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I've been talking about social hierarchy but since I'm talking essentially about closed group dynamics it's probably more accurate to call it interpersonal hierarchy. Since social can also mean societal

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If someone asks you a question, you shouldn't make them responsible for the answer *you* think they want. If someone asks you a question and you get angry because you assume they'll only accept one specific answer, that anger you feel is your own fault, not theirs. If what makes you assume they won't accept an honest answer is, specifically, that the person sounds unsure, scared, meek or anxious, then you're just being prejudiced in a very boring and wholly predictable way

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The people that behave the worst to the socially anxious are the people that used to have social anxiety and got over it. Personally I'd rather get worse than have my betterment come at someone else's expense. And if I ever happen to get better I swear I'll never stoop that low

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Not really liberating but maddening to learn that the consequences to my actions that my parents deemed apocalyptic were actually only slightly troubling to them, and not really something that would cause anybody to get arrested or fired or hanged at the public square

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I don't want to call this anti-intellectualism. I think it's very scary how one of the intended purposes of social media (especially the ones with a working algorithm) seems to be enabling people to reinforce each other's delusions. What scares me the most personally is not knowing if the people involved (the op, the commenter, the silent likers) indeed believe in this, or are just fucking around or purposefully trying to get numbers (or, in the case of the silent likers, purposefully gaslighting whom seem to be two crazy people to make them spiral and laugh at them)

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Most people have absolutely no fucking empathy for the way it affects you to survive an abusive relationship. Most people have absolutely no fucking empathy for what the symptoms of PTSD do to you.

I had to work various food service and retail jobs right after I escaped a violently physically abusive relationship, and that mixes together just about as well as having to work a strenuous physical labor job right after having both your arms broken. But it was my only option if I wanted to pay the bills and keep food on the table.

Of course customers would get aggressive and hostile with me, of course customers would scream while their faces were red with rage and slam their fists on the counter or even try to physically threaten me. And of course given my very fresh and very untreated PTSD I'd freeze and/or fawn and break down afterwards. Even just moderate aggression like a raised voice or a forceful attitude could send me into freeze/fawn because my brain had just spent years being taught that even something as moderate as a raised voice or a forceful attitude meant I was in physical danger if I didn't back down.

And when my co-workers would witness me freeze up in front of a screaming hostile customer the reaction would range from anywhere from annoyance at how pathetic that was of me to later bragging to me about how much better they would have handled that because they're so much tougher and more assertive than me and needed to preen about that. Instead of even bothering to think about why I might be reacting the way I was or trying to empathize they could only jump on the opportunity to judge me as weak to make themselves feel better about themselves.

Or a friend of mine who I distanced myself from after I saw how she reacted to her sister's behavior after leaving an abusive relationship. Her sister was of course afraid of her abuser and afraid of confronting him about custody matters, and my friend would always talk about how frustrated she was with her sister for being "so childish and such a scaredy cat". She knew her sister had just been abused, but all she could do was judge her sister for being "weak" and get mad at her sister for her "weakness".

I have spent years in therapy and have regained a lot of my confidence and assertiveness that I'd lost from the abuse. But it still stings in all sorts of ways when I think of how people reacted to my behavior after I'd just escaped the abuse. How everyone's, and I mean everyone's, reaction to seeing me freeze or fawn or break down when I encountered aggression or hostility was to judge me as weak instead of having any understanding at all, and this includes people who knew I was fresh out of an abusive relationship.

If someone had just broken their arm and couldn't carry anything with their freshly broken arm, any normal decent human being's reaction would be to understand why they couldn't carry anything with a freshly broken arm, and any normal decent human being wouldn't expect them to. It's widely understood that if you judged them as pathetic and weak for not being able to carry anything with a freshly broken arm, and if you started preening about how you're so much stronger and better than them because you can carry things with your unbroken arm, that this makes you a colossal fucking asshole and a generally bad person.

Imagine if we could actually approach mental/emotional injuries, like PTSD from a physically violent relationship, with the same understanding.

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It seems I'm not exempt from this

It seems there's a social norm to attribute feminized qualities to people you have distanced yourself from, most of all shallowness and irrationality

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What worries me about psychotherapy, especially in popular culture, and about the general language of wellness and healing, is that it can be very easily used to alienate people from their sense of agency and general ability to predict and solve problems. Let's say you have an irrational fear that you can't go to the grocery store because you're afraid every other customer will stone you to death because you don't have a right to be there. The goal of psychotherapy then would be to remind you that this fear is irrational, that the likelihood of that happening is essentially zero. Do it afraid. However, do it afraid as a thought-terminating mantra is so often used to terminate thoughts that actually need to be engaged with. Like, when you're afraid of something that is actually likely to have bad consequences for you, it's a bad idea to avoid thinking about it. The goal would be being able to think about it with a level of anxiety low enough to develop a strategy to minimize risk, assess alternatives, etc, not avoid the discomfort at all. You can't "do it afraid" the decision to change careers, to come out of the closet, to move to another country, to throw a rock at a cop... Jumping headfirst into danger doesn't work if the danger is real, even more so when it could also affect other people. But when you see people commenting in "do it afraid" type of posts, it seems that's precisely what they're advocating for, avoidance and impulsivity

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recently reading

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"Do it afraid" is advice that I'm surprised ever works for anybody because personally what I'm afraid of is that I'm making the wrong choice

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TikTok "Empaths" are Infuriating

Every person with a personality disorder or even just a visible mental condition needs to get an apology from all of these people individually, right now. How has this been made acceptable by society is beyond me, and people are rightfully calling out this person.

Imagine dehumanizing someone just because they "seem off" to you. Imagine saying that someone is not human, imagine saying that a person has no soul, imagine saying there is nothing behind a persons eyes...because they "feel weird" to you. Imagine describing someone as an almost cartoonish supervillain because they "don't seem right" to you.

They claim that they were describing an abusive person, not a mentally ill person. But why not just say that? Why hide behind the label of "empath" and speak of personality disorders this way, only to say "well no, this was just about one person." Just say that then?

People with personality disorders are not scary. They are mentally ill, not monsters. I will never be scared of a person just because they have a personality disorder, or because they have any mental condition, or because they're socially awkward or "don't seem right."

They are hiding their diagnosis from you for good reason if this is how we treat people with personality disorders. Treating people as less than human for having a severe mental disorder that developed from trauma and biological factors outside of their control is disgusting.

This is not how a healthy society talks about its people. This is not how good people talk about other people. This is not how anyone should be describing any population or group of people.

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It really does sometimes seem that psychologists treat avoidant people as possessing some kind of sin they have to atone for

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If you are a shy person, confident people will do their best attempts to erase your whole existence and replace it with their own. This is largely understood by everyone to be natural and okay. It's better for shy people to be self-serving and aggressive sometimes, to avoid being erased from reality

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We need to bring back the term “benevolent sexism” into widespread use for real. It’s a major mechanism in how bioessentialist Girlboss Radfems can be turned into bioessentialist conservative Tradwives.

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JAN TOOROP (Dutch, 1858–1928) Expulsion from Paradise, 1893

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It seems there's a social norm to attribute feminized qualities to people you have distanced yourself from, most of all shallowness and irrationality

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