OK, I really need to get down for a while and prop that leg up. But I’ve been avoiding it even more because I had maybe 4 hours of not great sleep earlier before pain (in that damned leg) got me up for good.

Really do not want to zonk out at 5 p.m., when that’s been enough of an issue on more sleep. But, I had better try for a while anyway, before I work on supper 😵

Not quite ready to say “fuck it, we can get delivery” and just have a nap if that wants to happen. But, it’s getting close.

I did get down, at least.

But, I’m also kind of irritated right now because I really do not feel up to dragging myself out to the store after something pressing.

(More ibuprofen, actually. Because I can maybe gimp to a store that sells that, and not an actual pharmacy when I am out of stronger behind the counter nonprescription stuff. With the leg waking me up, on top of the usual background garbage.)

And, if anything, his staying incommunicado has intensified.

I’ve mostly just not been attempting to message him, but sometimes I get desperate enough to try. Like “out of pain relief, getting woken up by pain”, yeah.

It’s hard not to feel like a selfish jerk, after finding out why he’s apparently not been keeping his phone charged. I also have (installed) actual scrupulosity issues around not wanting to inconvenience people by even asking for anything.

But, honestly? I’m having a hard enough time getting out after some basic items that this is causing me problems. These things do go multiple ways. I’m not necessarily a bad person for getting upset when I am having significant trouble getting some needs met.

He assured me before that it had nothing to do with my getting overly demanding, and that he didn’t mind stopping for things. He’s not prone to just lying or telling you what he thinks you want to hear, either. So, I’m guessing that is really not the main thing here. As much as the jerkbrain keeps insisting it must be. I don’t think it is some weird passive-aggressive number on his part. He really doesn’t seem to mind when I do manage to make “bread and cat food on the way home please!” type requests.

But, I cannot reasonably anticipate everything and also remember to ask him before he leaves in the morning. I’ve tried, and it just has not been working out well. Even if my executive function were better, you just can’t anticipate everything. It was already pretty hard to get some basic needs met, and this recent change has not helped my overall wellbeing.

Again, not looking for any type of advice. Just needing to vent some, and remind myself that needing to ask for more help doesn’t make you a terrible person who is lucky for whatever you do get. Including being tolerated at all.

I feel bad about the difficulties he seems to be having lately, but that also doesn’t mean that I’m a bad person for getting concerned about that making things harder on me. No matter how many times I got the message before that other people are dealing with Real Problems and I am making things much harder by even mentioning anything going wrong in my life.

(Also, things can be hard without anybody in particular being to blame 😧)

Yeah, some pretty PTSD-heavy stuff. No wonder I’ve been having some extra trouble coping, or even processing some things.

aether–system:

Triggers CAN make you angry.

I’ve seen a lot of posts saying what triggers do and do not do, and many times, I’ve seen it written that triggers do not make you angry, that they’re more likely to cause strong anxiety, panic, numbness, etc.

But coming from someone whose triggers invoke a gut-wrenching fury: Triggers CAN make you angry. They can remind you of the unfairness, trauma, and hurt of the past, and a normal human reaction to things like that is anger.

It’s not wrong for triggers to make you angry, and you’re not in the wrong for feeling it. Anger is an emotion that rarely gets addressed in relation to trauma, and I think that needs to change.

Your anger in response to triggers is valid.

-Parsifal

neolithicsheep:

thetwistedrope:

smokescreens-n-otherillusions:

jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

owlsofstarlight:

owlsofstarlight:

In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.

This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.

So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.

after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.

these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.

but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.

triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:

– if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.

– if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.

Triggers are a case of classical conditioning, where association between a stimulus (In these cases, forms of trauma) and a neutral stimuli (such as the garage door or scent of bath products) becomes so interlinked that you associate them as one. This happens a lot to those going through chemotherapy, where the nausea they feel from chemo medication becomes linked with everything they interact with while feeling nauseous (it doesn’t help that this sort of conditioning is super strong when linked with nausea) so even after all chemo treatment is done, they can’t stand to eat what they ate at the time, can’t look at the doctor, or a white room, or smell cleaning products without feeling extreme nausea.

Triggers are subconscious, and we haven’t really got control of them. Even if you go through therapy for them, because they’ve now become learnt, they will still be there and mess with people. Don’t make assumptions about triggers, and try to be accommodating.

For those who are interested, EMDR has been shown to be able to lessen the effects of triggers.

Please be cautious with EMDR and be aware that it is not risk free. I have tried it twice, both times nearly ended up with me hospitalized after a dramatic resurgence of suicidal impulses. My shrink kept pushing for a third attempt, I fired him and haven’t been back to therapy since because everyone wants to do EMDR on PTSD these days.

Taking your pet abroad if there’s no Brexit deal

Oh my, looks like DEFRA actually has some published guidance on this, since September.

Mr. C came home a while ago pretty late from another drinks after work night: sloshed, showing some worry, and talking about going ahead and getting the cats set up with EU pet passports just in case.

Guessing there was probably some more discussion that got him thinking about it more urgently tonight, but he also said tonight that this political mess has come up in every single one-on-one conversation he’s had pretty much since the referendum vote.

(The Mr. Calm Cool and Collected act kinda breaks down when he’s been drinking, that’s for sure. Sounded like he’s been a lot more worried about the somewhat near future than he’s been letting on normally, which is honestly not that much of a surprise knowing him.)

He also brought up not being sure how best to go about moving the fish. But, by golly, if anyone is urgently hauling ass for Sweden, everyone is going! He apparently felt like this was important to emphasize 😅

So yeah, while I’m pretty concerned about what might happen with this ongoing political clusterfuck, and how I might manage with some practical details as bad as my health situation has been? If he’s feeling a need to emphasize while disinhibited that Nobody In This Household Will Be Left Behind On His Watch, Dammit–explicitly extended to fish he really doesn’t take much interest in other than the fact that I care about them?

I am at least less concerned that he’s gotten quietly fed up with my bullshit to the point that he doesn’t want to live with it anymore.

(Which is totally a product of my own jerkbrain, and nothing to do with anything he has actually said or done. Just to be clear. I am a worrier, what can I say. Though both of us avoiding conflict past the point where it’s necessarily healthy–and for similar reasons AFAICT–doesn’t always help set my mind at ease. Maybe not his either.)

Taking your pet abroad if there’s no Brexit deal

mojavewastelander:

infiniteragequit:

sothisistherapy:

ericfvckingharris:

Growing up in an abusive household is a fucking trip dude……If you’ve never had someone angrily wash a dish at you or fold a sock in your direction then how are you gonna understand why I get nervous when you quietly do the laundry, or why I ask “are you mad at me?” when you set the bag of groceries down too hard? It’s a totally different way of living and it impacts you long after you’ve left the situation.

This is so important.

Abused kids speak a language you can’t learn

I think a lot of people misinterpret this post to mean that folding a sock angrily at you is abusive, and that’s not what it means at all. The fear abused kids feel at this kind of behavior is a conditioned response because we know what comes after. Its about sitting there terrified and waiting for when they will snap.

This is actually a symptom of PTSD, which is more common among child abuse victims than modern veterans

One not-so-funny thing about that ridiculous little spill earlier. (Well, besides ending up in rather a lot of pain, which probably isn’t helping the rest.)

When I suddenly came down almost on top of him, Mr. C’s immediate impulse was to throw his arms around me. Which probably wouldn’t be a bad impulse at all, dealing with most people.

I, however, yelled at him to get his arms off me.

(Then did manage to add that I knew he was trying to help, but everything was overwhelming right then. Trouble talking or no.)

I apologized and explained more as soon as possible. He seemed reasonably OK about it. But, I did lose it and yell when I shouldn’t have.

So, now I can’t stop doing the good old Scrupulosity Shuffle. Yell at somebody you care about when you don’t have good control, and wind up triggering yourself 😱

But yeah, if it had been my mom? That would have been enough to leave her seriously pissed at me and prone to explosions for at least the rest of the day. If not longer. With the potential to turn into some very ugly scenes. (But, that’s different, whatever she did. I was the one who created the entire situation, when she was Only Trying To Help 😵)

Let’s just say that my stressed autistic person behavior and her unaddressed borderline tendencies did not always mesh well. (Which tended to turn into a problem when I was sick/in pain in general, for that extra bit of PTSD background dread for a good while now.)

Anyway, I don’t think he’s liable to respond like that. Especially understanding (and, frankly, caring) why that happened–with apologies. We’ve known each other in person for over 15 years now, and he has yet to behave that way.

A lot like with the sudden spate of meltdowns a while back, though? I can’t stop feeling like maybe I have seriously fucked up, however unintentionally, and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Besides going off into more “maybe I really am a terrible person who doesn’t care about anyone else and just keeps hurting the people around me” garbage, naturally.

Never much fun to ride out, but as usual trying to argue with it is a bigger losing proposition.

astrologynigga:

geekandmisandry:

dovahfem:

I used to think i didn’t have any triggers. I’m an abuse survivor and i really thought maybe i came out of it just fine with no triggers.

Then a man slammed his hands on the desk beside me in frustration, he wasn’t angry at me he had just messed up something he was doing.

I froze, like literally froze, then tears started streaming and i was shaking.

I was so fucking upset and distraught, all i could manage to get out was “I didn’t like that.”

My body had a really surprising reaction and i guess i’m not as over my abuse as i’d like to think sometimes. I’m making this post to tell others things like this, triggers, they can pop up at any time.

Try to be patient, and understanding when someone has a reaction that you might not understand.

If you’re the person who was triggered, be patient with yourself.

Don’t be like me and blame yourself for overreacting.

Now i realize what it was that happened to me, and i’ll try to be better with myself in the future, and not blame myself immediately after.

It’s also possible to not even understand this are triggers. I used to think I just had “sudden mood swings” without realising the common thread because I was so deep into denying myself as a victim I couldn’t even recognise my own trauma.

They can appear long after trauma, they can be hard to recognise and it isn’t your fault.

reblogging for the comment. this explains so much.

We Can’t Keep Treating Anxiety From Complex Trauma the Same Way We Treat Generalized Anxiety

invisibledisabilitychameleon:

rapeculturerealities:

I’ve been living with the effects of complex trauma for a long time, but for many years, I didn’t know what it was. Off and on throughout my life, I’ve struggled with what I thought was anxiety and depression. Or rather, In addition to being traumatized, I was anxious and depressed.

Regardless of the difference, no condition should ever be minimized. If you are feeling anxious or depressed, it’s important and urgent to find the right support for you. No one gets a prize for “worst” depression, anxiety, trauma or any other combination of terrible things to deal with, and no one should suffer alone. With that in mind, there is a difference between what someone who has Complex PTSD feels and what someone with generalized anxiety or mild to moderate depression feels.

For someone dealing with complex trauma, the anxiety they feel does not come from some mysterious unknown source or obsessing about what could happen. For many, the anxiety they feel is not rational. General anxiety can often be calmed with grounding techniques and reminders of what is real and true. Mindfulness techniques can help. Even when they feel disconnected, anxious people can often acknowledge they are loved and supported by others.

For those who have experienced trauma, anxiety comes from an automatic physiological response to what has actually, already happened. The brain and body have already lived through “worst case scenario” situations, know what it feels like and are hell-bent on never going back there again. The fight/flight/ freeze response goes into overdrive. It’s like living with a fire alarm that goes off at random intervals 24 hours a day. It is extremely difficult for the rational brain to be convinced “that won’t happen,” because it already knows that it has happened, and it was horrific.

Those living with generalized anxiety often live in fear of the future. Those with complex trauma fear the future because of the past.

The remedy for both anxiety and trauma is to pull one’s awareness back into the present. For a traumatized person who has experienced abuse, there are a variety of factors that make this difficult. First and foremost, a traumatized person must be living in a situation which is 100 percent safe before they can even begin to process the tsunami of anger, grief and despair that has been locked inside of them, causing their hypervigilance and other anxious symptoms. That usually means no one who abused them or enabled abuse in the past can be allowed to take up space in their life. It also means eliminating any other people who mirror the same abusive or enabling patterns.

Unfortunately for many, creating a 100 percent abuser-free environment is not possible, even for those who set up good boundaries and are wary of the signs. That means that being present in the moment for a complex trauma survivor is not fail-proof, especially in a stressful event. They can be triggered into an emotional flashback by anything in their present environment.

It is possible (and likely) that someone suffering from the effects of complex trauma is also feeling anxious and depressed, but there is a difference to the root cause. Many effective strategies that treat anxiety and depression don’t work for trauma survivors. Meditation and mindfulness techniques that make one more aware of their environment sometimes can produce an opposite effect on a trauma survivor. Trauma survivors often don’t need more awareness. They need to feel safe and secure in spite of what their awareness is telling them.

At the first sign of anxiety or depression, traumatized people will spiral into toxic shame. Depending on the wounding messages they received from their abusers, they will not only feel the effects of anxiety and depression, but also a deep shame for being “defective” or “not good enough.” Many survivors were emotionally and/or physically abandoned, and have a deep rooted knowledge of the fact that they were insufficiently loved. They live with a constant reminder that their brains and bodies were deprived of a basic human right. Even present-day situations where they are receiving love from a safe person can trigger the awareness and subsequent grief of knowing how unloved they were by comparison.

Anxiety and depression are considered commonplace, but I suspect many of those who consider themselves anxious or depressed are actually experiencing the fallout of trauma. Most therapists are not well trained to handle trauma, especially the complex kind that stems from prolonged exposure to abuse. Unless they are specially certified, they might have had a few hours in graduate school on Cluster B personality disorders, and even fewer hours on helping their survivors. Many survivors of complex trauma are often misdiagnosed as having borderline personality disorder (BPD) or bipolar disorder. Anyone who has sought treatment for generalized anxiety or depression owes themselves a deeper look at whether trauma plays a role.

damn, this is important!

We Can’t Keep Treating Anxiety From Complex Trauma the Same Way We Treat Generalized Anxiety

Regarding Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) Therapy

queeranarchism:

Disabled people need to earn their right
to exist by performing less disabled, and ABA will train them to perform
as a less disabled person. At its core, ABA is rooted in the hatred and
denial of the humanity of disabled people. Even with the most generous
interpretation, it is about pathologizing and rejecting disabled ways of
being and holding up non-disabled ways of being as the only right way
and the only way to be correctly human.
It doesn’t matter that it may seem like
fun, it doesn’t matter that your “Behavior Technician” seems like a
really nice person. It doesn’t matter that you read a study that ABA
“works,” because what it “works” at is wrong. It is compliance training at its core.

Of all the demographics, one of the groups most at risk of experiencing physical, sexual,
emotional, verbal, institutional, financial, and educational abuse is
the demographic of people with developmental disabilities. You can
double, triple, and quadruple those risks according to how many other
marginalized groups they fall in.

Parents and therapists often use an
ends-justify-the-means approach to therapy for their disabled children,
believing that acquiring skills is the most important thing and that it
is worth the child having negative experiences if it means that they
will have a “better life.” In this context, what is considered better is
what is most “normal,” or non-disabled.

Survivors of ABA have come forward to say that they have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Complex-PTSD (C-PTSD) as a result of their experiences in ABA. This is not an acceptable trade-off.
This is not an acceptable trade-off. Suicide is dramatically shortening the life-expectancy of autistic people and autistic people are saying it is because they are not being accepted.

Autistic writer Max Sparrow, “All
those years of ABA therapy will have taught them that they are
fundamentally wrong and broken; that they are required to do everything
authority demands of them (whether it’s right or wrong for them); that
they are always the one at fault when anything social goes wrong; that
they get love, praise, and their basic survival needs met so long as
they can hide any trace of autism from others; that what they want
doesn’t matter.”

Another former ABA therapist writes,
“I thought that because I cared about the kids’ well-being, because I
had a strong desire to help them, everything I did must therefore be in
their best interest. In my mind, it gave me a special immunity to making
mistakes. Caring meant there was no way I could be hurting them. I now realize how dangerous this idea really is.
I’ve hurt many people I care deeply about. Just because you care about
someone or have good intentions does not guarantee you’re doing the best
thing for them.”

Regarding Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) Therapy

consumersurvivorexpatient:

that all people who experience a traumatic event do not end up receiving a diagnosis of ptsd does not demonstrate or prove in any way that people who are traumatized have some “innate” biological/hereditary “weakness” and that trauma merely brought this pre-existing “weakness” to the forefront

people respond to trauma in different ways. ptsd is a specific diagnosis that grew out a specific psychiatric and cultural context that referred to specific behaviours of specific people with specific traumas who responded to them in a specific way

ptsd does not equal “truama” or “traumatized”, it is one way of classifying one type of response to trauma

not everyone who experiences even the same type of trauma exhibits the same response. not everyone who is sexually assaulted has nightmares and flashbacks to the assault

say person A has flashbacks and nightmares and a startle response when touched, and remembers the assault and names it as such and connects the experiences to the assault. person A would likely receive a diagnosis of ptsd

say person B experienced a similar assault, but they have trouble naming what happened to them as assault and in fact don’t like to talk about it all, and they don’t have nightmares and their flashbacks are experienced more as a disembodied voice telling them things the person who assaulted them said. person B becomes frightened and unsure about the source of the voice and develops a number of theories others find implausible. instead of having a startle response when touched, they fear all people generally and worry that someone else will assault them. Person B is likely to be diagnosed with some type of psychosis, and not have their trauma acknowledged at all

say person C experienced an also similar assault, and they cope by self harming through sex, drinking, cutting, and dangerous impulsivity. they have trouble trusting people and having healthy relationships because of their trauma. person C would likely be diagnosed with bpd, or something similar, and if their trauma is acknowledged, they would be told the origin of their bpd is that they had an innately sensitive temperament which reacted with an invalidating environment to create their bpd, which is a different thing than being told “this is how you responded to trauma”

now person D, they experienced a similar assault like all the previous examples. but the way they cope is just trying not to think about it. they remember it, but they do not name it as an assault. they have none of the experiences listed above, instead coping through perfectionism, repressing their feelings and overworking themselves. because their desire to succeed at their job is a socially acceptable way of coping and they have no desire to label their experiences as an assault or find different ways of coping, and because, even though they are self harming through overwork and perfectionism, this is seen as admirable behaviour and not Crazy behaviour or dangerous behaviour, they have no contact with psychiatry and receive no diagnosis. they are considered to not be traumatized even though the trauma has affected them

in conclusion,1) ptsd is a label that gets applied to some traumatized people, not all, 2) it is not a defintive marker of who is actually traumatized, 3) trauma is an environmental problem, not an individual problem. it is caused by the trauma happening to someone. how someone responds to trauma and whether or not they respond in a way that is labelled a disorder is determined by individual factors, as well as environmental factors, but 4) this does not mean that “only people develop ptsd/are traumatized” or whatever other hyper-intellectualized versions of that idea are being churned out by asshole doctors