#trauma aware

[moonlit-positivity]

Art therapy/ visualization for creating your very own "safe space":

- draw a box around your heart. How big is the box, and what would you put inside it? How does it feel inside the box? Is it warm? Happy? Cold? Silent? What colors and aesthetics would you give your box?

- is there anything "good" in your box? What colors & feelings do they give you? How do these things make you feel about yourself? Do you enjoy them? Or do they make you "cringe"?

- is there anything "bad" in the box? What are they connected to in your life, either present day or past? What colors would you give this feeling? How does this affect the overall feel of your box?

- is there anything "controversial" in your box? Anything that makes you worry but you're not sure what to do about it? Or things that make you feel like you can't be your true self because of how others feel or what others have told you? How big are these things compared to the others? How much space do they take up in your box? What colors would you give them?

- how full is your box? Is there any empty space, or is it full to the brim? Whats it full of most, "good" things, "bad" things, "controversial" things? How does this make you feel?

- is your box in good condition, or are there any breaks or tears in it? Is it falling apart? Is it big enough to hold all of these things? what kinds of things threaten to tear or break your box? What & who are these breaks connected to in your life? Can you think of any ways to fortify your box and make it stronger? Duct tape? Super glue? Do you bother to fix it, or do you leave it broken?

- what sorts of things would your box have in it if it was a brand new, never-been-opened-before box? Childhood innocence? A good, happy home? Peace of mind? Financial stability?

- how do you feel about your box and whats in it? Do you protect it? Do you smash it? Does it make you feel "weird" or "cringe"? Can you think of any ways to hold these parts of you in softer and kinder ways?

- how do you want your box to be handled by others? Is there anyone you'd trust to show your box to? And who has access to it now, and how do they handle it? Do they help you patch the holes? Or do they make new holes for you to fix by yourself?

- which version of yourself do you trust with your box more- your past self, your current self, or your future self? Are there any words you'd like to give that version of you at sendoff?

- give yourself a big giant hug if you are comfortable with doing so. Your box is a very precious item, and you deserve to spend time mending the holes and fortifying that space for a better day ❤️‍🩹

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

Hope this helps ❤️‍🩹

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

[starfishinthedistance]

I talk to many people who say things like "oh I have trauma but I don't have PTSD", but then when I talk to them a little more I realize that they most likely do, they just can't recognize it as such due to how lacking PTSD awareness is, even beyond the whole "it's not just a veteran's disorder" thing.

The main reason they think they don't have PTSD usually has to do with flashbacks and nightmares, either they have one but not the other or have neither. But here's the thing, those are only two symptoms out of the 23-odd recognized symptoms. Flashbacks and nightmares are two of the five symptoms under Criterion B (Intrusion), which you only need one of for a diagnosis. The other three symptoms are unwanted upsetting memories, emotional distress after being reminded of trauma and physical reactivity after being reminded of trauma (i.e. shaking, sweating, heart racing, feeling sick, nauseous or faint, etc). Therefore you can have both flashbacks and nightmares, one but not the other, or neither and still have PTSD.

In fact, a lot of the reasons people give me for why they don't think they have PTSD are literally a part of the diagnostic criteria.

"Oh, I can barely remember most parts of my trauma anyway." Criterion D (Negative Alterations in Cognition and Mood) includes inability to recall key features of the trauma.

"Oh but I don't get upset about my trauma that often because I avoid thinking of it or being around things that remind me of it most of the time." Criterion C (Avoidance) includes avoiding trauma-related thoughts or feelings and avoiding trauma-related external reminders, and you literally cannot get diagnosed if you don't have at least one of those two symptoms.

"Oh I just have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, but I don't have nightmares." Criterion E (Alterations in Arousal and Reactivity) includes difficulting sleeping outside of nightmares.

"But I didn't have many/any trauma symptoms until a long time after the trauma happened." There's literally an entire specification for that.

Really it just shows how despite being one of the most well-known mental illnesses, people really don't know much about PTSD. If you have trauma, I ask you to at least look at the criteria before you decide you don't have PTSD. Hell, even if you don't have trauma, look at the criteria anyway because there are so many symptoms in there that just are not talked about.

PTSD awareness is not just about flashbacks and nightmares.

[ed-recoverry]

To anyone who was suicidal at age 14 or younger, here’s your permission to grieve. Here’s your permission to not joke about it or just flat out ignore it. Here’s your permission to acknowledge that lost child who felt way more pain than any child should ever feel. You’re allowed to cry for that child, whether you healed or are still suffering the same thoughts. Finally allow yourself to grieve for that child filled with undeserved hurt.

[inkskinned]

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.

[borderlineangel222]

it’s unfair how i have the responsibility to heal myself when i didn’t cause my wound in the first place

[twinstxrs]

so much happened in this whole episode but i’m still on fig infiltrating ruben’s dream, making it look like the place where his friend was murdered, and then disguising herself as kipperlilly & repeatedly saying different variants of “somebody needs to take the fall for this, and it’s not going to be me. it’s going to be you.” while adaine as the elven oracle shows up next to her. can you imagine waking up from that, the idea of a horrible truth being pinned on you by your friend to save her own skin while the personification of fate and destiny stands there, almost as a promise that this is GOING to happen to you. we don’t even know if this kid is guilty. my god.

[little-tiffany]

Don't sabotage your future peace because familiar chaos is comfortable.

[pink-devolve]

If you’re a domestic violence survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re an SA survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a CSA survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re an ECSA survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a child abuse survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a neglect survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a war survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a natural disaster survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a gun violence survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a cult survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re an organized abuse survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a torture survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a TTI survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a physical abuse survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a mental abuse survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

[classycookiexo]

[queerexpressions]

“that he’d been vindicated somehow”

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Autistic trauma: School Edition

Hiding in the bathroom

Feel like social outcast

Constant self monitoring

Know you are not liked but not sure why

Bullied

Hyper vigilant

Lonely

Crying at home

Last pick for games

No real friends

Not invited to parties

Littlepuddins.ie

[moonlit-positivity]

There is such a cold, raw anger that can come from being abused as a kid and then leaving that shit behind one day to inevitably learn that the entire reason you're supposed to be alive is to do exactly the opposite of how they brainwashed you to be as a child. What the fuck you mean I have thoughts and feelings??? And now I gotta talk about them??? Were you not there when they smacked my lips as a kid and told me to shut the fuck up anytime I opened my mouth to speak??? Were you not there when I had to hide myself away time and time again because I said and did something that went against the Standard Child NPC dialogue and that made them mad at me for basically existing out of the realm they expected of me and they beat my ass for that????? Like, what the fuck do you mean the solution to all my problems is to talk about it???? Out loud???? Where other people can hear me???? Like fuck, that shit is like ripping your skin off inch by inch. And I dont know what's worse, the fact that it's not gonna move unless you acknowledge and talk about it, or the fact that everyone else in society already knows how to do shit like that and is leagues ahead of you, because theyre off expecting you to be a "normal functioning adult" by this time in your life and well well well would you know it?? No, I'm actually NOT functioning, I'm actually anything BUT FUNCTIONAL!!! I'm still stuck in my childhood when my mother would beat my ass just for breathing the wrong way!! How TF are we expected to know and understand that without experiencing the gut wrenching pain and reality that we were fucking abused as children??? Other kids were off playing and laughing and having a blast, meanwhile we were getting beat and yelled at on a daily basis and told to shut up and stop crying about it. How TF do you talk about that???

[divinerapturesys]

Welcome to my Ted Talk about AsPD, or Antisocial Personality Disorder, which the internet likes to coin as sociopath 👌🏻 if you don’t like long infodumps about stigmatized mental disorders from someone who is diagnosed, move on.

Quick toxic rundown: People with AsPD are generally characterized as emotionless, violent, manipulative abusers who kill animals and like to make other people their bitches. The biggest pet peeve we have is the emotionless, sadistic and abusive generalization.

Personally, we are highly neurotic, with highs and lows of: depression, frantic drive, self abuse tactics, chronic fear, lapses of rejection, overwhelming over-analyzation, grey area thinking, false goods and false bads, ultimatums, obsessive compulsive behavior, harsh self demands, and irritability.

AsPD is a disorder that is caused primarily (according to current research) by trauma and abuse in childhood; most notably being emotional neglect and absent caregivers that cause a child to have emotional shutdowns and repression episodes in an attempt to self soothe. Primary caregivers who do not bond with their children are also a factor. Children learn how to behave from those around them. If a primary caregiver is emotionally distant and unavailable, children will learn that is normal behavior and that’s how people are. If a primary caregiver does not provide empathy and sympathy during moments of distress and fear, children will learn that aloofness and disregard of others feelings is normal behavior. If a primary caregiver does not keep a child safe, children will learn that they should not prioritize their own safety or the safety of others. You can find my follow up post regarding this here.

Neglected and abused children often act out trying to get attention and help, often acting out in bad ways because they lack the ability to articulate what they’re feeling and what is happening to them. The pipeline for AsPD typically is: Oppositional Defiance Disorder as a child, Conduct Disorder as a teen, AsPD as an adult. There are a lot of warning signs cueing that AsPD is becoming a risk for development, but often kids do not have a support system to help negate it as it’s their support system that is usually a factor in its creation.

Being AsPD is like being an emotional La Croix 70% of the time. If you’re depressed, then it’s like someone in the other room has depression and is telling you about it. The other 30% of the time, if you’re depressed, your brain doesn’t understand how to handle it so it’s an ultimatum between doing something drastic to remove the Trigger or ignoring and dissociating for days on end.

People with AsPD are very good at ignoring things. Honestly it’s problematic as fuck but it’s not hard to ignore major issues when you just, don’t care. It’s not in the terms of being cruel or making ourselves not care, but the fact that finding the emotional willpower is so far out of our feasible reach we don’t do it. This causes us to piss people off because we don’t have the capacity to care as much as they want us to, even if we can and do to an extent.

Think of it this way: empathy/sympathy is a deep tub of water that everyone has. They can easily fill their measuring cup for the needed amount of empathy without any issues and it’s easy for them. People with AsPD don’t have a tub of water. We have shallow skillet. When we try to dip our cup to fill it, we can’t, it always comes up short and it is difficult to get any water in it as there is no room for the cup to dive. Our ability to care is limited because we do not have the same emotional resources everyone else does.

❌ False Positives & False Negatives ❌

I operate on what I’ve learned are called false positives and false negatives. These are things that are trained into the brain from an early age based off of childhood trauma and other factors. False positives are a distorted version of why we do something to help ourself and for our own good, meanwhile a false negative is something we do because it’s a threat, or based out of fear.

❌ Some of my false positives:

- It is good to be afraid of nothing

- It is good to adapt to someone’s personality if they are stronger than you

- It is good to isolate yourself

- It is good to be a silver tongue because you can get into any place you want

- It is good to become a social chameleon and shape yourself to whatever those around you need/want most, because then you have no chance of being abandoned

❌ Some of my false negatives, which can explain the false positives as well as core beliefs:

- it is bad to be afraid, if I am afraid then I am vulnerable and it can be used against me

- It is bad to be emotional or show concern for others emotions because they do not care for mine

- It is bad to be able to be exploited, because I believe it is everywhere

- It is bad to allow myself to be bored, because boredom begets bad thoughts and no one can or wants to help me when I spiral

- It is bad to not shape yourself to the social circle, because people quickly grow tired of those who do not match them perfectly and being discarded means I failed

My core beliefs can be viewed as the root for the false positives and negatives, because they are based on the core of trauma, abuse and neglect. They come from patterns and instances that make someone with AsPD become the opposite of what they experienced:

- eat or be eaten

- If I don’t show that my bite is worse than my bark, I will be taken advantage of and I must remain on top because the ones on top are safe

- I must look out for myself because nobody will do it for me

- It doesn’t matter what happens to me, therefore it doesn’t matter what people think of me

- If I cannot do something well, then I should not do it at all

- If you are dependent on others for emotional and mental well being, you are weak, therefore I must isolate myself to avoid becoming codependent and a burden and useless

- If I can handle the stress of a situation better than everyone else, therefore I will keep the problem (financial, emotional, mental, etc) to myself to reduce chances of being abandoned due to failure of perfection

People with AsPD are hard to get along with. We often:

- are always anticipating a fight

- lack respect for authority

- ignore social structures to an extent

- tendency to lie if it’ll lessen punishment or if we feel the lie is more acceptable than our actions

- limit social support because it’s wrong to be dependent on others

- have an inflated view of our own importance — which turns into a self ridicule for believing someome like me could be found important to others —

- can be rude and inconsiderate of others feelings somewhat unintentionally

- are unable to read the correct social cues in relation to empathy towards people and animals

- am constantly confused by others dependence upon empathy and inability to make desicions from logic based standpoints

We can’t speak for everyone who has AsPD, nor are we saying that no one with AsPD is capable of being a murderer/abuser etc. but we are saying that y’all need to stop automatically classifying someone as a certain “type” as soon as you know about their disorder.

One last thing I do want to point out is that it is not uncommon for people with AsPD to derive some sort of enjoyment in causing harm, doing something illegal, hurting someone or animals, etc. This entirely stems from lack of environmental control as a child. Being able to control what happens to others or being able to control the things you say or do that hurts someone else is a hefty high to get addicted to; it soothes the underlying itch of not being able to control your own trauma and abuse, so in turn you push these behaviors onto others and enjoy it because it gives you a sense of power and control. Some people with AsPD do genuinely love hurting others, and some enjoy hurting others when they believe it’s deserved or their ire has been stoked. Some enjoy causing pain to those they think deserve it, and others don’t care who they hurt as long as they feel like they’re in control of the situation.

Hope this have some insight into AsPD 🤙🏻 if y’all have any questions, shoot.

[mayasaura]

Harrow got so unbelievablely horny dreaming about Gideon's rolled up sleeves exposing her lean, taut muscle, a little dewy with sweat and steam but you know what.... thinking about it. Gideon does not disrobe basically ever, except in private to bathe. A tantalizing glimpse of forearm may legitimately be the most Harrow's imagination has to work with

[psychocitysblog]

Why does being alive have to be so hard?

[chronicallyonlinesworld]