Y'all nothing makes me realize how low my bar for being ‘well-treated’ is as fast as having a conversation with my extended family.
Problems I currently have include:
- My aunt who is purportedly coming up to visit tomorrow and expects us to drop everything on the off chance that she actually deigns to drive all the way to Maine and honor us with her presence
- Relatedly, the sect of my mother’s family who only speaks to her when they’re struggling with the fact that her mother is possibly the worst human in the world
- My grandparents who are currently refusing to speak to my father because they’re awful people
- My other aunt who is just a manipulative bitch and has currently convinced my father (her brother) that she’s on his side against their parents and that’s going to be ugly when it inevitably
- My grandmother on Mom’s side who is SOMEHOW not dead yet and wow, God, please
- The ongoing misapprehension that my extended family seems to labor under in which I actually give a good goddamn about them
- The even more dangerous belief they seem to be possessed of in which they have any say about what I do
- Their absolute delusion that they have an automatic right to being involved in our lives because well, we’re family
My overwhelming and undeniable bitterness about this is not news, but what IS very annoying is that:
- I am bitter
- Brenneth is also very bitter in the scene I’m trying to write here
- To my shock, writing someone being bitter while feeling bitter yourself is a good way to spiral into being bitter about other things
As such I have gotten Literally Nothing Done and I’m really aggravated about all of it.
I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.
Yep, this is a very, very common reason for procrastinating. It’s also why procrastination, even though it’s often associated with laziness, is a fairly common trait in a lot of people with anxiety and perfectionism issues.
This idea - You’re not lazy, you’re protecting yourself - hit me really hard while reading, of all things, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which turns out to be as much about how brains work and how relationships work as how orgasms work.
In an early part of the book she talks about Fight/Flight/Freeze responses to threats–the example she uses is being attacked by a lion. You fight, if you think you can defeat the lion; you run away, if you think you can escape the lion; and when you think there’s nothing you can do, when you feel the lion’s jaws closing on your neck, you freeze, because dying will hurt less that way. You just stop and go numb and wait for it to be over, because that is the last way to protect any scrap of yourself.
Later in the book, she talks about the brain process that motivates you to pursue incentives, describing it as a little monitor that gauges your progress toward a goal versus the effort you’re expending. If it feels like too little progress is being made you get frustrated, get angry, and, eventually, you… despair. You stop trying.
You go numb and wait for it to be over, because that’s the only way left to protect yourself.
So it occurred to me that these are basically the same thing–when facing a difficult task, where failure feels like a Threat, you can get frustrated and fight it out–INCREASE DOING THE THING until you get where you’re going. Or you can flee–try to solve the problem some other way than straight on, changing your goal, changing your approach, whatever. Fight or flight.
But both of those only apply when you think the problem is solvable, right? If the problem isn’t solvable, then you freeze. You despair.
And if you’re one of those Smart Kids (Smart Girls, especially) who was praised for being smart so that all tasks in the world came to be divided between Ooh This Is Easy and I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DO THAT AND IF I FUCK UP I WILL DIE, then… it’s pretty easy to see how you lose the frustration/anger stage of working toward a goal, because your brain goes straight to freeze/despair every time. Things are easy and routine or they are straight up impossible.
So, you know, any time you manage to pull yourself up and give that lion a smack on the nose, or go stumbling away from it instead of just falling down like a fainting goat as soon as you spot it on the horizon, give yourself a gold star from me. Because this is some deeply wired survival-brain stuff. Even if logically you know that that term paper is not a lion, it really is like that sometimes.
Oo, I like this!
(via primarybufferpanel)
Anonymous asked: I am really glad about your tags on that mom post you did. Everyone is always ragging on me because I do t talk to my mother, but they don't understand how shitty she is. And things like you said just help me not feel super shitty as well. Thank you.
Listen, honey, let me tell you a story about my family. First of all, my mom and dad are the kindest, most generous, best people I have ever had the privilege to know, and I am grateful every day for their presence in my life.
That being said.
My Yaya, my mom’s mom, used to leave bruises on me and convince me that I was insane, and that’s nothing compared to what she did to my mother. She has caused directly four (five?) nervous breakdowns in my cousins, and drove one to the point where he called his sister to come keep an eye on him in case he tried to kill himself. My Nana, my dad’s mom, is a decent person, or could be if she didn’t stand idly by while her husband turns violent and aggressive. He’s a bitter, cruel, misogynist old man, and the shit they are literally right now putting my father through makes me see red. I could gladly punch any of them in the face. My response to hearing that Yaya has kicked the bucket will be literal tears of relief, followed by copious amounts of alcohol. The best I can hope for is to be ignored, and I have resigned myself to that, but my god am I ready to be done with their shit.
So here’s the point to this unnecessarily personal rant: you’re doing right by yourself, and that’s what matters. You looked at your situation and chose life over limb, and I’m really, really proud of you for it. That is a brave thing to do and the only people who understand that are the people who are in the same situation.
Family isn’t supposed to hurt like this. You are doing the right thing.
Anonymous asked: DID YOU WATCH SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON BECAUSE THAT MOVIE AND BALTO WERE MY CHILDHOOD
Okay…so.
My relationship with a lot of movies I watched as a little kid is messy. Spirit being one of them. On the one hand, I think I recall liking it quite a lot. On the other hand, I watched it with my cousins, which is pretty much a knee-jerk hate response because my cousins took their mother and grandmother’s perspective on me. There’s a lot of movies that fall into this category, or, alternatively, the category of “I was too fucked up to deal with this movie as a kid” like for example Spirited Away. It’s a pretty benign movie that I inexplicably had screaming nightmares about. All of these movies fall into the much larger category of ‘very vaguely recalled because they were casualties of memory repression.’
So…I guess the end result is: yeah, I watched it, but like…it’s complicated and I’ll probably rewatch it now that I’m an adult on the other side of some therapy and get a lot more out of it. Sorry this got kind of weirdly personal rather than being a response to the movie.
Anonymous asked: please, what is "gaslighting"?
Okay, this is a good question, I’m going to try to be clear.
So, gaslighting is fundamentally a method of psychological abuse intended to make the victim question their own sanity. The word’s been in use for about a century, common since about the 60′s, originating with a 1938 stage play called Gas Light featuring a woman whose husband would manipulate small parts of their environment (notably the gas lights in their house) and then insist to her and to everyone else that she was remembering incorrectly, mistaken, or outright delusional. Gaslighting basically means telling someone with absolute confidence that you’re right and their memory is flawed, and you’d be surprised how damaging it can be to a person. It’s a terrifying experience, to believe you can’t trust your own mind, and it makes an abuse victim a much easier target. It’s considered something of a hallmark of psychological abuse–so much so that it’s used in brainwashing techniques.
For example:
Sue* invites Jane over to her house for a playdate. Let’s assume they’re ten or so–old enough to ‘know better.’ Jane brings a doll, and Sue likes the doll very much. At the end of the playdate, Jane goes to pick up her doll and take it home, and Sue starts crying and won’t let go of Jane’s doll.
“This is my doll, I want it back,” says Jane.
“This is MY doll and you’re lying!” Sue shouts. “You’re trying to steal it from me!”
“No, I’m not,” Jane says, “I brought this doll here in the first place.” She’s confused, because she knows the doll is hers, but Sue is her friend and, normally, Jane would trust her word.
Sue insists that the doll is hers, and starts screaming for her mother. Sue’s mother shows up and wants to know what’s wrong.
“Jane’s trying to steal my doll!” Sue cries.
Sue’s mother looks at the doll and knows that Sue doesn’t own it, she remembers seeing Jane bring the doll over, but she says, “Jane, give Sue her doll back and stop lying.”
“I’m not lying!” Jane says, starting to cry. She remembers bringing the doll over, she remembers getting it for Christmas, she remembers all this, but…Sue and Sue’s mother seem awfully sure. And Sue’s mother is a grown-up. “It’s my doll!”
Sue’s mother reaches down and picks up the doll and looks at it. “I remember buying this for Sue,” the mother says, looking disappointed down at Jane. “I can’t believe you would lie about something like this.”
“I’m not lying,” Jane insists, crying harder.
“Then you’re imagining it,” Sue’s mother says, handing the doll back to Sue. “Don’t be such a baby, stop crying. And get your imagination under control.”
Sue, doll in hand, immediately stops crying. She smiles at Jane, and says, “Or maybe you’re just crazy.”
Names/toy in question have been changed
Or, alternatively:
Yam-In-Chief: My inauguration was yuuuge, biggest inauguration in history.
Media: Um? No? No it wasn’t?
Yam-In-Chief: Yes it was!
Media: It literally wasn’t, we can prove it, look, we have photographic evidence and statistics.
Yam-In-Chief: You’re fake news! You’re lying to the American public!
Media: ??????????
So, on the subject of resisting gaslighting: trust yourself. If you believe you can’t, if for example you suffer hallucinatory experiences that make you uncertain, find someone whose report of the past you do trust. Or, barring that, write it down somewhere you can keep safe and look at it if you feel like you’re being lied to.
Hope this was helpful, sweetheart!
So is a familiar police procedural or a familiar Justice League cartoon better for pre-dentist anxiety insomnia?
