i hate when the teacher’s like “write about a bad time in your life” like i ain’t tryna get a social worker up my ass, thanks tho fam
This ain’t no joke I had to write a essay about what your scared of so I did it (I was scared of growing up and where my life was going) it was great got a 100 but then I got sent to councilors office and was sent to therapy cause they thought I was suicidal and on the verge of breaking…Apparently they ment like spiders or some shit…
Also like, not everyone finds that at all useful or cathartic.
“Write about some difficulty you’ve experienced personally.” “Aight fam let me just break down into tears and skip the rest of my classes.”
Yes! I had a psych professor ask us to discuss outloud the hardest thing that ever happened to us literally two days ago and I said “you realize the position you’re putting us in? I feel obligated to lie to not only save my peers the awkwardness but also because I will find no relief in answering honestly but rather anxiety. The hardest thing in my life is having people repeatedly tell me I should find some sort of catharsis in reliving my trauma so someone else can feel pity for me!”
The whole class backed me up because they didn’t want to either! Those kind of exercises are only helpful for people who don’t have any real past/current issues– which is no one btw.
On par with this are those fucking self-assessments where they want to to be optimistic and positive about the future. You’re sitting there drowning in college stress and anxiety so bad you can’t look another human in the eye, fighting depression so that you can eventually achieve a piece of paper that might get you a better job if the economy doesn’t tank itself (guess what, it did), and the most optimistic thing you can think of is that the class ends in 20 minutes.
There’s a WIRED article that explains the history behind this practice.
Basically, this guy named Jeffrey Mitchell had a traumatic experience, then after months of PTSD, he told a confidant about the event that traumatized him. Retelling the event to a confidant was so cathartic for Mitchell that his PTSD went away after. He did a bunch of research to see if his personal experience of catharsis and relief could be replicated in other people suffering from PTSD. Years later he published a paper proposing a formalized psychiatric treatment revolving around this idea that expressing a traumatic experience helps relieve it. The paper was so influential that the whole psychiatric community adopted “critical incident stress debriefing” (CISD) as a standard treatment for PTSD.
Unfortunately … it’s bullshit.
Not only does the CISD treatment program Mitchell came up with not help the majority of patients who try it, but it actually makes PTSD worse in the majority of patients who try it.
The WIRED article explains why:
CISD misapprehends how memory works…. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.
None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant.
…the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge.
Basically, Mitchell waited until he had some emotional distance before trying to recall the memory, and he had full control of the situation. It was fully his decision. Nobody was pressuring him to talk about it. So he felt safe. Thinking about the memory from a place of safety allowed his brain to re-contextualize the memory as harmless.
Conversely, pressuring a patient to recall a traumatic memory, particularly when it’s still fresh in their minds, makes the patient feel very unsafe. Recalling a bad memory in this unsafe context only serves to re-traumatize the patient.
One of my pet peeves lately has been the meme going around facebook, that “Western culture” (here meaning, presumably, European literature + modern democracy + the scientific method) in its current form has to be entirely thrown out, and that we need to look into strategies for organizing society that come from colonized countries. I’m seeing a lot of the idea that the whole world was peaceful and good until white people came along.
This is so irritating to me precisely because I used to believe something like this, and then I actually did start studying non-Western cultures and it turns out all human nations have been systemically murdering the shit out of each other since forever.
And I am pretty convinced that 0% of the people telling me that “we need to learn colonized people’s methods of resistance” have actually looked into this themselves.
Endorsed. I saw a tweet yesterday that’s pretty much the epitome of this:
Okay, you’ve got a better idea than “innocence until proven guilt” and “equality in the eyes of the law”? Am I the only one who has any idea what societies *without* those things are like?
Not to mention that pretending pre-colonial societies were peachy is a real slap in the face to the groups they themselves subjugated. It is wrong that indigenous mesoamericans were conquered and exploited, but I also prefer a society *without* human sacrifice.
Yeah I think people are not getting that EVEN ON WEBSITE LEVELS the main problem is laws are not ENFORCED against these people because that is literally the definition of “privilege”.
Like here is a quick and easy way to screen this shit ask yourself what would happen to black lives matter if you pass your restrictions. Because that is going to be who they target for enforcement right now.
The laws are already so we need to put in people who will actually enforce them.
One tip for way too many of these folks: Maybe consider fixing your own systems, before you start trying to grab onto your own romanticized versions of other people’s systems that you don’t really understand. It’s gross, and also rooted in some very colonial mindsets.
I have been suspicious for a little while that it is not at all an accident that so many SJ community norms intensely discourage critical thinking and sourcing information and are so actively hostile to the values of traditional liberalism.
The Tumblr left doesn’t have the community antibodies to fight something like this. A bunch of people who don’t know each other IRL, combined with hiding behind the identity shield and accelerated by the taboo against tone policing – it was bound to happen. Their only mistake was using too many male avatars and not going after specific Hillary supporters for crimes against intersectionality.
It’s like a weird inverse of “using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.”
I just… seeing lagonegirl in that article was wild, man
I mean I never liked lagonegirl much but I just thought “that person is overzealous” not “hi Russia”
The fact that this is what the IRA is doing nowadays is… fucking wild.
That’s not the Irish Republican Army IRA, it’s the Internet Research Agency IRA
I think it would be naive to think these are the only ones that are infultration accounts. One of my friends warned me awhile back some accounts I have been reblogging were suspiciously seeming to manufacture outrage over certain things and make people fight to fuck with them mentally and hate each other and I unfollowed every account reblogging those posts on my dash and suddenly my mental health got better.
Like I just suggest to people to when seeing outrage posts on your dash to pay attention to who is in that post and if you see trends blacklist their names. The sj trolls have gotten a lot smarter and a lot more horrible.
Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.
Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.
“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”
Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.
“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.
“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”
The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.
“If you’re [inclined] to believe that … the system is fair, then you’re maybe going to accept stereotypes about you more easily.”
not to like make a huge fucking post about shit that’s been talked to death but it really genuinely scares me how many straight girls think it’s normal to just… not like your partner. like they think it’s normal and okay for their boyfriends to openly think they’re stupid and annoying and to be totally derisive about their interests and for them not to be friends or have things in common or enjoy each other’s personalities or encourage their interests? you are supposed to be friends with the person you’re in love with. you are supposed to want to talk to them about the things that make them happy. you do not have to settle for people who treat your entire personality as a burden outside of what you do to cater to them.
Are people really like this? I’ve only seen people like this in media, not IRL…
My fundraising effort has gotten to its halfway point! What this means is that I can afford to make at least a minimum payment on all my bills (medical, insurance, etc.) so I don’t end up in collections, while still being able to afford rent, food, and gas. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has donated and/or shared my donation links. I’m not out of the woods yet since I currently owe my hospital just shy of $1300 among other things.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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