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.
some things that horror movie culture has taught you are scary…. are just ableist
….clarify?
okay sure. psychosis? scarier to have than to know someone who has it. DID? im more a threat to myself than people around me. wheelchairs and psych meds? are tools that help people live more functional and flexible lives and are not judgments of the persons character and for sure are not scary things. and for real, intellectually disabled people are not threats, but movies love to make them villains because they act different and understand the world differently. and people with notable physical differences? people who’s bodies look different? people with scars, growths, amputations, etc? are literally just people. and seeing themselves painted like monsters on the big screen is absolutely sickening and damaging to how society will see them.
its not only bad writing but its extremely harmful to people who actually live with conditions that are misrepresented in media. when i found out i had DID, my mom freaked out because her only point of reference was Sybil. when i was younger and first went on psych meds, i thought it meant i was set on a track to be a bad person, because in so many movies and video games you find out the bad guy has medication in his bed side table for some sort of psych disorder. the worst thing a hallucination has ever made me do was wake my mom up at 3 AM to check my bathroom to see if the bugs i saw everywhere were real and the worst thing an “episode” of any sort has made me do is hurt myself. my ptsd doesnt make me kill people, my alters dont kidnap people, my autism doesnt make me so morally unaware that ill murder senselessly, my ocd doesnt make me hurt people etc etc etc
literally the only “horror” is the ableism. and the only way you can write good horror about disability and mental illness is if the focus is on how society and the medical field treat us rather than focusing on how we are apparently so scary, threatening, and bad.
STOP making posts that say, “If you scroll past this, you have no heart!” or, “You’re a monster if you scroll past this.” As someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, this really triggers me and harms me.
As someone else with OCD I wanna chime into say that posts like “reblog or you’ll have your worst week” or “like and reblog or your mom will die” also really trigger me and directly tie into my obsessions. If you MUST reblog them at least tag them as reblog bait! And stop tagging reblog games as reblog bait instead, tag them as reblog games!!! So people can properly blacklist what they do and don’t wanna see because those are both very different!
What people without OCD don’t understand is that even though we know it’s not real, we take those posts seriously, even the “good” ones like “Reblog money cat for money” or something can seriously fuck with our OCD. It leads to horrible panic attacks and giving into compulsions. If you wanna help us out please PLEASE tag reblog bait of all kinds.
Holy fucking shit is this important or what!! I’m going to do my best to remember to tag like this from now on
can i just chime in that i have hyperempathy as a part of my autism and it makes it really hard to scroll past those “you’re a bad person if you don’t reblog” type things without getting MAJOR anxiety about it. like even if its good content that deserves to be rb’d, don’t guilt people into it
I don’t know which disorder is causing my problems with this, but yes, please do not guilt people into reblogging things. It mostly doesn’t even help your post to be noticed – a positive approach is better for everybody, in (almost) every situation. From what I heard, those guilt-based strategies are annoying to people who don’t have any mental problems too.
Surprisingly, nobody likes to be guilted into something.
When I was a kid, my mother once found me in the kitchen, swearing at the dishwasher and shoving its filter around. She had me step aside and showed me a better way of finding out what was wrong with the filter: looking for objects stuck in it, moving it from side to side, taking it out and inspecting it and its seating more closely, and so on.
At the time, this looked like magic. The filter wasn’t working, and I was angry – when I got mad, it felt impossible to do anything other than fight the target of my anger. But my mom was capable of doing otherwise. When faced with the same situation, she calmed down almost immediately and got systematic.
When I said this seemed magical, she told me that she used to fight inoperative appliances too, until she was shown enough times that a systematic approach works better on complicated, broken inanimate objects. From repeated exposure, she learned a mental motion which she called “Don’t get mad, get curious.”
I think there are three broad categories of response to problems (situations where trying what’s worked before isn’t producing good results):
Get mad
Don’t get mad, give up
Don’t get mad, get curious
They’re appropriate to different kinds of problems, and it’s useful to consider in advance which problems call for which reactions. It’s also useful to learn how to switch modes on purpose. This post covers which contexts call for which reactions; how to switch modes is an open question, and approaches tend to be highly individualised.
Getting mad is useful when:
You’re being mistreated,
Both submission and strategic action have failed repeatedly,
Future cooperation is off the table or isn’t worth it.
Getting mad is best used as stop energy: it’s a way of getting someone to stop doing a thing you dislike, to go away and leave you alone, or to give up their claim on some resource. It’s a bad way to convince someone about matters of fact, it burns goodwill (if any exists), and it makes you less capable of strategic thought, which may put you at risk.
Giving up is useful when getting mad wouldn’t serve your values and curiosity has produced a lot of dead ends. It’s an adaptive response if you’re sad and tired, and don’t expect more negotiation to help your position now, but want to leave the door open for future discussion and potential compromise.
Giving up helps you pick your battles. It’s a bad way to engage with situations that are likely to kick you when you’re down, and/or net-negative situations you really could just leave. It’s a good way to sustain net-positive relationships at those times when your curiosity has been used up.
Getting curious is useful when getting mad wouldn’t serve your values, and you don’t feel like giving up yet. Getting curious helps you learn new information that might be useful: it’s easier to be surprised by the output of curiosity than it is to be surprised by the output of anger or surrender.
It’s the best response to situations where you want something you haven’t yet gotten, getting what you want is feasible, and the thing you want is not best obtained through intimidation. However, curiosity isn’t a generically appropriate response. It costs willpower, which isn’t always available, and it leaves you open to manipulation if you’re interacting with an unsolvable problem.
At times, I’ve struggled with overusing one or two of these strategies and neglecting the other(s). My problem-solving ability is significantly improved by using each of these strategies only when they’ll help.
that I used the words “ego-syntonic” and “ego-dystonic” when talking to a psychiatrist was used as evidence by that psychiatrist that I was obviously faking, additionally, the fact that I have read and memorized various portions of the dsm was presented as evidence by a psychologist that I was obviously faking
this is an attitude I have commonly encountered amongst mh professionals, which is, If You Appear To Have Accessed The Forbidden Psychiatric Knowledge And You Are A Patient, That Is A Bad Sign
like I remember a psychiatrist who got mad at me for my explaining that if I was bipolar I had to be having a manic episode and not a hypomanic episode because my symptoms were, by the criteria in the dsm, definitively manic and not hypomanic
the same psychiatrist brushed it off when i explained that me stimming was not an ocd compulsion, because it did not meet any of the dsm criteria for being a compulsion, saying that “well, no one is ever a textbook case“
same psychiatrist again, said “excuse me, are you the doctor?” when i was genuinely trying to be helpful by suggesting a starting dosage for a med I had been on before
he was clearly very threatened by me knowing or indicating that I knew anything about Official Psychiatric Information, and this is, aside from being very frustrating, is completely fascinating to me
why is it a threat if I know psychiatric terminology? why is it a threat if I have read the dsm? why is a diagnosis only valid if the patient doesn’t have the faintest idea what it means and adamantly disagrees that they have it? (one example: I was dxed with bpd for the first time, had never heard the term and disagreed, saw a different psychiatrist who I told about the dx and the fact that I had googled it and now I was more receptive to the dx given that I had read more about it, and this psychiatrist told me I “shouldn’t self diagnose” and dxed me with bipolar instead. in this instance, me agreeing with the bpd dx instantly made it no longer applicable)
like there is very much a power thing in psychiatry where the ideal patient knows nothing about their diagnosis or medication beyond what they are told by a mh professional, agrees with whatever they are told, and then complies with no further question, complaint or disagreement
I literally just describe the symptoms as I experience them and pretend I don’t know what any of it means or any of the psychiatric jargon because playing dumb is the only way I can get doctors to believe I’m actually experiencing those symptoms.
do you ever feel yourself slowly losing your current hyperfixation but you’re not particularly interested in anything else rn so you have nothing to fill that void and ur just bored and ready for death
Lets talk about how hard it is to open up to someone about being sad for no reason. Lets talk about how hard it is to explain to your friends and family that you have this heavy feeling in your chest for no reason. Lets talk about how hard it is to understand why you’re having a panic attack while just taking a walk back home. Lets talk about how hard it is to understand your own self and how scary it is to feel like the whole world is falling on your shoulders and you have no idea why .
It so hard to start a conversation and say hello, I’m sad for no reason and you’re just going to have to deal with it. No, not much you can do will fix it. Yes, it will be irrational and will never make any sense to you. But you have to deal with it because I can’t change. I have a lifelong dehabilitating disease.
Luckily, two of my great friends, Jensen who everybody knows very well, and my friend Kelly who I work with, came to my trailer to check in on me and talked to me for probably an hour or so and then, I was like, “all right guys, I’m going through a tough time right now. I don’t know what it is, but I’m just going to keep my legs moving. I’m going to keep fighting.” They let me go that day. They were like, “Hey buddy, go home. Call your family, and you’re off work. Come back to work tomorrow.” – Jared about Jensen helping him when he was diagnosed with depression. [x]
artherra 