Hygrocybe psittacina, commonly known as the Parrot Toadstool or Parrot Waxcap, is a colourful member of the genus Hygrocybe, the waxcaps, found across Northern Europe.
my dad committed suicide and I will soon have no reliable finances ori place to be
I am a mentally Ill and disabled (cerebral palsy, autism) 18 year old trans women. On October 30th, i lost my beloved father to suicide. I lived with him to escape my mentally, physically, and sexually abusive mother. Without my father around, I have very limited options now as far as housing, finances, and medication availability. I have no car or drivers license and my bank account and PayPal balances are 0. I have nothing. On October 30th I lost everything. My father was all I had. Please try to donate anything you can so I can afford to live. My relatives can help somewhat but I will still be in dire need.
Causing distress
and pain to another person and then focusing on how that person reacts to it,
and criticizing the reaction, as if the reaction and not the abuse is wrong, is
in fact, evil. It’s not helping anyone but the abuser divert attention from
themselves and abuse they’ve just committed. Abusers have no business
criticizing anyone and least of all their victims. Your reactions to abuse were never wrong.
jesus *christ* abuse != causing distress and pain this is like actually abuser logic. “you hurt me by smiling at someone else so now you can’t criticize me for hitting you”
what the fuck?
“don’t treat someone badly and then blame them for reacting” is abuser logic?
are we reading the same post?
Both “it is possible for people to feel unreasonably distressed by a normally innocuous action and to react disproportionally to the offense, in which case it may be entirely justified to criticize their reaction” AND “it is possible to unfairly criticize someone’s reaction to a reasonably upsetting thing” can be true statements.
Abusers will treat you badly and then blame you for reacting, and will ALSO overreact to your minor missteps and claim that your action justified their reaction.
Abusers will put you in the hospital with a concussion over a disagreement about where a bus stop is, and then claim that you “provoked them” and therefore “deserved it” and deny any responsibility for what they did after you “made” them get mad.
And they’ll also call you a disgusting gross piece of trash who no one could ever love, and when you react with “stop verbally abusing me” they’ll say “oh my god how could you call me an ABUSER that is SO OVER THE TOP”.
And part of what makes it so easy for abuse victims to end up behaving abusively toward other people later is the fact that whichever of those your own personal abuser did (including possibly both, not just one or the other), you’re likely to get hypersensitized to, to the point that you end up not realizing that you are actually the overreactor or the person in the wrong sometimes, even if only minorly. You’ll interpret a deliberate insult out of a mildly-critical comment, scream at the criticizer and call them all sorts of awful things, then when they say “wow you’re overreacting” you assume they’re gaslighting you. Or, the other way around, you’ll say something insulting to someone else, and when they react like “wow that was an asshole thing to say, don’t talk to me like that” and get mad at you, you react like “HOW DARE YOU CALL ME AN ASSHOLE”.
Self-awareness is the way out of that shitty trap, and remembering that nuance exists, and cultivating a sense of perspective. And questioning your knee-jerk reactions for whether or not they make sense in the ACTUAL current context, or if they’re a reaction to your past trauma more than they are to what’s happening right now.
Love being brutally called out by the British Library
Oh my gosh I went here a few days ago do you guys want to see the whole sign
I’m covered with “Librarians from Everywhere” but as a former museums professional “Tourists who think we’re the British Museum” really speaks to me on a personal level.
Tag yourself, I’m “All ten people who think they’ve got the most niche interest in the building”
I’m researchers on a bit of a mission because I have 3 weeks to finish a thesis I haven’t started
I’m “person who doesn’t want anyone to know what I’m working on”
I actually hesitated to reblog one otherwise excellent post a little while ago, very specifically because of that reference to the exploding emotional pressure cooker. As apt as that idea might be in a lot of cases, including my own life sometimes. Because that analogy got used against me when I was younger in ways that turned it very triggering.
I’ve talked some before about how some very serious misinterpretations of what was even happening led to some extremely harmful therapy and psych treatment in general when I was younger.
(Also very relevant there: some other good discussion of the problems inherent in parents/other adults in power being the real clients, with the open goal of “please fix this crazy kid and make them easier to live with ASAP!” Talk about built-in conflicts of interest and potential for abuse, which don’t seem to worry much of anybody who hasn’t ended up on the wrong end.)
Anyway, I landed in the psych system when I was 13, after a series of pretty spectacular meltdowns which were managed very, very badly. With apparently no connection made to all the previous ones that looked pretty much identical when I was a smaller kid–surely that was grown out by puberty to the point of total irrelevance, right? 😩 I say “smaller” for a reason, since being close to full adult size by then probably did not help matters at all.
My mother looked for a therapist, and we saw her once before I had another bad meltdown and New Therapist suggested I be locked up For My Own Good (and before my out of control behavior hurt somebody, yeah). That happened a couple times more over the next few years, and was a close thing many more times.
Now, early adolescence is pretty well recognized as a stressful time for kids in general. With loads of new stressors in their lives. Even if people are preferring to ignore factors such as bullying and (sometimes should-be super obvious) disabilities/neurodivergence. That gets used against too many other kids who are experiencing severe difficulties, to deny that anything unusual is going on at all and avoid looking at the situations causing them distress.
But, my mom did get professionals involved. Who promptly went for a bizarre combo approach: obviously nothing unusual is going on in this kid’s life now, but they’re also obviously doing the emotional pressure cooker thing and just generally coming across as Very Weird Indeed. Therefore, the explosions must be attributable to Severe Emotional Damage from one specific truly horrendous type of early childhood trauma ! 😵 (Which never actually happened, but hey.)
I’ve talked more about how that focus can turn abusive and gaslighty really fast. But, at least as harmful in a lot of ways?
Professional endorsement of the idea that nothing happening in your life right now really matters, except as it may pertain to The Real Problem. In fact, your perceptions and reactions must be skewed enough that whatever you say about what’s bothering you/how you feel cannot be trusted.
(Oh, and it’s obvious that the people paying us have nothing to do with any problems you may be experiencing. May not always be totally conscious, but it really should not be discounted as a potential motivation.)
If you’re angry about anything that’s currently happening? It’s misplaced at best, and likely a sign of severe emotional damage. There is absolutely nothing to get upset about now. It’s all The Crazy.
Not too surprisingly, a lot of extremely stressful things were going on then, or I wouldn’t have started into that cluster of spectacular meltdowns at all. That included my mother’s extremely volatile and sometimes outright abusive behavior–which they did see in action some. And excused/enabled, because out of control severely mentally ill kids.
But yeah, nothing worth mentioning could possibly be going on then and there.
Plenty to try to sort through later, yeah. It’s been almost 30 years since I was introduced to the added psych abuse, and more fallout still keeps coming up.
Another post that’s not intended as a “poor me!” type deal at all, BTW. I am mainly talking about this at all now because I do expect that once you get beyond the specific details? That’s not nearly as unusual an experience as it should be. And it doesn’t get talked about enough, difficult as the subject can be.
It’s just particularly nasty when actual professionals get in on the invalidation and gaslighting. They’re set up to do plenty of damage, and with even less accountability.
I’m not sure of it’s cool to reblog this or not, it really resonates with me though, and gave me a lot to think about when I consider getting therapy for my own kid. (I am constantly trying to see if I’m the one causing his distress, or adding to it, bc I distinctly remember how my own parent never seemed to be a source of stress according to my therapists as a child/teen)
Lately I’ve been angry about CBT therapy, which feels like professional gaslighting. Like, everything that causes me pain or stress is really just a “cognitive distortion” that needs to be “reframed”, and like, nah. I usually know when my brain is thinking things that are bullshit, the problem comes from the fact that these are tied to trauma, little kid me still has visceral emotional reactions to it, and other sources of stress include the fascism of my country which no amount of reframing is gonna make go away.
I have an appt with a new therapist on the 14th, so I’ve been thinking about this a lot, my experiences with therapy throughout my life.
Like as a teen I was taught to keep my “fangs in” because I was supposedly too angry in response to things I still feel warranted my anger, and yet the double standard was clear. It was okay for folks to treat me in the ways that made me angry but I was expected to use coping strategies to endure their abuse. I was being tone policed with therapy.
No worries. If I really don’t want a post reblogged, I try to make sure to tag it right up front. This is personal enough that I did consider it, but figured some of it might be too relatable
I don’t have a lot of spoons to process right now, but one point:
It was okay for folks to treat me in the ways that made me angry but I was expected to use coping strategies to endure their abuse. I was being tone policed with therapy.
Well said. What can be extra bad about that is how it usually reinforces/enables messages you’ve already been getting from people who are hurting you 😑 Doesn’t matter what they’re doing or how little respect you’re being treated with, you’re going to be in the wrong.
This is more or less how it went down for me. Please be aware, and help others be aware, that fat people can have eating disorders, and the way we expect fat people to act actually encourages developing them.
When I was in treatment in my teens with the person who literally wrote the book on bulimarexia, at one point Slim Fast was suggested “to relieve anxiety”. I wish I were joking.
CARIBOU RUN ACROSS PLAINS IN THE ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, ALASKA. PHOTOS BY KILIII YÜYAN
To a new arrival, the Arctic in summer is pure confusion, a set of realities that seem to always shift and conflict. You can’t tell the time or your place in it because of the endless days; you completely forget to be tired, or hungry, or hurried. Distance and size, too, become mysteries: Without trees for scale, hills that seem close take hours to reach. Plants that you usually think of as trees max out at only a few inches high, while tiny lichens grow in mats so thick they bounce like pillows. Whole herds of caribou, hundreds or thousands of enormous animals, can disappear in a few minutes, swallowed up by a far more enormous landscape. In the flat plains, the horizon blurs in and out, as though reality is getting poor reception.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge holds Alaska’s single-most-remote spot, the very farthest you can get from human roads, trails, or homes. A bush plane bringing travelers will fly over hours of uninterrupted wilderness (a fact that guides implore you to think long and hard about before climbing that boulder or fording that stream or messing around with that pocketknife) and land on “airstrips” that are simply areas of flattish tundra or gravel bars cleared of large rocks and sometimes marked with caribou antlers. And yet it is far from isolated. You’ll come around a bend in the river and see, in a strange new landscape, familiar old friends on summer vacation: geese and mallards and swans, falcons and thrushes and sparrows and sandpipers, each a reminder that the refuge is directly linked by avian migration to every U.S. state and every continent but Australia.
Though the Arctic may be far from factories and traffic jams and other major sources of carbon pollution, human-driven climate change is warming it faster—as much as two times faster—than anywhere else on Earth. The signs are everywhere: melting permafrost that makes ponds and wetlands drain and hillsides collapse; disappearing sea ice that leaves polar bears starving and new shipping lanes open; animals and plants whose ranges are moving northward. Some of the changes, such as the increase in dark, heat-trapping open water and the release of methane once locked in permafrost, also act as accelerators of change that will lead to even more change and even more warming. When it comes to the planetary-scale transformations of climate change, isolation doesn’t exist. Not even here.
The future of the refuge is still the mystery it has always been. The faraway politics, our ideals about wilderness, and, not incidentally, the prices of oil and possibly carbon are all in flux. Environmental groups and Alaska Natives like the Gwich’in have vowed to fight drilling in any way they can, but they are on the defensive as never before, with the focus moving to court battles and delays and to dissuading oil companies and banks from getting involved.Supporters of drilling contend that the ecosystem damage would be minor. They usually don’t talk about the wilderness value behind the refuge’s original establishment. The Trump administration has asked for the required environmental review to be fast-tracked, demanding in months what normally takes years. Isolation has never felt so illusory.
I actually hesitated to reblog one otherwise excellent post a little while ago, very specifically because of that reference to the exploding emotional pressure cooker. As apt as that idea might be in a lot of cases, including my own life sometimes. Because that analogy got used against me when I was younger in ways that turned it very triggering.
I’ve talked some before about how some very serious misinterpretations of what was even happening led to some extremely harmful therapy and psych treatment in general when I was younger.
(Also very relevant there: some other good discussion of the problems inherent in parents/other adults in power being the real clients, with the open goal of “please fix this crazy kid and make them easier to live with ASAP!” Talk about built-in conflicts of interest and potential for abuse, which don’t seem to worry much of anybody who hasn’t ended up on the wrong end.)
Anyway, I landed in the psych system when I was 13, after a series of pretty spectacular meltdowns which were managed very, very badly. With apparently no connection made to all the previous ones that looked pretty much identical when I was a smaller kid–surely that was grown out by puberty to the point of total irrelevance, right? 😩 I say “smaller” for a reason, since being close to full adult size by then probably did not help matters at all.
My mother looked for a therapist, and we saw her once before I had another bad meltdown and New Therapist suggested I be locked up For My Own Good (and before my out of control behavior hurt somebody, yeah). That happened a couple times more over the next few years, and was a close thing many more times.
Now, early adolescence is pretty well recognized as a stressful time for kids in general. With loads of new stressors in their lives. Even if people are preferring to ignore factors such as bullying and (sometimes should-be super obvious) disabilities/neurodivergence. That gets used against too many other kids who are experiencing severe difficulties, to deny that anything unusual is going on at all and avoid looking at the situations causing them distress.
But, my mom did get professionals involved. Who promptly went for a bizarre combo approach: obviously nothing unusual is going on in this kid’s life now, but they’re also obviously doing the emotional pressure cooker thing and just generally coming across as Very Weird Indeed. Therefore, the explosions must be attributable to Severe Emotional Damage from one specific truly horrendous type of early childhood trauma ! 😵 (Which never actually happened, but hey.)
I’ve talked more about how that focus can turn abusive and gaslighty really fast. But, at least as harmful in a lot of ways?
Professional endorsement of the idea that nothing happening in your life right now really matters, except as it may pertain to The Real Problem. In fact, your perceptions and reactions must be skewed enough that whatever you say about what’s bothering you/how you feel cannot be trusted.
(Oh, and it’s obvious that the people paying us have nothing to do with any problems you may be experiencing. May not always be totally conscious, but it really should not be discounted as a potential motivation.)
If you’re angry about anything that’s currently happening? It’s misplaced at best, and likely a sign of severe emotional damage. There is absolutely nothing to get upset about now. It’s all The Crazy.
Not too surprisingly, a lot of extremely stressful things were going on then, or I wouldn’t have started into that cluster of spectacular meltdowns at all. That included my mother’s extremely volatile and sometimes outright abusive behavior–which they did see in action some. And excused/enabled, because out of control severely mentally ill kids.
But yeah, nothing worth mentioning could possibly be going on then and there.
Plenty to try to sort through later, yeah. It’s been almost 30 years since I was introduced to the added psych abuse, and more fallout still keeps coming up.
Another post that’s not intended as a “poor me!” type deal at all, BTW. I am mainly talking about this at all now because I do expect that once you get beyond the specific details? That’s not nearly as unusual an experience as it should be. And it doesn’t get talked about enough, difficult as the subject can be.
It’s just particularly nasty when actual professionals get in on the invalidation and gaslighting. They’re set up to do plenty of damage, and with even less accountability.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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