#therapy < metaphors

[4ullbloom]

Y'all ever yearn for something so hard it makes you feel like a dog starving out on the streets? Like bro, if I'm not fed some scraps soon I will be gnawing at my own limbs.

[inkskinned]

something bad happened to you, and you died, and you came back wrong.

not wrong all the way. the little ways. you forget important dates, stopped going out with friends. it's harder to make you smile. you're apathetic towards things you used to love, afraid of places you used to go to cheer up. quieter. flinching. different.

you came back for love. you're still here for love. what pulled you back was a brightness so loud that even death couldn't outshout it. death heard the call and smiled at you and said okay. go home. somebody is waiting for you.

but you came back different. like lot's wife; you've turned into salt. you used to chirp through life in hops and skips; but now you lose skin just standing up. you have to move slower, skimming across this world without-touching-it. most things feel dull - until they're suddenly all-too-much. life, and being alive just rushes up and over you and you get hopelessly crushed.

you try to explain it to them: it is ugly, but this is what you are, now. the huge golden hoop of your halo now a little bronze ring. you are still watering your plants and wearing the same clothes. after all, you worked hard to come home. this life; so odd and off-color, now that you are wrong.

but they waited for you - it's just that they wanted the "you" that happened before this. the "you" that could sing in the show and hug people tight and look at a blade without breaking down to cry. the you with a smile in pictures. god, holyshit, it's like looking at a completely different person, isn't it. that other-you; the one they actually wanted.

you are the consolation prize. you are the body that forgot the ghost. you are the memory of the bad thing, and the death after; like you are wearing that memory as a banner. you are a fragment, an assembly. simulacrum. you don't make eye contact in mirrors, afraid the light will glance off and your true nature will flash back at you.

you hear them talk about it in their hushed, desperate whispers. sometimes they even admit it to your face; harsh and violent, acid thrown at christmas dinner. god, can you just fucking be normal again. you do not remember what normal is. you had to climb so far to get back here; you are far too exhausted. you want to open the glass door of your heart and show all the gears. can you help resolve whatever got messed up?

you try so, so hard. you came back for them. because you believed they would love you, even when you were so horribly broken. because you believed they would be patient. because you believed unconditional meant "without exception." you cannot do things the same way. you just get tired too quickly these days.

you want to put them on a couch and pour them the tea with hands that shake more than they remember. you want to line them up and draw them a map of where you have had to wander. you want to show every bruise in a backsplash; the little helpless ant of your soul carrying all that weight, over and over. you want to say: yes! it is different! but i did it for love!

you want to say: "i'm not the same, but i'm yours and i'm here. can that be enough?"

[tagerrkix]

back with my astarion bullshit again

[prompt-master]

I know that Haibara is a genuinely tragic character but also its so funny how often she sees something slightly tragic and goes "it's just like me fr"

[ineffable-suffering]

Trauma-Dumping on your plants: The Anthony J. Crowley Chronicles

This has been living in my silly head rent free for so long, I finally decided to slap it on here in hopes of thinking about it a little less (than three times a day. It's been years. I need to get over it.)

Also, I'm absolutely certain I'm not even remotely the first person to realize or post about this, since it's not the hardest of parallels to figure out. Alas, I still shall, because out of mind, out of sight and all that. So:

Let's talk about how Crowley is using his houseplants to work through his own Trauma of the Fall. Or, well, maybe not work through it per se, but more so roleplay it to give it somewhat of an an outlet because he never got over it. Lol.

It's not rocket science to figure it out and God Herself actually gives us a pretty spot-on explanation of it in her own narration.

Crowley's plants are perfect. They're, as God Herself tells us, the most luxurious and beautiful in all of London. He takes great care of them, waters them, mists them. Does any and everything to give them the perfect conditions so they won't have a worry in the world.

And yet, we're immediately shown that despite the seemingly perfect conditions they're living in, Crowley's plants still get *gasps quietly* spots. And we all know how Crowley feels about that:

It seems like such an unnecessary tiny thing to get upset about, right? Like, plants get spots all the time. They're not perfect, they're part of nature and nothing is ever perfect in nature. Crowley would know that by now. Imperfection is the whole point of nature. If everything had stayed exactly the way it always was, nothing would have ever changed or evolved.

Besides, Crowley is a demon. If it were merely about aesthetics to him, he could easily miracle away any spot with a blink of his serpent eyes. But he gets so angry about it, it's almost comical. At first we think it's just to show us, the audience, that, in contrast to Aziraphale, who cares very dearly and lovingly for his books, Crowley is a mean, mean demon who, instead of being outwardly nice to the things he loves (like Aziraphale does), yells at his plants because he's a mean meanie.

But! If you look at the whole scene and what God says, it's pretty obvious what he's actually doing is something else entirely: "What Crowley does is he puts the fear of God in them. Or, the fear of Crowley. The plants are the most luxurious and beautiful in London. Also the most scared."

Folks, this man dude serpent is literally roleplaying the concept of God/Heaven threatening angels with their Fall in order to keep them obedient ... with his houseplants.

Have I mentioned yet that I am absolutely obsessed with him and also desperately wanna get him a therapy voucher?

Because what does he do once he sees a plant disobeying his rules of perfection and acting out? The same thing God did to her questioning, equally disobedient angels (including Crowley): Parade it in front of the very scared rest, making an example of it ...

... only to then, well ...

... quite literally chuck it out.

To anyone else, this seems like a completely ridiculous thing to do over a tiny, minuscule spot. There would have been a bunch of other ways to go about fixing that spot.

Figuring out what it was the plant needed that might not have been given to it yet.

Taking care of it in a different, individual way so it would have been able to thrive again.

Listening to the plant and letting it tell you why its spot appeared in the first place.

Telling the plant, that loves and relies on you entirely, you love it too, despite it not being without fault, despite of it not fully living up to your unreachable standards of perfection.

Caring for the plant not because you want it to be perfect, but because you're okay with it being imperfect.

(We're no longer talking about plants here, as you are probably aware.)

Alas, this isn't what Crowley does. Because it wasn't what God did, either. We still know very little about Crowley's actual Fall and the Fall of Lucifer and the rest. But we do know that Crowley was never like or even with them.

All he did was ask some questions. A tiny spot. A seemingly insignificant blemish in the luxurious, beautiful flora of Heaven.

And yet, before he knew it, he did a "million lightyear freestyle dive into a boiling pool of sulfur". Cast out, chucked away, just like his little spotty plant. And for what? Well ...

... to keep the others angels plants check, for the rest of time.

***

(Addendum from the comments: If we go by what the book tells us, Crowley doesn’t actually end up violently throwing out the ‚bad‘ plants. He just finds a different place for them and makes sure they‘re looked after. So much to him being a big, bad, meanie-mean demon.)

[nerdy-hyperfixations]

I’m just imagining Bill putting in so much effort to try and find the “loophole” out of theraprism because he thinks it will get him out faster, but it actually would take more effort than if he just actually worked on himself lol.

He’s like that one guy who was too lazy to wash his hands, but he didn’t want people to know he didn’t wash his hands, so he turns on the water, put then is worried they’ll know because he didn’t use soap, so he pumps the soap into the sink, and then when he’s done he wipes his hands on the towel to mimic the sound of drying hands.

And when he’s done he realizes he just could’ve washed his hands at that point-

[lavernius]

Locus and Lopez vs. dehumanization and seeing your own humanity through someone else

AKA 1.5k words worth of me trying to justify a random pairing I've been trying to sell people on for 5 years. Feat. a lot of my own introspection on both characters, CW for mentions of abuse.

It's kind of easy to assume that Locpez as a ship only exists because Locus is one of the few people who understands Lopez and one of even fewer who has had an actual (off-screen) conversation with him with full mutual fluency, especially since they interact directly, like, twice in canon (Objects In Space and the "Holy shit he's bilingual" scene from The Federal Army of Chorus). To be honest, that was my initial reason for shoving them together whenever I got into RVB and there was literally no content for them because no one was really considering them together in any capacity but a brief, funny passing interaction.

I do think language is an inherent motivator in their relationship with each other. It's a catalyst. Spanish, of course, is perhaps the most obvious thing they share--Locus being a Latino man and Lopez being the same in a convoluted and meta-racist metaphor. Beggars, choosers: anyone who knows how I operate knows I lean into reclaiming their depictions for my own brown person machinations. For Lopez it's the beauty of meeting someone who not only understands him, but isn't going to belittle him for the language he speaks or imply it'd be easier if he learned English. Locus will just listen to him talk and respond without commenting on the language barrier; Lopez isn't exotic or abnormal or "broken" for it, he just speaks Spanish, big deal, Locus speaks it too.

For Locus, it leans more toward reminding him of who he used to be when he was a simpler and kinder person. His culture seems like a forgone part of himself in many ways, but even if only because he's so distant from his humanity that he doesn't remember HOW to embrace his culture, or what the point of cultural pride even is. Lopez is like, reverse culture shock for him, where Locus is very familiar with Spanish as a language--grew up with it, learned it young, whatever, he canonically understands it and given he's Latino it's easy to assume it could be his native language--but has divorced himself from it so much to be malleable to his abusers that hearing someone speak it so unabashedly feels new. It's the lack of it that makes it so foreign, but it's so ingrained into him that it's easy for him to just slip back into it.

And Lopez being so stubbornly proud of what he is plays into that language dynamic, yes--now that there's someone who will listen and not judge, he has room to be adamant and own his monolingualism, and having someone as aggressively, straightforwardly prideful as Lopez forces Locus to recognize the beauty in the language too--but it applies on a grander scale, which is what I suppose the point of this post is: Locus and Lopez don't just share Spanish, but also histories of abuse and dehumanization, of being overlooked as living, thinking things in favor of taking advantage of their skills. And the results of this abuse manifest differently in both of them, but they're alike in just enough ways that their differences stimulate each other into bettering themselves and reflecting on what makes them, dramatic pause, human.

Some of Lopez and Locus's defining personality traits to me are their shared low empathy (forcibly learned on both of their parts) and the way they feel so alien in any group they're a part of. They're people with a lot of potential who don't care how others see them (at their worst, especially in Locus's case), but are limited by someone who only sees them for their usefulness (Sarge, Felix) and doesn't truly see them as a person. Lopez may be a Red, but they don't really care about anything he says, so he's just a wrench to them. Locus has Felix, but he doesn't recognize that Felix has one-sided power over him and is keeping him on a short leash; he's a shield and a weapon. They're tools, they don't have feelings, and if they realize as much it's a fault in their programming, they can and have to be steered back into place.

They're reflective of each other in this way. However, they're not identical in disposition: Locus resigns very easily to what he's told to be. He had more hope once, made attempts to be humanitarian, but was swiftly taught that kindness is suicide and that the point is to survive, no matter the cost. It was easy for Felix to take advantage of him by saying they needed each other when Locus was at his worst, because having kindness ripped out of him gave Locus little else to rely on but his hands. Locus has no room for questions, because a rulebook is absolute. It takes a reminder of what he used to be to make him falter, but even when Santa is showing him one of the inciting incidents of his "soldier" mindset, Locus can't stop himself from resigning to the mindlessness that Felix and the UNSC have already taught him.

Lopez feels trapped and is hyper-aware of it. He'll listen, but only because there's nothing else in the world for him. He's subservient but not in the same way Locus is, because he's angry about his situation: he knows it's not fair, but what can he fucking do about it? He was made to be Red Team's mechanic, and every word he says falls on deaf ears. He carries this self-awareness like a shield, like a threat: he could do something, but there's no point because his nature as a robot defines him. All he has is a sharp tongue and his hands, and the Reds only need one of those things from him. He revels in being able to complain and reminds himself that he's meant for something greater, but he's so fatalistic that he won't take action.

The balance comes from this anger. They're so alike in how they see the world and how much life has mistreated them, but they don't fully understand each other despite it. Locus sees Lopez as privileged for having a team because Locus has never had people to belong with, but he doesn't understand that Red Team isn't a safe place for Lopez. Lopez thinks Locus is misguided for letting himself believe he could ever be reduced to a mindless weapon, because Lopez has only ever been an object and Locus can't comprehend what that's really like. They see each other for their imperfections first and foremost and it frustrates them mutually: "You could've fixed this sooner, you could've escaped the grief, why didn't you try?"

It's this back-and-forth that they both need in order to reflect on themselves. They're harsh people who don't want to be coddled and admonished, but they're not making forward motion on their own because they're both stubborn and tend to decathect before they even recognize they CAN feel. They refuse to see themselves as human, but they can only see the humanity in each other, and they're both so alike that it could make them hypocrites. For a robot, Lopez's anger is so potent that it's alive: Locus sees more feeling in him than he's ever felt in his own life. Locus wants to be a weapon so bad, but he doesn't realize an object doesn't have heart the way he does, doesn't mourn the years it spent under someone's thumb, doesn't want to fix itself.

They're both brutally honest and they both need brutal honesty. They get along WELL by nature of being as similar as they are, but they argue so much because they want to understand each other and don't realize they already do. They're mapping details of their reflections. It's great: Locus is so hurt that he can only see the damage he causes, Lopez is difficult to hurt and notoriously good at fixing things. Lopez wants true accountability and retribution and Locus has cultivated complicity and guilt to perfection.

After Felix, Locus needs room to command his own life and put others in place when they overstep his boundaries, but he's scared of becoming Felix, so he also needs an anchor to keep him grounded in reality and reasonable. Lopez has never had real control over his own life before and would kill to have the power to make small choices and do as he wants, but he's a very private person who also needs a lot of space to work. They balance each other out and know the other's limits so well that they can easily go "You're hurting yourself and I'm not going to let you get away with it."

It's about understanding yourself through someone else and vice versa. Realizing that you share so much that if they deserve good, you do too. Reclaiming pain, experiencing freedom, finding support. They will deconstruct each other to the metal and muscles and rebuild one another over and over again, and they'll never get it perfectly right, but they're both going to learn more and more as they go. Flawless navigation of a road you've driven a million times, forward and back, potholes and all.

[blonde-and-cat-suc]

Catra being anxious and having panic attacks over the bad things she did is actually counter productive to any hypothetical scenario where she is self reflecting and/or receiving constructive criticism.

Her potentially having crippling anxiety over being an asshole in the past PREVENTS and/or DELAYS any changes she might potentially make.

Making this character spiral over moral dilemmas does not inherently mean she’s actively working to change her ways. Her being afraid of facing her badness does not make her good; it simply means she has anxieties toward constructive criticism/dialogue.

[quietwingsinthesky]

my therapist: you sure seem to be coming back a lot to the way that the timeless child episode skimmed over the doctor being killed over and over again to use them. is there something we need to talk about here.

me: no im normal.

me: but do you think anyone even noticed them changing each time or do you think they did and kept quiet about it because the work being done was too great to lose to protect the timeless child from being used.

my therapist: 🤨

[tangledinink]

therapy was great today, we agreed that i have two wolves inside of me. one is a little goblin child eating dog kibble off the floor and the other wolf is my therapist.

[androdragynous]

personally I don't believe in half assing things. I don't think it's something possible to do. It's always whole assed! it's always the best you can do in that moment in that situation. just sometimes that ass has less energy / time / etc and can't do as much. But it's still the whole ass

[yuridotcom]

the wednesday show??? oh mein gott??? it was so good??? the plot twist was amazing and I can almost forgive the shitty love triangle between wednesday and the 2 boys because of it

ALSO THAT WENCLAIR HUG?? WOAH?? SHIT WAS MORE ROMANTIC THEN ANY KISS/ALMOST KISS

[wkngsnds]

Thor: let me see the real you, the god of war

Kratos: brother I cannot begin to explain to you why that is the worst idea in existence

[shiranaia]

Keep out. 🐅

[littlefankingdom]

~ Batman (2016)

"It's not funny. It's the choice of a boy. The choice to die. I am Batman. I am Suicide."

[anonymous-tals]

An interesting thing I noticed is that Gob and Buster both have unintentionally boundary crossing gestures; Gob’s hugs(as well as other things but I’m not going to list every single thing separately) and Buster’s back massages. Their actions are intended to be nice, comforting, relaxing but, to others, it comes off as over the top or weird or off putting.

I don’t really have much more to say on the subject but I just found it notable. Finding similarities between Buster and any of the siblings is always notable because of how Buster tends to be separate from the rest of the crowd. I’ll be thinking about the characters and I’ll be like, “Oh, this applies to all the siblings…Except Buster.” It’s especially notable with Gob because of how, on a surface level viewing, different Gob and Buster are. They were both on the opposite sides of the spectrum when it came to getting love from their parents. Gob got none and Buster got, like, so much(or, “so much” since it wasn’t really love; or, at least, it wasn’t healthy love). Gob was neglected while Buster was overprotected.

Lindsay and Michael try to separate themselves front the family. They want to think they’re better than it; Michael taking care of everything and putting family first and Lindsay hosting charity events. Gob and Buster want to be in the family, though. They want to be protected by their parents, loved by their parents. Gob, in as much denial as he is in, is definitely more aware of how bad their parents are than Buster is but they both go along with (or try to go along with in Gob’s case) what will get them love from their respective parent-they-want-the-approval-/-love-of. And we see that, when the attention is shifted from Buster to Annyong, Buster gets mad and upset and fights for attention and has petty rivalries just as Gob does with Michael.

I think one of the reasons Buster stays with Lucille and on her side, other than believing it’s the only way he’ll be safe from the “dangers of the world” is that it’s the only way he’ll be safe from the dangers of his parents. He is shown to recognize that his siblings don’t like their mom and he just sort of respectfully is like, “I get it but I like mom so I’m going to stay with her.” So, it’s not like he doesn’t know that his mom does bad things. I think that he sees that, for whatever reason, he got special treatment. He was treated differently. He was treated better. And, even if in some ways he may find himself dissatisfied or held back, this is the only life he knows(which is the case for all of the siblings, just in different ways) and he doesn’t want to risk losing what good things he does have. And, as I said, with Annyong, he sees him as a threat to his happiness, to his safety, and he fights against him to keep it.

And, as I said, it’s a similar thing with Gob. He was neglected his entire life and had to fight for attention in an ever-losing battle. And, if he did get attention, it wasn’t good attention. For him, though, he sees what his siblings have. His main rival is Michael, of course, but, there’s also what I feel is a bitterness he has towards Buster, which is why he is shown teasing him a lot(other than, ya know, that being typical oldest sibling stuff). It’s not shown too much, as Buster isn’t a threat to him but it is something that probably affects him. Buster is just as incompetent as he is and yet he is loved. He is cared for. Gob wants to be to their dad what Buster is to their mom. Of course, he’s going for the positions, roles and status that Michael has but Michael doesn’t necessarily like his dad. He cares for his dad but he has qualms. Gob is trying to play into things that will get his dad’s approval. He is following whatever his dad tells him to do. He wants the “love” that Buster gets. He’s willing to compromise his own happiness and wellbeing for his dad and, anything he does or feels that goes against what his dad would approve of, he pushes down and hides. Buster would rather stay with their mom than find his own independence. Gob would rather stay with their dad than find his own independence.

Their main differences come from the fact that Buster was given that love and Gob wasn’t. There’s also what was expected of them. Gob was expected to be a functional person and a business man who marries a women/sleeps with a lot of women and Buster was expected to be a well behaved little boy all his life who did whatever his mom said. For Buster, that didn’t really take him out of his comfort zone so, while it probably isn’t very fulfilling, it was at least safe. He was stuck within a warm room on a boat while Gob was drowning in the waves. Desperately trying to get his dad’s attention so he’ll let him onto his boat, he does more and more things, all of which just exhaust him and lead him closer and closer to succumbing to the rough seas. Neither situation is good. Buster was hidden away, never exposed to the elements and Gob was always exposed to them, struggling to survive. This just leaves them both unable to handle the waves, becoming overwhelmed and ceasing functionality at even just the slightest ripple in the water.