises — accurately or not — that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated a universal moral standard and bear significant responsibility for it.

hallucinations: an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.

hypersomnia: or excessive sleepiness, is a condition in which a person has trouble staying awake during the day.

hypervigilance: an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect activity.

hypochondria: ( also known as illness anxiety disorder ) is a condition in which a person is inordinately worried about having a serious illness.

idealization: the action of regarding or representing something as perfect or better than reality.

insomnia: a sleep disorder where people have trouble sleeping. they may have difficulty falling asleep, or staying asleep as long as desired. insomnia is usually followed by daytime sleepiness, low energy, and a depressed mood.

intellectualization: a defense mechanism by which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress — where thinking is used to avoid feeling. it involves removing one’s self, emotionally, from a stressful event.

introjection: regarded as the process where the subject replicates in themselves behaviours, attributes, or other fragments of the surrounding world, especially of other subjects. cognate concepts include identification, incorporation, and internalisation.

isolation: a defense mechanism in psychoanalytic theory characterized by individuals defending themselves from possible threats by mentally and physically isolating themselves. by minimizing associative connections with other thoughts, the threatening cognition is remembered less often and is less likely to affect self-esteem or the self concept.

low self esteem: a person with low self esteem feels unworthy, incapable, and incompetent.

narcissism: is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s own attributes. narcissistic personality disorder ( npd ) is a personality disorder in which there is a long term pattern of abnormal behaviour characterised by exaggerated feelings of self importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of other’s feelings.

night terrors: also known as a sleep terror, is a sleep disorder, causing feelings of terror or dread, and typically occurs during the first hours of stage three to four rapid eye movement ( nrem ) sleep.

obsessive compulsion: obsessive-compulsive disorder ( ocd ) is a common, chromic, and long — lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts ( obsessions ) and behaviours ( compulsions ) that they feel the urge to repeat over and over.

panic attacks: a sudden overwhelming feeling of acute and debilitating anxiety.

passive aggression: a tendency to engage in indirect expression of hostility through acts such as subtle insults, sullen behavior, stubbornness, or a deliberate failure to accomplish a required task.

paranoia: the irrational and persistent feeling that people are “ out to get you. ” the three main types of paranoia include paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia.

phobias: an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.

projection: psychological projection is a defense mechanism people subconsciously employ in order to cope with difficult feelings or emotions. it involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings.

psychosis: a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.

rationalization: a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable — or even admirable and superior — by plausible means.

regression: a psychological defense mechanism in which a person abandons age — appropriate coping strategies in favor of earlier, more childlike patterns of behavior. this regression is a form of retreat, bringing back a time when the person feels safe and taken care of.

risky sex: risky sexual behavior is commonly defined as behavior that increases the probability of contracting sexually transmitted infections, diseases, becoming pregnant, or making a partner pregnant. drug use is associated with risky sexual behavior.

somatisation: the manifestation of psychological distress by the presentation of bodily symptoms.

splitting: ( also called black — and — white thinking or all — or — nothing thinking ) is the failure in a person’s thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole.

sublimation: is a mature type of defence mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long — term conversion of the initial impulse.

suicidal ideation: ( also known as suicidal thoughts ) is thinking about or an unusual preoccupation with suicide. the range of suicidal ideation varies from fleeting thoughts, to extensive thoughts, to detailed planning, roleplaying, and incomplete attempts.

sleepwalking: formally known as somnambulism, is a behaviour disorder that originates during deep sleep and results in walking or performing other complex behaviours while asleep. it is more common in children than adults and is more likely to occur if a person is sleep deprived.

suppression: the act of stopping oneself from thinking or feeling something. it is generally assumed ineffective because even if you suppress or hold back an emotion, like anger, that feeling returns with a vengeance.

thousand yard stare: a phrase often used to describe the blank, unfocused gaze of soldiers who have become emotionally detached from the horrors around them. it is also sometimes used more generally to describe the look of dissociation among victims of other types of trauma.

triggers: something that sets of a memory tape or flashback transporting the person back to the event of their emotional trauma. triggers are very personal ; different things can trigger different people. the survivor may begin to avoid situations and stimuli that they think triggered the flashback.

trust issues: a person with these kinds of thoughts may construct social barriers as a defense mechanism to ensure that trust is not lost again. these barriers are often a person’s way of avoid the pain, rejection, or guilt associated with mistrust.

violence: the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.

temper: a reflection of irritation or rage, a propensity to be angered rapidly.

tagged : stolen tagging: @viclentheart @enygma @falsedking​ @cathief @0000004479 @sonicanary @prettybird @greenpuns,  @batvvmn, @starxhal , @btwng , @quinzotic , @chaoticblondes, @gctjinxd , @bulletballet , @reincarnatedhawk , @bcthound , @charmher

[9ths]

cognitive assessment. bold all that apply to your muse’s current mental state; italicise any that apply to your muse’s past mental state — repost don’t reblog !

alcoholism: or alcohol use disorder ( aud ), is a broad term for any drinking of alcohol that results in mental or physical health problems.

amnesia: a deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease, or psychological trauma.

anxiety: a mental health disorder characterised by feelings of worry, anxiety, or fear that are strong enough to interfere with one’s daily activities.

appetite loss: a reduced desire to eat.

binge eating: a psychological illness characterised by frequently eating excessive amounts of food, often when not hungry.

co-dependence: dysfunctional and maladaptive relationship reliant on another person’s dependence on the affected individual.

cynicism: an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self interest ( scepticism ), or to question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile ( pessimism ).

defensiveness: the tendency to be sensitive to comments and criticism and to deny them. to constantly protect oneself from criticism, exposure of one’s shortcomings, or other real or perceived threats to the go.

depersonalisation: a state in which one’s thoughts and feelings seem unreal or not belonging to oneself.

depression: a mental health disorder characterised by persistently depressed mood or loss of interest in activities, causing significant impairment in daily life.

derealisation: alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that it seems unreal.

devaluation: defense mechanism used when a person attributes themselves, an object, or another person as completely flawed, worthless, or as having exaggerated negative qualities.

displacement: an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new object or goals felt in their original form to be dangerous or unacceptable.

dissociation: is any state of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experiences, such as a disconnect from reality.

drug abuse: the extreme desire to obtain, and use, increasing amounts of one or more substances.

dysphoria: a state of unease, or generalised dissatisfaction with life.

emotional detachment: an inability to connect with others on an emotional level, as well as coping with anxiety by avoiding certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as “ emotional numbing ” or dissociation.

flashbacks: an involuntary recurrent memory, is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual has sudden, usually powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of said experience.

flat affect: a severe reduction in emotional expressiveness. they may not show the signs of normal emotion, perhaps may speak in a monotonous voice, have diminished facial expressions, and appear extremely apathetic.

guilt: a cognitive or emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realises — accurately or not — that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated a universal moral standard and bear significant responsibility for it.

hallucinations: an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.

hypersomnia: or excessive sleepiness, is a condition in which a person has trouble staying awake during the day.

hypervigilance: an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect activity.

hypochondria: ( also known as illness anxiety disorder ) is a condition in which a person is inordinately worried about having a serious illness.

idealisation: the action of regarding or representing something as perfect or better than reality.

insomnia: a sleep disorder where people have trouble sleeping. they may have difficulty falling asleep, or staying asleep as long as desired. insomnia is usually followed by daytime sleepiness, low energy, and a depressed mood.

intellectualisation: a defense mechanism by which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress — where thinking is used to avoid feeling. it involves removing one’s self, emotionally, from a stressful event.

introjection: regarded as the process where the subject replicates in themselves behaviours, attributes, or other fragments of the surrounding world, especially of other subjects. cognate concepts include identification, incorporation, and internalisation.

isolation: a defense mechanism in psychoanalytic theory characterized by individuals defending themselves from possible threats by mentally and physically isolating themselves. by minimizing associative connections with other thoughts, the threatening cognition is remembered less often and is less likely to affect self-esteem or the self concept.

low self esteem: a person with low self esteem feels unworthy, incapable, and incompetent.

narcissism: is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s own attributes. narcissistic personality disorder ( npd ) is a personality disorder in which there is a long term pattern of abnormal behaviour characterised by exaggerated feelings of self importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of other’s feelings.

night terrors: also known as a sleep terror, is a sleep disorder, causing feelings of terror or dread, and typically occurs during the first hours of stage three to four rapid eye movement ( nrem ) sleep.

obsessive compulsion: obsessive-compulsive disorder ( ocd ) is a common, chromic, and long — lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts ( obsessions ) and behaviours ( compulsions ) that they feel the urge to repeat over and over.

panic attacks: a sudden overwhelming feeling of acute and debilitating anxiety.

passive aggression: a tendency to engage in indirect expression of hostility through acts such as subtle insults, sullen behavior, stubbornness, or a deliberate failure to accomplish a required task.

paranoia: the irrational and persistent feeling that people are “ out to get you. ” the three main types of paranoia include paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia.

phobias: an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.

projection: psychological projection is a defense mechanism people subconsciously employ in order to cope with difficult feelings or emotions. it involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings.

psychosis: a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.

rationalization: a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable — or even admirable and superior — by plausible means.

regression: a psychological defense mechanism in which a person abandons age — appropriate coping strategies in favor of earlier, more childlike patterns of behavior. this regression is a form of retreat, bringing back a time when the person feels safe and taken care of.

risky sex: risky sexual behavior is commonly defined as behavior that increases the probability of contracting sexually transmitted infections, diseases, becoming pregnant, or making a partner pregnant. drug use is associated with risky sexual behavior.

somatisation: the manifestation of psychological distress by the presentation of bodily symptoms.

splitting: ( also called black — and — white thinking or all — or — nothing thinking ) is the failure in a person’s thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole.

sublimation: is a mature type of defence mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long — term conversion of the initial impulse.

suicidal ideation: ( also known as suicidal thoughts ) is thinking about or an unusual preoccupation with suicide. the range of suicidal ideation varies from fleeting thoughts, to extensive thoughts, to detailed planning, roleplaying, and incomplete attempts.

sleepwalking: formally known as somnambulism, is a behaviour disorder that originates during deep sleep and results in walking or performing other complex behaviours while asleep. it is more common in children than adults and is more likely to occur if a person is sleep deprived.

suppression: the act of stopping oneself from thinking or feeling something. it is generally assumed ineffective because even if you suppress or hold back an emotion, like anger, that feeling returns with a vengeance.

thousand yard stare: a phrase often used to describe the blank, unfocused gaze of soldiers who have become emotionally detached from the horrors around them. it is also sometimes used more generally to describe the look of dissociation among victims of other types of trauma.

triggers: something that sets of a memory tape or flashback transporting the person back to the event of their emotional trauma. triggers are very personal ; different things can trigger different people. the survivor may begin to avoid situations and stimuli that they think triggered the flashback.

trust issues: a person with these kinds of thoughts may construct social barriers as a defence mechanism to ensure that trust is not lost again. these barriers are often a person’s way of avoid the pain, rejection, or guilt associated with mistrust.

violence: the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.

temper: a reflection of irritation or rage, a propensity to be angered rapidly.\

[dikiyvter]

cognitive assessment.

bold all that apply to your muse’s current mental state; italicize any that apply to your muse’s past mental state — repost don’t reblog !

tagged by: nobody tagging: n o b o d y

alcoholism: or alcohol use disorder ( aud ), is a broad term for any drinking of alcohol that results in mental or physical health problems.

amnesia: a deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease, or psychological trauma.

anxiety: a mental health disorder characterized by feelings of worry, anxiety, or fear that are strong enough to interfere with one’s daily activities.

appetite loss: a reduced desire to eat.

binge eating: a psychological illness characterized by frequently eating excessive amounts of food, often when not hungry.

co-dependence: dysfunctional and maladaptive relationship reliant on another person’s dependence on the affected individual.

cynicism: an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self interest ( skepticism ), or to question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile ( pessimism ).

defensiveness: the tendency to be sensitive to comments and criticism and to deny them. to constantly protect oneself from criticism, exposure of one’s shortcomings, or other real or perceived threats to the go.

depersonalization: a state in which one’s thoughts and feelings seem unreal or not belonging to oneself.

depression: a mental health disorder characterized by persistently depressed mood or loss of interest in activities, causing significant impairment in daily life.

derealization: alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that it seems unreal.

devaluation: defense mechanism used when a person attributes themselves, an object, or another person as completely flawed, worthless, or as having exaggerated negative qualities.

displacement: an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new object or goals felt in their original form to be dangerous or unacceptable.

dissociation: is any state of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experiences, such as a disconnect from reality.

drug abuse: the extreme desire to obtain, and use, increasing amounts of one or more substances.

dysphoria: a state of unease, or generalized dissatisfaction with life.

emotional detachment: an inability to connect with others on an emotional level, as well as coping with anxiety by avoiding certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as “ emotional numbing ” or dissociation.

flashbacks: an involuntary recurrent memory, is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual has sudden, usually powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of said experience.

flat affect: a severe reduction in emotional expressiveness. they may not show the signs of normal emotion, perhaps may speak in a monotonous voice, have diminished facial expressions, and appear extremely apathetic.

guilt: a cognitive or emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes — accurately or not — that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated a universal moral standard and bear significant responsibility for it.

hallucinations: an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.

hypersomnia: or excessive sleepiness, is a condition in which a person has trouble staying awake during the day.

hypervigilance: an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect activity.

hypochondria: ( also known as illness anxiety disorder ) is a condition in which a person is inordinately worried about having a serious illness.

idealization: the action of regarding or representing something as perfect or better than reality.

insomnia: a sleep disorder where people have trouble sleeping. they may have difficulty falling asleep, or staying asleep as long as desired. insomnia is usually followed by daytime sleepiness, low energy, and a depressed mood.

intellectualization: a defense mechanism by which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress — where thinking is used to avoid feeling. it involves removing one’s self, emotionally, from a stressful event.

introjection: regarded as the process where the subject replicates in themselves behaviors, attributes, or other fragments of the surrounding world, especially of other subjects. cognate concepts include identification, incorporation, and internalization.

isolation: a defense mechanism in psychoanalytic theory characterized by individuals defending themselves from possible threats by mentally and physically isolating themselves. by minimizing associative connections with other thoughts, the threatening cognition is remembered less often and is less likely to affect self-esteem or the self concept.

low self esteem: a person with low self esteem feels unworthy, incapable, and incompetent.

narcissism: is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s own attributes. narcissistic personality disorder ( npd ) is a personality disorder in which there is a long term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of other’s feelings. ( sort of?? he doesn’t have NPD by any stretch of the imagination but he is a narcissist and it’d feel wrong not to bold this in some way. ) 

night terrors: also known as a sleep terror, is a sleep disorder, causing feelings of terror or dread, and typically occurs during the first hours of stage three to four rapid eye movement ( nrem ) sleep.

obsessive compulsion: obsessive-compulsive disorder ( ocd ) is a common, chromic, and long — lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts ( obsessions ) and behaviors ( compulsions ) that they feel the urge to repeat over and over.

panic attacks: a sudden overwhelming feeling of acute and debilitating anxiety.

passive aggression: a tendency to engage in indirect expression of hostility through acts such as subtle insults, sullen behavior, stubbornness, or a deliberate failure to accomplish a required task.

paranoia: the irrational and persistent feeling that people are “ out to get you. ” the three main types of paranoia include paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia.

phobias: an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.

projection: psychological projection is a defense mechanism people subconsciously employ in order to cope with difficult feelings or emotions. it involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings.

psychosis: a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.

rationalization: a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable — or even admirable and superior — by plausible means.

regression: a psychological defense mechanism in which a person abandons age — appropriate coping strategies in favor of earlier, more childlike patterns of behavior. this regression is a form of retreat, bringing back a time when the person feels safe and taken care of.

risky sex: risky sexual behavior is commonly defined as behavior that increases the probability of contracting sexually transmitted infections, diseases, becoming pregnant, or making a partner pregnant. drug use is associated with risky sexual behavior.

somatization: the manifestation of psychological distress by the presentation of bodily symptoms.

splitting: ( also called black — and — white thinking or all — or — nothing thinking ) is the failure in a person’s thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole.

sublimation: is a mature type of defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long — term conversion of the initial impulse.

suicidal ideation: ( also known as suicidal thoughts ) is thinking about or an unusual preoccupation with suicide. the range of suicidal ideation varies from fleeting thoughts, to extensive thoughts, to detailed planning, roleplaying, and incomplete attempts.

sleepwalking: formally known as somnambulism, is a behavior disorder that originates during deep sleep and results in walking or performing other complex behaviors while asleep. it is more common in children than adults and is more likely to occur if a person is sleep deprived.

suppression: the act of stopping oneself from thinking or feeling something. it is generally assumed ineffective because even if you suppress or hold back an emotion, like anger, that feeling returns with a vengeance.

thousand yard stare: a phrase often used to describe the blank, unfocused gaze of soldiers who have become emotionally detached from the horrors around them. it is also sometimes used more generally to describe the look of dissociation among victims of other types of trauma.

triggers: something that sets of a memory tape or flashback transporting the person back to the event of their emotional trauma. triggers are very personal ; different things can trigger different people. the survivor may begin to avoid situations and stimuli that they think triggered the flashback.

trust issues: a person with these kinds of thoughts may construct social barriers as a defense mechanism to ensure that trust is not lost again. these barriers are often a person’s way of avoid the pain, rejection, or guilt associated with mistrust.

violence: the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.

temper: a reflection of irritation or rage, a propensity to be angered rapidly.