An open thread for personal stuff, continuing from here.
As usual for these threads: no trolls, no MRAs, no I’m-not-really-an-MRA-buts, don’t be mean.
Categories
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The Mammoth
Topic change! But not really. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/iowa-court-oks-firing-female-worker-irresistibly-attractive-article-1.1226068
Yet more evidence that some people really believe that men are unable to control their penises, and it just doesn’t fucking matter what women do, or how they dress, or how they behave. Nope. The boner is in control, and that’s just natural. FFS.
Alex, I feel your pain. My sister read Shot in the Dark when she was pregnant, and my nephew (now 15) isn’t vaccinated. He’s been fine so far, but it’s a worry in the back of my head. I’m all for natural health and alternative health and health in general (and I’m totally into WOO). But natural doesn’t mean harmless, and the potential, un-provable, infinitesimally small chance of possible side effects of vaccines are FAR better to have to deal with than the real, actual, deadly, debilitating, damaging, and effects of the fucking disease.
I mean, yes. My friend’s baby developing whooping cough FROM the vaccine, and it nearly killed her. BUT. They have since re-designed that vaccine, and the incidents of becoming ill from the vaccine are, afaik, no longer a thing. And that baby is now in her late 20’s, and doing just fine.
…and *proven* effects…
Thanks, kittehserf and Alex. Kitties and pygmy marmosets make everything better! marinerachel, yeah, I feel pretty sick at her stuff too. I didn’t want to believe this shit about my mother at first.
Feeling better now, though now a little guilty about letting my emotions get the frontseat in a matter that hurts others. I’m probably a pretty crappy ally when it comes to my mom. I’ve always avoided conflict with her because I’m extremely suspectible to her manipulative behavior that emerges every time I try to discuss any of the bad stuff she says or does. Even though I’ve become more aware of when she’s doing it, she’s still a master at pushing just the right buttons to suddenly make me feel like I’m the bad guy for pointing out the hurtful things she says and does. That the rest of my family bands together to support her and make me back down when the whole crying and guilt-tripping begins really doesn’t help matters. Worst of all, there’s never any progress, as all the serious and painful stuff that was discussed is selectively forgotten the next time we meet. My family seems to exist in perpetual Groundhog Day regarding any elephants in the room.
I don’t know. I’ve been kind of at a crossroads the last few months regarding coming to terms with the death of a relative who did his part in turning me into the self-doubting, self-hating emotional wreck that I’ve been for most of my life, and all the confusion and feels that come with realizing that. A confrontation with my mother is coming, sooner rather than later, and I’m both relieved and terrified at the prospect. I know avoiding conflict is not the way to go if I want to make a difference and be a better person, but I’m still scared of what might happen. I want to believe she would rather reexamine her views (or at least show less intolerance) than cut ties with me, but I don’t actually know how serious her bigoted views have become lately. And having to choose between me and my mom means that the rest of my family would be gone from my life as well if it ever came to that.
@Alex: Holy fuck. So sorry about what you’re going through. Putting children’s lives in jeopardy because of fucked-up beliefs is really shitty. Best of luck with your sister. I hope things turn out for the better.
RE: Anarchonist
My folks live in perpetual Groundhog Day too. I ended up leaving them over it, since among the things that were Forever Forgotten were: my existence, the child-molesters in the family, and the Raping Year. I hope that whatever happens, you find a good route through.
My favorite response to anti-vaxxers.
Is this real? Like, is that actually happening? That’s…
Huh.
I’m not sure I have the words. What a strange thing.
Just saw Susan Patton, the so-called “Princeton Mom,” on CNN. She was raving and ranting again about women getting married by the time they graduate and how campus rape is bullshit. Michael Smerconish was smiling the whole time, but he didn’t mock her, which was lazy as shit.
Of course, it was lazy to have her on the show.
There’s not really anything anyone can do, likely, but my brain has been up to mega-shenanigans lately. I’ve been in the extremely uncomfortable stage of repressed memory retrieval, where my brain consumes huge amounts of my energy pulling the block into conscious awareness. It’s hugely exhausting, leading to nightmares, random terror, constant fatigue, and compulsive movements on my part. For obvious reasons, I try to avoid humans when I’m in this state. It usually lasts a few days.
It’s been three weeks.
I still don’t know what the block is, or the memory. I think my brain tried to re-submerge the memory for my writeathon, but it’s obviously not working out. I had to up my meds, because I was so exhausted and anxious that I was losing functionality, and now I seem to be going into rage. I still don’t know why.
All of my old techniques to force the memory up have been unsuccessful. (Admittedly, the only technique I know is to strap on my stomping boots and do a hornpipe in the trigger minefield. Which even when it does work, tends to leave emotional havoc in its wake. It didn’t work. I tried three or four times, just to be sure.)
I’m not sure what to do now. I worry that if I boostrap myself into functionality, I’ll just suppress the memory even harder, meaning I’ll have to do all this AGAIN later. Triggering doesn’t seem to be working. I’m trying to use all my DBT skills and stay open and still but I’ve felt like a zombie for the past two weeks. There is suppressed screaming in my head, and I have no idea what it’s attached to.
Any advice would be welcome. I have a shrink and she doesn’t know what to do either.
Best part is this lady’s kids are both vaccinated, though she stopped vaccinating her son at two. Neither of them have autism. And by the way, this lady SMOKED throughout her pregnancy, but she’s telling my sister to not give her kid even one vaccine. Selfish asshole.
But! My sister’s talking with me about it and seems to be listening. Thanks for the links, guys! 😀 So I guess I’ll just have to undo the misinformation right up until it comes time for her to vaccinate her kid. Wish me luck!
@Anarchonist, hey you do whatever you have to do. I for one would never demand anyone cut ties with their family, even if they are a bunch of bigots. It’s really up to you how you navigate it. If you end up cutting ties, well, it’s their fault for being bigoted assholes. If you don’t, who could blame you for wanting to stay connected to your family? But it is a really shitty situation to be in, and have a butterfly! http://www.deviantart.com/art/Black-Swallowtail-On-My-Hand-144093010
RE: Alex
It’s good your sister’s listening. I’m pretty sure that if vaccines DID cause autism, we would’ve fucking figured it out by now, considering how commonplace they are. All my autistic friends fucking HATE the anti-vaxxer rhetoric, because on top of everything else, it acts like being autistic is a fate worse than death. It isn’t.
And yet, this stupid bullshit keeps getting recited, over and over! It’s like a fucking zombie, debunked over and over only to rise from its miserable grave once again, to instill dread and panic in hippies everywhere.
LBT, I know I can’t really do anything to help, but I’m sorry about the suck. I hope that it blows over soon and that the memory doesn’t turn out to be too traumatic.
@LBT, sorry if it seems obvious, but hypnosis, maybe? Sometimes dreaming helps me. Hope you get it sorted, though.
RE: Alex
Yeah, the only other method I know is hypnosis, but… it can go REALLY badly. (I once read a story about an old-school MPD shrink who would hypnotize his multi patients, and then have them relive traumas for an hour solid, until their session was over.) Also, at this point, I’m eager enough for the memory to come up that I wouldn’t put it past my brain to fabricate something just to appease itself, in that highly suggestible hypnotic state.
Also, my shrink has told me she isn’t comfortable trying it on me.
As for dreams, I’ve just been having nightmares. Lots and lots of nightmares. Mostly about school, for some bizarre reason.
RE: katz
At this point, I don’t care HOW traumatic it is. I just want it OVER.
Visualization? Like, it’s a boil that you can lance. Or it’s a bowel obstruction that you can X-Lax the fuck out of you? It’s a beaver dam that you can blow the fuck up? Or, you know, something gentler, like a meadow of snow melting away to reveal whatever it is. The tide going out.
I used to do non-dominant hand dialogue stuff, like speaking directly to the thing, whatever it is, and asking it what it is, and what it wants, and what it needs you to know or acknowledge, and write the answers with your non-dominant hand. Because you have to concentrate so much on forming the words, your conscious mind is distracted, letting the subconscious stuff slip through.
It sounds horrible, and if a bunch of us thinking loving thoughts toward you helps at all, we are.
RE: Unimaginative
I actually tried visualization a couple weeks ago. It caused an entity of fire and eyeballs to manifest in my headspace, and one of the kids had to bind it, which led to its own problems. (Yeah, didn’t expect that to happen either. Thanks, brain.)
I might try the handedness thing. (Though it’ll be less effective, since we’re ambidextrous.) I’ve never done that before, and hell, it’s worth a shot, at least it probably won’t manifest any more flaming eyeballs.
For now, I’m making comics and art and stories to stay calm.
Aw man, and it’s dinner time. *sigh* I really don’t want to eat.
The handed-ness thing is fun, for any value of “fun” that covers “messing about with your own headspace”.
Results vary for any of the below:
You can ask for the negative, which is asking yourself what you are worried is happening and will happen, and what any part of your system (which for me means “me”, but I imagine means something else for you?) feels at this given moment.
A basic NLP trick is asking yourself where you are visually, and where whatever is in relation to yourself on that visual place, and then asking about texture, size, stuff like that. Tends to give impressions of what you’re not really wanting to think about.
There’s an old brain-hack along the lines of just asking yourself “Am I willing to let this emotion into my consciousness at this time?” and then when the answer IS SO OBVIOUSLY FUCK NO FUCK THAT FUCK NO FOREVER ARGH CHRIST NO asking “So what part am I willing to feel right now and what does that tell me?” and then repeat ad nasuem until you realize you’ve gone through the whole lot.
You can ask infinite questions, which is literally just asking infinite questions (start with “So what’s that over there?”) and then eventually as you spend all your day thinking up random questions you circle towards asking about your emotional state and what’s going on sort of automatically.
Cognitive hacks are interesting.
But anyway that sounds like shit, good luck.
If any of you has ever wanted a stuffed hippocampus and/or you want to support me as an artist, I have another squishabe up for vote. Yep, it’s a hippocampus!
So if you like it, go give it a high score. And big thanks to everyone who previously voted for my squishable vampire bat and trilobite.
I did the left hand-right hand thing…the thing is, I didn’t believe or get the memory of what the person driving my left hand told me happened.
…STILL have not gotten them, but other bits of recall and circumstantial evidence points to the truth of what was said….Have not gotten most of them because the alter who has them is really ashamed of what went on, so we have to convince her that it wasn’t her fault before we get anywhere.
@Anarchonist…You have a great deal of empathy, and that is a quality much to be praised. I hope you’re able to successfully negotiate a healthier relationship with your mom.
The thing is, though… people don’t tend to change until they are damn good and ready.
It might be better to leave this issue as an elephant in the room.
But how big is this elephant?
Does your mom’s flaming homophobia and hypocrisy constitute a deal-breaker in the relationship between you and her?
Or is she still, overall, kind and loving enough to make her worth being around as a person?
Also, her guilt-tripping, does that make her too draining and demoralizing to be worth being around?
You’re allowed to say “She drains me, she makes me feel horrible when I’m around her, and therefore I want very little to do with her.” You and your mom are both grownups.
…I have a friend who…Well, I’d try to discuss politics, and it would go tits-up person to person. The thing is I dissociate really easily when talking to people if they upset me at all. So I tried debating him through email to figure out why he made me so angry.
Well, first he’s condescending, but…I didn’t realize he’s a freaking racist. Not just lightly, REALLY racist. I was actually dissociating because of the content of what he was saying.
Racism disgusts and upsets me.
If he hasn’t grasped the unfairness of racism by now he ain’t gonna, I don’t think.
I think the best I can ask for is that politics HAS to be out of bounds for he and I to talk about…
We have to fit our friendship around one really big-ass, really mean elephant, and I don’t know that it’ll work.
…My mom doesn’t want to talk about my childhood any more.
For her, it’s finished business. Unfortunately, I’m still decanting memories and processing, so for me it’s NOT finished business. I have to stifle about certain things.
In her case though, it’s only a dwarf elephant. Sometimes I have to avoid her, but mostly I am okay around her.
LBT, the flaming eyeballs sounds terrifying. The kids in your head are brave little fiends, themselves. If that thing had shown up in my headspace, I’d be hiding in my headspace closet.
Brave little toaster, I am not.
Katz! The hippocampus is adorable! I don’t have an account, but now I am very tempted to sign up, just to vote for the hippocampus of adorability.
Car update: I’m about 95% sure the first guys were trying to be fraudsters. A second place looked at it, and were all “you’re battery is toast, but your alternator looks just fine”, and then they immediately started suggesting a list of places I could buy a battery cheaper than what they would sell one for.
I bought a Chilton manual from them by way of thanks (and making future car troubleshooting easier), bought myself a new battery, and as soon as my phone has charge I’ll be off to buy a $10 volt meter from walmart, snag a buddy to rev my engine and push all the electrical buttons, and check my alternator myself.
If it checks out fine, then I have to draft my “Thanks, but I’d like a refund of my deposit, since you told me I’d need to replace a part that’s just dandy. If you can’t do that, I’d like to swing by and pick up my spare part. Thanks, but I’ve no need for you to ever poke about under my hood again.”
Any good advice for that kind of conversation? I’m working on the “make sure I know as much about my alternator and battery as they do” stuff (in case they try the making me feel guilty or uncertain type nonsense) but I absolutely suck at confrontation, and I kind of suck at having the guts to tell people that they’re full of manure…
If I had a nickel every time someone said “It only takes 5 minutes to sign up for thus-and-such,” I would have several nickels, so I will simply say that I will be extremely appreciative of anyone who takes the time to sign up.
@ pangloss, just rehearse saying what you wrote in that last paragraph a bunch of times…
Except with your eyes closed and visualizing a butthurt, dishonest mechanic standing in front of you.
Is that a manual that teaches you to drive really slow?
If so I probably need one…Stock Yarises are not happy at 95.
Or I just need to give in and mod the car (WHEE!)
If I get a better job the latter will happen because (WHEE!)
katz, just voted for your hippocampus. Soooo cute!
Extra round of kitty hugs (with bonus furs) for everyone.
Anarchonist, my sister is a racist and we’ve just agreed to avoid the topic after a few almost-arguments. She’s not going to change, I’m not going to change, and we’re too fond of each other and have enough interests in common that, in Unimaginative’s words, I’m just going to have to live with being a hypocrite on this. She’s my only worthwhile family member apart from our mother. I think blahlistic put it best, about weighing up whether a relationship is worthwhile.
LBT, firey eyeball entity, holy shit. D: