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probablyhuntersmom · 1 year

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A Bit of Mental Health 101 with Hunter: Analyses by a Therapist

Disclaimer: This is in no way a substitute for therapy: it's only psychoeducation. Please consult a therapist and/or hotline and get the help you need if you are experiencing mental health difficulties, especially if experiencing distress or issues that feel unmanageable.

Warnings: themes such as abuse and trauma ahead.

I thought to share some pieces of info from a few counselling theories and general mental info, which are way easier to grasp when I tie them to specific Hunter scenes. These might lead you to some realizations about yourself or someone else, which you could then bring up with a therapist if you like.

1. Survival Stances/Communication Stances: You might spot these in yourself or those around you. They are responses to stress and anxiety when you interact with other people. There are 5 in total; the first 4 are indicators of low self-worth and are where our childhood wounds are; the last one means you are healthily able to be present with difficult emotions and respond with relative calmness and clear thinking. Each one involves whether or not you are acknowledging three things: yourself (Self), the people you're interacting with (Other), and viewing the situation clearly (Context). The stances come from a theory called Satir Transformational Systemic Therapy (STST), or the Satir Model, invented by Virginia Satir who earned the title of "Mother of Family Therapy".

Placating:

It disregards Self, but recognizes Other and Context. You may blame yourself for something that isn't your fault at all. This is very common, especially with many parents in society who fail to acknowledge their child's pain, and who raise parentified children. As you can imagine, the way Belos raised Hunter would make the poor kid quite a Placater.

Blaming:

The opposite of Placating. Disregards the Other, but recognizes Self and Context. Definitely rare in Hunter, but being raised in the toxic environment of the castle and holding a high rank would've contributed to these tendencies. Maybe the closest thing would be him defensively snapping at Alador as shown above. What he could've chosen to do instead was calmly persuade Alador that he was in fact, not eager to return to Belos and why, independent of what Alador might think. But to do that in a calm manner would've been tough since the Day of Unity affected everyone.

Super-Reasonable:

Disregards Self and Other, only paying attention to Context. Also very common in my experience because we as a whole are a emotions-adverse, grief-adverse and find-quick-solutions/resolve-inconveniences-quickly sort of society. Emotions aren't often given the space they need to be experienced. In the screenshot above, Hunter is emotionally detaching from the validity of his own betrayal-related pain (disregarding Self), saying Gus is foolish and that his points aren't valid (disregarding Other), and trying to use pure cold logic to intellectualize why there's no point of paying attention to what they actually need in their dynamic.

Irrelevant:

The opposite of Super-Reasonable. It disregards all three areas, and people in this category are usually the class clowns or jokester types. Their stress response is to try and lighten the mood in the room quickly with something off-topic so that they don't need to feel anxiety. I haven't noticed it in obvious ways in Hunter, but when he quickly cuts Luz off from potentially mentioning that he's a grimwalker above, trying to put on a big smile and act all jolly/positive...it's the closest he's gotten. It would become an issue if repeated jokester behavior to avoid what needs addressing, is not benefitting his relationships with people who are actually trustworthy.

Leveling:

The healthy stance out of all 5. You are a Leveler if you can be calm, firm and understanding of the current situation, and (the following is to minimize defensive reactions from the other party) respectful of both your views and other people's views, when in conflict with others. However, obviously you should never remain in a conflict if it gets actually dangerous for yourself. (Obviously I would tell anyone to run from Belos! He is physically dangerous, not just emotionally, and we know he won't listen to reason. In the above situation, poor Hunter was in a crazy life-threatening situation)

Two important notes: - Placaters and Blamers may unhealthily attract one another in romantic relationships, friendships, family dynamics, work relationships. I'm not too sure about Super-Reasonable and Irrelevant people attracting one another, though. - However, we can have all of these 5 in ourselves, e.g. you can be either a Placater or Blamer in different situations.

2. Self-Leadership: Draws from the Internal Family Systems (IFS) theory. When we are in touch with what this theory refers to us our Self, it's the best version of us, and you could also say it's your true self. It is split into 8 parts which mean it's often conveniently called The 8C's of Self-Leadership. I guess when you are able to access all 8 of them, you are at a point of self-actualization. I like how it's nicely split up so you can work on whichever areas you feel might need to discuss, with a therapist.

In Hunter's case, you can spot improvements in mental health when he gets in touch with these qualities (man, thank you Dana, directors, writers, storyboarders, animators of the show..the fact that I can easily find which frames to use shows how much quality the writing and visuals have):

Clarity

Calmness

Compassion

Connectedness

Courage

Confidence

Curiosity

Creativity

3. Psychological Flexibility

A pretty neat theory called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has the above title as its main goal. (The person behind this theory wrote a book called The Happiness Trap, that goes into why we have unnecessary additional stress by expecting/pressuring ourselves to be happy all the time: instead of the better option of embracing the downs in life too, not just the ups... the book is free if you find it on PDFDrive dot com..)

ACT places plenty of importance on the specific words we use when having our own self-dialogue, which forms what we think of ourselves etc. If a therapist uses the ACT route, they hope to guide their clients towards the three pillars of ACT: being Open, Centered, and Engaged. Each pillar splits into two areas...so it's a total of six aspects of psychological flexibility which I'll list below:

Pillar 1: "Open"

A) Acceptance (its negative opposite is Experiential Avoidance) The simplest way one might break down this one is it's about embracing your demons, not judging them: the parts of you that you wish weren't there e.g. the parts that feel like a burden, any private experience you've had that you never wanted. When I think of this, these precise frames of Hollow Mind and Thanks to Them came into my head:

This concept operates on the belief that any emotion (like, especially what Hunter will feel when he looks back on the above memories) wants to be seen and is welcomed, like a guest. Even if the scarier, more unruly guests are welcomed and not turned away (which sometimes cannot be done alone: you may need the safety of the therapy room or trusted loved ones), it offers the best chance that they'll soften and become less unpleasant over time.

B) Cognitive Defusion This process is to help us not be fused with the content of our unpleasant thoughts, but to instead just notice that the process of thinking is happening in ourselves (see the difference?). This doesn't mean such thoughts are not allowed or not valid, though. A great analogy to explain how getting consumed by such thoughts and feelings is: if you hold out your hands close enough in front of your face or completely cover your eyes with them, you can't see the rest of your surroundings. If you spread them out and move them further from your face, you can see the rest of the room. Defusion techniques help you get more unstuck from discomfort and remind you of e.g. you are not your thoughts and therefore not fused with them forever, and other things exist outside of them. Very important if Hunter ever has experiences like this again, so that his moments of being inevitably triggered are less intense and their duration is shortened significantly:

It'll make the ride of being sucked into terrible distress e.g. future nightmares and potentially vivid trauma reminders, a less bumpy one.

Pillar 2: "Centered"

C) Contacting the Present Connecting with the present moment, based on this theory, is to restore control. Having awareness of your senses and being able to be grounded. Instead of being caught up in rumination about the past or future. There are certainly times where the right thing to do is reflect on the past or plan for the future, but during periods where being present would serve us better, that's the time to use this skill. Hunter was already incorporating this below, grounding himself by pacing back and forth. He was in an actually dangerous situation with immediate threats, as a literal survival mechanism for a crisis, so it was on a more extreme scale than us applying in it our everyday modern life:

(my personal method is having the right kind of music in my earphones to keep me totally present)

D) Self-as-Context (its negative opposite is Self-as-Content) Involves being in touch with something called your Observing Self. An easy way to explain this is, imagine you are a big sky: containing clouds that represent your thoughts and emotions. It can certainly feel like you're caught up in a cloud if a particularly tough emotion arises, but practicing this, whereby you become aware you're the big container with these separate smaller things inside, may help. An example of applying this is your therapist guiding you to say to yourself, "I am having the thought...that I am a failure" and to internalize that statement. This kind of detachment can be helpful because it could lead on to further positive reframing, and reinforcing that reframing, as you heal more.

Intuitively I think Hunter could be in this mode (though he wouldn't be able to put a name to it without a therapist telling him) when he started to feel better after reaching out to Willow. Having a good needed cry, he was less fused with excruciating grief:

Pillar 3: "Engaged"

E) Values (negative opposite: Lack of Direction) You get to choose what values matter to you. They go deeper than goals you want to achieve, they are qualities you want to align your life with, for life to be meaningful. One value that will certainly matter to Hunter a lot is based on this:

Kindness/Gentleness. Making sure others are cared for and protected.

F) Committed Action (negative opposite: Inaction/Being Stuck) Taking action to live out the values you choose. Pretty straightforward:

4. Aspects of Grief (especially, but not limited to, Acute Grief):

Searching Behavior

Perfectly normal especially in early grief, even though the griever may think they're going crazy. You may catch glimpses of a lost loved one, or reminders of whatever you have lost, on the bus or at the grocery store, in dreams or in other places. Your brain will be thinking thoughts like "Is that them?"..."That's them! It has to be!"..."All that didn't really happen, did it?" because it can be so painful to lose a relationship (not limited to just literal people. It could be a home or job, etc) that you have to still believe on some level that it hasn't been lost. Such numbing and denial is to provide mental cushioning for your mind, or else it would be overwhelmed. This behavior should decrease over time, but there shouldn't be any expectation of it totally vanishing.

Linking Objects

Objects that are reminders of a lost loved one, and/or which belonged to them, to help the griever feel close to the lost loved one. Usually it's too painful in early grief days to have a high awareness of such objects. Maybe there are other objects that Hunter would want to keep, which Flapjack used or perched on often. And if Hunter wishes, he can create new linking objects from scratch as well, to keep remembering.

5. Self-Interruption A concept I love from the theory of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). Because one of the seven therapists I've tried taught me about this, it was one of the first few milestones in my own recovery.

Notice that this boi switched quickly from being puzzled about something he wasn't even entirely sure was negative, to bounce back and point out what went fine. While he later said "I miss knowing who I'm supposed to be" which was great, there is plenty of room for him to lean into the agency he has had since Camila first welcomed him into her home. I think we self-interrupt pretty often. Self-interrupting means we restrict ourselves from expressing what we feel, we self-censor and disown the important parts of us that have natural emotional responses towards e.g. being treated unfairly. Society's emphasis on staying positive and not being a burden likely reinforces this, and I'm sure Belos disregarded and invalidated his emotions enough that he'd feel he isn't allowed to complain about most things.

A healthy upbringing would mean the freedom to express your needs and desires. It's also perfectly fine and even necessary for Hunter to reflect on positive memories he's had. I'd say it only becomes an issue if he keeps doing stuff like below and if he is cut off from recognizing his own emotional needs:

(which I don't think he'll continue doing as much: he seems to be quite on track towards healthily exploring what he has been through).

So yeah. This got on the lengthy side but I hope it was informative! Which parts stood out to you the most? Feel free to comment and share your own thoughts~

#toh hunter #golden guard #toh analysis #the owl house #loz writes a meta #mental health 101 with Hunter #long post

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