a form of gaslighting that i don’t see mentioned nearly as much as, say, refusing to acknowledge the past, or misremembering a conversation, is the way abusers project an identity or a characteristic on someone so strongly that they take on this projection as a fact about themselves.
like being told you’re incapable of love. or being told that you are hateful, or cruel, or dangerously mentally ill, or that you’re just like your father, or that you’ve never cared about anyone in your entire life.
parents are almost uniquely suited to this since they have so many opportunities to shape your perception of yourself from the moment you’re born; your parent’s definition of you becomes your definition of you. realizing that you have entire aspects of your identity that your parents have been trying to deliberately obfuscate and erase is huge, and so is the incredibly painful struggle to come out from under it.
abusers don’t want you to think of yourself as a warm or protective or capable person. they don’t want you to think of yourself as perfectly suited to love any number of people admirably and well. they need you here, and they need you to not even think about leaving, and teaching a kid to think like that is so much easier if you get them while they’re young.
coming out of that is hard work. you have to be able to go down through the events of your life, piece by piece, decision by decision, and dispassionately analyze them to the best of your ability. you have to be able to recognize your own efforts done in good faith with all the knowledge and understanding you had at the time. you have to be able to forgive yourself, and to give yourself the warmth and love of your own inner good parent. being able to be calm enough to do this takes an immense amount of work if you have anxiety or trauma, and handling the symptoms of those are difficult enough on their own.
just remember that I, a registered nurse with a bachelors degree, accidentally glued a patient’s foreskin shut over his penis and had to call a urology doctor to come help me get it to retract
I had to send a page that said “I glued the patient’s penis shut. send help.”
The urology resident said, “Wow. I’ve never seen anything like this. Let me go ask someone else.”
It’s been like 5 days since this happened and I’m just sitting at the nurses station with some coworkers and the urology resident walks by and says “hey! Glue any penises shut lately??” And keeps on walking
THEN ALL MY COWORKERS WERE LIKE WHAT JUST HAPPENED
and so yeah, that freaking doctor exposed me and went on his way
Are you sure you know what you’re asking of me? Are you sure? Well, okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. This post is long and contains description of genital injury.
So as you’ll know, I worked three and a half long, hilarious years at an NHS sexual health and contraception clinic. I loved that job, and packed it in because the Tory cuts to the service meant running it became hideously untenably stressful, but that’s a story for another time.
One of my duties at the clinic was to take phone calls. Patients liked me on the phone because I have a nice voice and I’m basically completely unflappable, and they felt happy to tell me things. A vital skill in the wang biz.
One day, a man called. This was not unusual. “Hello,” he said. “I need to see one of your nurses about my, er, my chap.”
“Righty-oh sir,” I said, “are you experiencing any symptoms that you’re concerned about? It’s just a yes or no kind of question.”
“Well,” he said, and I instantly felt a dark and terrible energy pulsate down the phone. “Well… sort of. But, uh, it’s not symptoms of anything, it’s just…”
I would come to regret what I said next. “Is everything all right, sir?”
“Well.” There was a pause. I heard fidgeting. “I got a yeast infection.”
Phew, easy peasy. Yeasties are easy to fix. I sounded reassuring and buoyant. “Well that’s nothing to worry about, sir – if you don’t want to get anything over the counter from the chemist, we can-”
“No, no, that’s not the problem. Listen -” he sounded serious. “Listen, I’ll just tell you what’s the matter, and you’ll see what I mean.”
This is where, whenever I tell this story, I like to ask the listener to play a little game with me. The game is “Where Would You Tap Out?” I’d have already tapped out by going to the chemist and getting some Canestan.
“I didn’t want any chemicals on my chap, so I decided to go for a home remedy. Internet said garlic was good for yeast infections, and I’ve got a lot of garlic, so I figured that’d be all right.”
I made sympathetic noises. Home remedies for yeast infections are normal, and garlic is actually quite effective. “Oh good,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure how much to use, but I figured, I have a lot of garlic usually, so I minced a whole bulb.”
The dark energy wafting down the phone intensified.
“I packed it all over my, you know, knob, made a poultice. Packed it all over the head, like a hat. But, uh, I wasn’t sure how to keep it on..”
I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to scare him off by sounding judgemental.
“..so I just duct taped it all on. Wrapped duct tape all round it.”
Still with us? Tapped out yet?
“So er, that worked, kept it on nice and tight, and I left it on over night.”
Over night. All night with your cock mummified in garlic paste like some sort of fiendish chicken kiev.
“But, uh, when I took it off the next morning, well… garlic is…”
“Caustic,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Garlic is caustic.”
“Yeah! Yeah, it is!” he said, sounding cheerful that I, too, understood the Way of Garlic. “So I unwrapped my dick and, well, it looked kind of like… melted.”
I sat, silent, on the phone. Already I’d missed 6 other calls, watching them sail by on the other line while this saga unfolded.
“So I figured,” he continued, the terrible juggernaut barrelling unstoppably through this phallic disaster, “I should probably exfoliate it.”
“Exfoliate,” I echoed weakly.
“Yeah,” said this abject human disaster, misinterpreting my echolalic expression of horror as hearty encouragement. “So I had a look around the kitchen -” he was in the kitchen for all this “- for anything I could use and got my brillo pad-”
For anyone not in the UK, that’s what we call one of these:
I must have betrayed myself and given a gasp of horror at that point, because he quickly reassured me – “No, no, no, it’s okay – it was a new one!” before going on to describe scrubbing the affected area to remove the alkaline chemical burn that he’d inflicted on his poor, blameless cock.
“So you want to come in because of… this?” I said, assuming he would want a new dick by this point.
“Oh no, no -” he said, jovial again. “No, it’s all fine – it just, my knob’s gone all… well, it kind of looks camo print now. I was wondering if you could do anything about it looking camo print.”
No, sir. No, neither we nor anyone else can do anything about your camo print garlic cock mistake.
i’m both impressed and horrified by his continued cheerfulness in the situation
I think one of the things people don’t get about autism (or, probably, disability in general) is that it’s highly contextual. I can handle certain clothes in the right environment, at the right time of the month, and with enough sleep. I can talk to unfamiliar people when I’m around someone whose social energy I can sort of feed off of. I can break routine or ask for help if I’m taking care of someone else. But all of these things have a cost, you know? So if the surrounding elements aren’t exactly what I need, my ability to do the thing (and appear neurotypical doing it) is reduced or eliminated.
yES THIS IS IT.
On the day I got rid of my last wool sweater I was having such a bad day. I was so angry and cranky and short and unreasonable and impatient and then I finally noticed somehow that my arm itched and I took off the sweater.
It is important to note that this sweater LOOKED fantastic. And I didn’t even parse it, consciously, as “scratchy”. I was not consciously aware that it had been bothering me. I actually loved this sweater.
But I took it off and suddenly I was at least 50% calmer. I had 50% more patience, I hated people 50% less, I could think better.
I have spent the last, like, six years learning to NOTICE when sensory processing hell is Fucking Me Over, so I can do something about it, instead of just … suffering all the consequences and not knowing why.
This is also the story of why I do not wear socks, or shoes that cover my instep and my toes at the same time, if it is humanly possible to avoid it, and would actually rather up to a point have cold/wet/sore feet.
Here’s something that happens to ADHD children a lot: Getting pushed beyond their limits by accident. Here’s how it works and why it’s so bad.
Child says, “I can’t do this.”
Adult (teacher or parent) does not believe it, because Adult has seen Child do things that Adult considers more difficult, and Child is too young to properly articulate why the task is difficult.
Adult decides that the problem is something other than true inability, like laziness, lack of self-confidence, stubbornness, or lack of motivation.
Adult applies motivation in the form of harsher and harsher scoldings and punishments. Child becomes horribly distressed by these punishments. Finally, the negative emotions produce a wave of adrenaline that temporarily repairs the neurotransmitter deficits caused by ADHD, and Child manages to do the task, nearly dropping from relief when it’s finally done.
The lesson Adult takes away is that Child was able to do it all along, the task was quite reasonable, and Child just wasn’t trying hard enough. Now, surely Child has mastered the task and learned the value of simply following instructions the first time.
The lessons Child takes away? Well, it varies, but it might be:
-How to do the task while in a state of extreme panic, which does NOT easily translate into doing the task when calm.
-Using emergency fight-or-flight overdrive to deal with normal daily problems is reasonable and even expected.
-It’s not acceptable to refuse tasks, no matter how difficult or potentially harmful.
-Asking for help does not result in getting useful help.
I’m now in my 30’s, trying to overcome chronic depression, and one major barrier is that, thanks to the constant unreasonable demands placed on me as a child, I never had the chance to develop actual healthy techniques for getting stuff done. At 19, I finally learned to write without panic, but I still need to rely on my adrenaline addiction for simple things like making phone calls, tidying the house, and paying bills. Sometimes, I do mean things to myself to generate the adrenaline rush, because there’s no one else around to punish me.
But hey, at least I didn’t get those terrible drugs, right? That might have had nasty side effects.
There’s a lot of overlap between ADHD traits and autism traits. Whether you meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, too, I have no idea (because I’m a random person on the Internet), but you might find ADHD resources helpful in figuring out your life challenges.
A lot of “help” for executive function skills comes from neurotypicals who are naturally good at it and lack insight into people who aren’t, which makes it spectacularly useless to the people who actually need it.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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