#the language of body that speaks love

[nilabhehehe]

Ever thought someone could love you so much that the warm blood in your veins feels like their cold touch, you start getting goosebumps you feel cold inside but outside you're warm, but you just want to freeze in that warmness of that person, just the way when you look at the cold moon they look at your warm eyes and freeze there.

And that's how I love you.

[artlesscomedic]

AHAHAHAHAHAHA

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I was talking to a client today about "how to identify masking" as part of the process of learning how to shift masking from a reflexive coping strategy to a voluntary and conscious one and I feel like it led to a really important shift in framework FOR ME about masking and social distress.

Paraphrasing, the ideas we came to are as follows:

One of the reasons masking can be so difficult to recognize is because, essentially, masking is the act of performing "yourself" as a mirror for the other person you are interacting with. It's this idea of "I will micro-manage my own mood, affect, behavior, mannerisms, and environment in order to reflect back to you whatever version of "self" you need from me because if I don't there will be consequences". So because masking is essentially performing "mirroring" as selfhood by amplifying or minimizing aspects of yourself based on what you think the other person wants to see in you, it varies significantly from one context to another. The major commonality is that it takes up an INCREDIBLE amount of energy, mental and emotional resources, cognitive processing power, etc. So you don't identify masking by specific behaviors so much as by the feeling of "having a significant amount of your mental/emotional resources be occupied by the act of social interaction" to the point that it doesn't leave enough left-over for other cognitive tasks, or leaves you feeling exhausted and worn out, or basically by the impact that masking has on you during and after.

In this framework, part of why we get so anxious about new or unfamiliar people or situations is because we don't know how to mask in that context yet, and so until we get there and figure it out, we're basically just terrified of what could go wrong since we don't know what we're walking into.*

*This is the underlying framework of anticipatory and obsessive anxiety as well. Anticipatory and obsessive anxiety functions as the mechanism by which we conduct both predictive reasoning-basd advance planning and review/self-correctionof our mental predictive model.

Autistic aversion to uncertainty has a lot to do with our need to be able to use predictive reasoning-based advance planning to cope with "social deficits" aka how much harder it is for us to interpret subtextual/nonverbal cues, learn/meet social expectations, and work through/around disordered sensory processing. That predictive reasoning requires us to be familiar, in advance, with the stable constant factors that influence decision making in social contexts. If we aren't familiar with the constant variables than we can't plan, if we can't plan than we are more likely to make noticeable social mis-steps, and if we take notable social mis-steps there are consequences. It becomes necessary for us to be hypervigilent to observable patterns in other people's behavior in order to try to reverse engineer the social interaction playbook on the fly. That ends up making us more likely to assume personal responsibility for predicting and managing the emotional regulatory needs of people around us at all costs, replicating the behavioral/cognitive impacts of chronic traumatic stress due to the activation of our sympathetic nervous system from chronic hypervigilence.

Essentially, masking is a cognitive defense mechanism to severe and/or persistant traumatic interpersonal stressors. As the neurological impacts of chronic traumatic stress heal, we mask less frequently. But in order to heal from chronic traumatic stress, the human brain requires a safe environment that does not trigger a retraumatization episode or replicate feelings of helplessness/fear for safety. In other words, reducing/terminating masking safely requires us as autistic people to have consistent access to social environments in which we are able to utilize autistic interpersonal boundaries without fear of consequence or chonically unmet need. This requires the people around us to be able to respect not only autistic interpersonal boundaries, but also autistic self-expression/advocacy modalities and mediums.

I feel like a lot of the pieces of this framework have been rattling around in my head for a while but the flavor of words hit just right today and all the connections snapped into place.

Anyway, I'm still sort of sorting through the clinical implications of this framework but I think it's a direction I want to keep exploring for sure.

[fidgetspringer-art]

Olath - Aberrant familiar

[user1286]

In inspiration from those shorts that one SuperXavier fellow has of Kratos, and the original audio belonging to @/TrevohnnTheTitan he made the original audios of those.

(Mostly bc I thought it’d be funny to draw the expressions I imagined kratos having in them bc fuck it why not)

He’s so fucking silly.

[spacedlexi]

Do you like Vi and Clem as best friends as well? Or just as lovers? (Also, I love your art)

im assuming youre asking if im fine with either friendship or romance route, which i am!! at the very base of their relationship they are best friends regardless, its just whether or not they kiss about it (and i just think they do 😏)

either way s4 is about building a home and a family. you get to choose what that looks like :) so while i definitely go to bat for romanced vi, i can understand some people not being interested in that element and choosing to be friends instead. either way theyre partners. and vi still makes clem a gay little button about it 😭💕

(and thank you!!)

[sysig]

Incomplete exchange (Patreon)

[sciralta]

There’s something that’s been bugging me for ages about Marcelino and I could never quite grasp it until right now in this chapter when he quoted Ursula’s “and don’t underestimate the importance of body language” line from poor unfortunate souls.

I fully believe that Marcelino was originally written as a Gay Best Friend™. I have never seen a single adult man not only quote Ursula but the body language line who wasn’t a dogged homosexual. And when you realise that, literally everything else about his character comes neatly into perspective as the GBF™ stereotype. My theory is that someone in PB offices took a look at his character and was like “isn’t that a little reductive? aren’t we past this?” so the writing team changed his sexuality and slapped in a pregnant wife character as their way of fixing the problem.

[vampiromano]

frankly human meat is probably the only meat I'd eat. it's the only meat that can be consensually given up in a way i understand and also the only meat I wouldn't feel disgusted about eating w/o consent and violently if I disliked the person enough. I mean cmon would you say no to dead president meat. to dead policeman meat. it'd be like the final humiliation for them. it'd be great

[francesderwent]

sometimes the tumblr therapy-speak crowd makes it seem like in a real-life healthy relationship, you can never, ever expect anyone to anticipate your needs because that would require them to read your mind and people can’t do that, so you’ll have to talk explicitly about every single issue every single time for the rest of your life. and I don’t know, I just don’t think that’s true.

[fubbytime]

new friend!

All things considered, they arrived in better condition than i thought and faster (Canada to U.S.A. shipping)(why did they go from one side of canada to the other to the side of the us farthest from me. to me. was there nothing closer?) So far just some battery box corrosion, also i nicknamed them "mr grumpy and stinky fub senior" due to having an issue with one side of their mouth not closing, having a birthday of Jan 4th, 1999 (almost 25!), and coming with a peculiar smell I'm pretty sure is coming from the motor. Currently this little guy is getting a nice, long bath (the 3rd bath)(VERY stinky n still dirty) and I'm working on getting the corrosion out (so far my isopropyl alcohol isn't helping much). Very excited to do the naming and gender reveal ritual once I fix the battery box! I almost hesitated to share them so early since they need to be in their best condition for the ritual and i KNOW i can get them working. Also doing a push start just in case so I'll know for a fact what's wrong when the batteries go in. Wanna be on the safe side and troubleshoot to prevent. SO excited cannot wait to see what I can do for them.

[ice-sculptures]

like ripping off a band-aid

[jimtheviking]

A thought on losing my mother tongue:

So, as some of you may be aware, I was raised speaking (or at least hearing) three languages: English, Calabrese Italian, and Canadese. Canadese being a pidgin of English and Calabrese that is found mainly in the Golden Horseshoe area of southern Ontario, Canada (basically from Hamilton to Niagara Falls.) It's neat, and it's dying out because people of my Nonna's generation and my mom and uncles' generation are, well, dying out.

Anyway, it's not something I use outside of the family, because few people understand it, and it's getting to the point where I'm forgetting words for things that I would use, because my dad doesn't speak it and doesn't like it when my mom uses it - and she's the only regular contact I have who does speak it.

It's just weird, feeling certain things that I grew up knowing as one thing getting morphed into other things because I don't have people to speak the language with. It kinda makes me sad.

Anyway, back to reblogging stuff and whatnot. Just wanted to get that out there.

[feralthembo]

i dont like that post thats like. "you need to be able to put humanizing words on your symptoms so people can relate to you" or whatever its like. no motherfucker. nobody relates when i tell them walking too far makes me feel like i have bugs in my skin so why shouldnt i say post exhertion malaise and tachycardia? why shouldnt i have words to define what im going through?????? why does me medicalizing my symptoms hurt you? im not going around and advocating everyone talk like me about their symptoms >.>;;

[angsty-doodler]

watching tdp season 6 and this might b an unpopular opinion but soren and corvus are like found family to me

[bumpscosity]

also while i was at the zoo i saw these weird Beasts called chacoan peccaries and apparently when they were first discovered in the 1930s they just found fossils and thought they were extinct until they finally found living ones in the 70s. they look like what a kids drawing of a wild hog would look like and i like them very much. they aren't even pigs.