one of the more valuable things I’ve learned in life as a survivor of a mentally unstable parent is that it is likely that no one has thought through it as much as you have.
no, your friend probably has not noticed they cut you off four times in this conversation.
no, your brother didn’t realize his music was that loud while you were studying.
no, your bff or S.O. doesn’t remember that you’re on a tight deadline right now.
no, no one else is paying attention to the four power dynamics at play in your friend group right now.
a habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight….it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age.
Here’s the thing: most people don’t do that. I’m not saying everyone else is oblivious, I’m saying the over analysis of minor nuances is a habit of abuse.
I have a rule: I do not respond to subtext. This includes guilt tripping, silent treatments, passive aggressive behavior, etc. I see it. I notice it. I even sometimes have to analyze it and take a deep breath and CHOOSE not to respond. Because whether it’s really there or just me over-reading things that actually don’t mean anything, the habit of lending credence to the part of me that sees danger in the wrong shift of body weight…that’s toxic for me. And dangerous to my relationships.
The best thing I ever did for myself and my relationships was insist upon frank communication and a categorical denial of subtext. For some people this is a moral stance. For survivors of mentally unstable parents this is a requirement of recovery.
I’d like to add a thing inspired by these tags: people care. They all care. They care so much. That feeling is SUCH a common one among survivors of mentally ill parents and abuse survivors. We think people don’t care, that not noticing is a product of not caring because we have been trained in the toxic habit of measuring our worth by how well we manage others. And we imagine that everyone operates that way.
Other people don’t measure their caring that way. Your friends and family and loved ones….they care. Even if they don’t notice every tiny detail. They also don’t know how to read that things are not okay by the shift of your weight or a heavier than usual silence. You have to learn to speak it. I know it’s scary. I know it’s hard. But you have to learn to tell people “I am not okay. I need your help.” And sometimes even then they won’t hear that what you are saying is your world is collapsing. They don’t measure “not okay” on the same scale as you do.
But they care. Please know that they care. When it feels like they don’t. When it feels like you have to shout to be heard, when your tiny steps, as monumental as they feel to you, don’t bring you close enough and they ask you to leap farther and it’s terrifying. Know that they do that because they care. Because they WANT to hear you. They WANT to know. They care so much. Don’t let the legacy of your trauma, your abuse, your pain rob you of that knowledge.
you have a brain, you are capable of critical thinking, you can sift through the material and keep what is edifying for you and discard what isn’t
flaws don’t necessarily make material worthless
all right i queued this last night because i was already posting a lot and didn’t want to flood anyone’s dash but you guys i need to talk about this more.
like, okay. i grew up REALLY STRICT christian. like. every piece of media i consumed underwent a fine-toothed comb by my parents to be sure there wasn’t anything “sinful” in it. I got into a tearful, screaming fight with my mother over whether I was allowed to watch a piece of educational children’s material on PBS because one of the characters said “damn” once.
(I’m still not sure they did. In retrospect, I think my purity-focused mother misheard something and, having her suspicions confirmed that you couldn’t trust any “secular” source not to be sinful, reacted accordingly.)
(Pay attention, that parenthetical was also relevant.)
Do you know what my teenage rebellion was? Listening to the oldies station in the car when I had my driver’s license and could go places on my own. That was my big fuck-you to my parents: listening to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel and the Fifth Dimension when they couldn’t tell me how I shouldn’t be listening to them because the creators of that music were drug-addled, free-loving atheists whose own disregard for God and religion might just infect my impressionable spirit. Like I was gonna listen to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and go do LSD and become an atheist. This was my teenage rebellion in the year 1999.
I’m 35 now. And all right so I became agnostic. But I didn’t become a drug addicted prostitute because I loved listening to psychedelic rock music as a teenager. (And you know what? Even if I had become a drug addicted prostitute, I’d still have worth as a human being, so dissect that one.) And it wasn’t even the psychedelic rock music that turned me agnostic: It was Christianity itself. But that’s another story altogether.
My point here is: Y’all are on here acting like my goddamn parents, “don’t watch this” and “don’t listen to that” because this character does XYZ problematic thing and this author said ABC ignorant thing two years ago at a con when they were put on the spot in an interview. If you watch this movie where a teenager falls in love with someone five years older than them, you’re going to become a pedophile! If you read this book by an author who once used an outdated term for someone in the trans community, then you’re a transphobe!
Y’all need to sit the fuck down and stop acting like nobody ever taught you to think for yourself, because I know damn well that you’re capable of critical thought and you don’t need your media chewed up and spit into your mouth like a baby bird. And I’m an adult and I sure the hell don’t, so stop telling me I’m going to choke because I’m consuming something complicated, complex, and not already pre-morally-dissected for me.
“Many women take a “wait and see”attitude when signs of abuse appear in a partner’s behavior. They tell themselves: “It’s so hard to leave him right now because I still love him. But if he gets worse, that will lessen my feelings for him, and then breaking up will be easier.” This is a dangerous trap. The longer you are with an abuser, and the more destructive he becomes, the harder it can be to extricate yourself, for the following reasons: The more time he has to tear down your self-opinion, the more difficult it will be for you to believe that you deserve better treatment. The more time he has to hurt you emotionally, the more likely your energy and initiative are to diminish, so that it gets harder to muster the strength to get out. The more damage he does to your relationships with friends and family, the less support you will have for the difficult process of ending the relationship. The longer you have been living with his cycles of intermittent abuse and kind, loving treatment, the more attached you are likely to feel to him, through a process known as traumatic bonding. For all of these reasons, act sooner rather than later. At the same time, if you have already been in a relationship with an abuser for five years, or ten, or thirty, it is never too late to recover your rights and to get free.”
wait….are any americans aware that the cia overthrew the democratically-elected premier of iran in 1953 because he wouldn’t concede to western oil demands….and how that coup was the reason for the shah’s return to power, the iranian revolution, and the resulting fundamentalist dictatorship…..like, america literally dissolved iranian democracy and no one knows about it???
No. No we don’t know about it.
Americans aren’t told this shit.
The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.
Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.
The only reason I knew about it is because there’s a thirty second summary of the event in Persepolis. Those thirty seconds flipped my entire worldview.
“All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer is a good, accessible text for people who want to know more about this.
!!!
I had to explain literally this to one of my co-workers, who is so fuckin racist against Middle Eastern people it’s insane.
She’s 60. She never heard of this.
As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.
He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods. Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.
And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”
And she just looked floored.
“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”
“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “
She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.
“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.
And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”
She lived through it.
American schools don’t teach you any of this sort of thing.
I thought of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi too. Never underestimate the power of a good book.
Every year in my entire schooling in small town Indiana, we’d start the year studying the revolutionary war. By the end of the year we would reach world war 2. The next year, the cycle would repeat. Every year. Revolutionary war to world war 2. Rinse and repeat.
We never studied the Vietnam War. Korea. No current events. No ancient cultures. No history of other countries. When 9-11 happened I was in high school, and me and my classmates legitimately had no idea who would attack the U.S. or why. We were baffled. Because we were taught our entire lives that America is always the good guy.
History class in America is an utter joke.
it’s very important that people in america know that the reason the taliban exists is because of america. We funded and trained the mujahideen (featuring osama bin laden) to fight back against the soviet union. and we didn’t just throw them a few dollars and some guns, the combined financial investment of the US and saudi arabia was 40 billion dollars. Osama himself said that he never came up with the idea to fly planes into the twin towers, he was inspired to do it as a result of the US backed Israeli invasion of lebanon and the siege of beirut which predominantly featured the destruction of over 500 buildings (and the starvation and bombing of innocent civilians) and directly influenced the decision to destroy american buildings. the US has a long history of destabilizing and overthrowing governments and then just bailing, throwing countries into chaos, and then decades later when the results of those actions come to fruition the government is like “i have no idea why this country hates us, we’ve never been anything but nice to them, and also we help out so many people, and we’re the freest country in the world (◡ ‿ ◡ ✿)”
do yourself a favor and dig into the history of the middle east and central/south asia (afghanistan and pakistan aren’t in the middle east, just fyi, and they also don’t speak arabic), US imperialism, banana republics, and the true cost of living in the land of the free and home of the brave (some exclusions apply)
I also second reading Persepolis. For those who don’t know, it’s a graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi about her living through as a child – young adult the Islamic Revolution in Iran, with family members who were communisit and socialist, and it goes into how America greatly influenced the chaos of that time.
For a great civilian perspective of the Bosnian War in the 1990s, I highly recommend Zlata’s Diary by Zlata Filipovic.
American imperialism has destroyed so many lives, and in America we are indoctrinated with propaganda to believe that we free, good, and brave, when in fact it’s the opposite.
Read, educate yourselves and others, because the American school system won’t.
@hiranyaksha I feel like some people in your ask box should read this for starters…
This is his Jokers first day on the job, and he’s being such a good boy.
Donald W. Cook is a Los Angeles attorney with decades of experience bringing lawsuits over police dog bites — and mostly losing. He blames what he calls “The Rin Tin Tin Effect” — juries think of police dogs as noble, and have trouble visualizing how violent they can be during an arrest.
“[Police] use terms like ‘apprehend’ and ‘restrain,’ to try to portray it as a very antiseptic event,” Cook says. “But you look at the video and the dog is chewing away on his leg and mutilating him.”
Cook says the proliferation of smart phones and body cameras is capturing a reality that used to be lost on juries. “If it’s a good video,” he says, “it makes a case much easier to prevail on.”
The new generation of videos is capturing scenes of K9 arrests that are bloodier and more violent than imagined by the public. An NPR examination of police videos shows some officers using biting dogs against people who show minimal threat to officers, and a degree of violence that would be unacceptable if inflicted directly by the officers.
…
In fact, in many videos, the release of a dog appears to escalate the violence of an arrest.
“You just look at the dog as the source of pain and you do everything you can to address that pain,” says Seth Stoughton. He’s a former police officer, now an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force. “Those shouted commands — you’ll deal with that later, when the pain stops.”
And yet suspects who kick and try to shake the dog off are often accused of resisting arrest.
i don’t care what this dog in particular is being trained to do. furthering the idea that police dogs are somehow cute or good directly contributes to injustice and the perceived acceptability of police violence
My aunt rescues and rehabilitates german shepherds, and the vast majority are failed police dogs. The rehab process for these dogs is intense. They are trained to be hyper vigilant and to resort to violence. They are often is worse condition than formerly abused animals.
I spent a summer training one of these balls of anxiety. She was too fast and strong for my aunt to train her, so I did it. The biggest hurdle was getting her out of the mindset that biting someone gets her a treat. I had to let her bite my arm, forcible break the hold, and kennel her all without giving her a response because these dogs are trained to equate someone screaming at them as Go Time.
By letting her attack me and showing her that I was stronger than her and then not allowing her to play with the other dogs was what finally got her to stop attacking whenever she heard a loud noise or was surprised or just felt like it.
She still had to be homed in a gun-free, pet-free, child-free home because of the sheer anxiety she was bred for. These dogs are not cute, they are horribly mistreated.
When I explain cultural misappropriation to children, I use the example of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.
There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.
When Jack tries to get the folk of Halloween town to make Christmas gifts for children, etc., children understand that the Halloween town folk do not have the full context for the objects they are making, and they are able to see that the direct repercussions and consequences are very harmful.
what i like about this is the implication that if jack had taken the time to understand christmas town, bringing christmas to halloween town would not have been harmful. that’s how it works, folks. cultural sharing is GOOD, it’s only misappropriation when it’s done in ignorance and disrespect.
So it’s not just accidentally removing things form their context; he has intentionally disregard the meaning of the rituals he purports to be recreating, making them more fun for the recreaters but not like what the rituals are supposed to be and without the related significance.
This is the best way to conceptualize the wrong way to share culture I have ever seen and I think I finally get where people are coming from when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”
Getting pretty fucking annoyed at all the ableist reporting on Stephen Hawking’s death so like hey uh just a nice little summary of the core of literally every article about Stephen Hawking’s death and the reason why they fucking suck
Stephen Hawking didn’t achieve the things he did ‘despite’ his disability. He didn’t ‘overcome’ them in order to achieve what he did. He had a physical disability. He did physics. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Heck, as the fucking ableist mess of an article Buzzfeed posted said, he himself said "My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in.”
They also included a quote from another physicist that says “He thinks about the universe differently, due to his physical disability. That enabled him to make discoveries that no one else could make. And he has. They have shaken the foundations of physics.”
Stephen Hawking and his scientific discoveries weren’t made in spite of his disabilities. His scientific discoveries and the achievements he made happened with his disabilities, and possibly were informed by them, and his disabilities shouldn’t be shunned or seen as something that held him back while his achievements – that he’s literally said weren’t held back by his disability – are celebrated
It’s because girls are taught we deserve to be mistreated and abuse is love.
It’s because I had rocks thrown at me when I was a little girl with skinny legs, with blood streaming down my face, leaving a scar that stays with me to this day, and I was told “he does that because he likes you!”
It’s because so-called “love” stories, all over, everywhere, tell women that the man who obsesses over them, controls them, and abuses them is the one who loves them.
It’s because genuinely good men (not Nice Guys™ who think women owe them sex for basic human decency) are desexualized and sidelined because they don’t conform to the ideals of domineering, entitled, violent masculinity.
It’s because women are told they are responsible for fixing men with the power of their love, that women are selfish if they don’t offer their emotional labor and bodies to men who demand it.
It’s because women are told we should revolve around men, their success, their self-realization, their redemption, because we are not our own persons but accessories in others’ lives.
It’s because women and girls don’t get the space to see themselves cherished and treated as equals in relationships, and instead are bombarded with messages that we are milestones in men’s stories, their rewards, their conquests.
It’s because we’re not taught to say “no,” we’re taught to smile and accommodate and let them down gently and give and give and give and ask for nothing back.
It’s because we are blamed for the wrongs committed by men, because men can do no wrong and we must be tempting them to evil.
It’s because if we speak out we are called names and barraged with threats, because we must be silent, silent and smiling and sweet and we are not allowed to scream when we are hurt.
Because he likes you.
It’s because women are not treated as human beings. It’s because we’re taught to swallow the message that we are less, and we are taught to like it.
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