fennecandco

[fennecandco]

I'm really exhausted from seeing posts online (Twitter, mostly) about how SA victims should and shouldn't react to, cope with, and express our trauma. If you aren't some pure, innocent, sex-repulsed individual You're doing it wrong. If you write fiction about sexual assault in any way to cope you're doing it wrong. And even if it is okay, you MUST do it the CORRECT WAY or else you're condoning the action. If you're kinky, if you have disturbing sexual fantasies, if you have certain fetishes, you're doing it fucking wrong in some people's eyes. Hell, I've even seen other SA victims follow this idea that there's a "correct way" to be one It's really, really frustrating..

I don't have much else to say on the matter to be honest, just had to get that out somewhere. There is no right or wrong way to be a victim, and the idea that there is has gotta be one of the more harmful beliefs prevalent in the trauma community. If you're one of those with this belief, do better. Seriously.

#tw sa mention #trauma

[fennecandco]

13 Steps for Managing Emotional Flashbacks

 1. Say to yourself: “I am having a flashback”. Flashbacks take you into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as you were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now.

2. Remind yourself: “I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present.” Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past.

3. Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior.

4. Speak reassuringly to the Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her/him unconditionally– that s/he can come to you for comfort and protection when s/he feels lost and scared.

5. Deconstruct eternity thinking. In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless – a safer future was unimaginable. Remember this flashback will pass as it always has before.

6. Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. [Feeling small and fragile is a sign of a flashback.]

7. Ease back into your body. Fear launches you into “heady” worrying, or numbing and spacing out. 

[a] Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. [Tightened muscles send false danger signals to your brain.]

[b] Breathe deeply and slowly. [Holding your breath also signals danger.]

[c] Slow down: rushing presses your brain’s flight response button.

[d] Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a pillow or a stuffed animal, lie down on your bed or in a closet or in a bath; take a nap.

[e] Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body. It cannot hurt you if you do not run from it.

8. Resist the Inner Critic’s Drasticizing and Catastrophizing.

[a] Use Thought-stopping to halt the critic’s endless exaggerations of danger, and its constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self- attack into saying “NO” to your critic’s unfair self-criticism.

[b] Use Thought-substitution & Thought-correction to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments.

9. Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment. Validate and soothe your child’s past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn your tears into self-compassion and your anger into self-protection.

10. Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don’t let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn’t mean you are shameful. Educate your intimates about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them.

11. Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks. Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes. Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable.

12. Figure out what you are flashing back to. Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal your wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to your still unmet developmental needs and can provide you with motivation to get them met.

13. Be patient with a slow recovery process. It takes time in the present to become deadrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process [often two steps forward, one step back], not an attained salvation fantasy. Don’t beat yourself up for having a flashback.

- Pete Walker, Complex PTSD

#trauma #flashback #very useful guide #please read

[fennecandco]

I love Chainsaw Man, a lot. I got into it during a rough eviction, binging the whole manga on my phone. A couple months ago I was in a psych ward that allowed your own books, so I read over and over again the three volumes of CSM I had. One of the things thats hooked me to it tho, is how different characters respond to trauma throughout the series. POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW!

I'm thinking mostly the main characters for this, so.

Denji: Repression. It is a huge component to the story of part one and side note of part two that he blocks his trauma out, in part one especially, behind a metaphorical "door." He gets nightmares about it, with Pochita telling him "Don't open it." And it is huge when he finally does, with Makima's guidance. Along with the door, there is a point in part two that may represent more repression, where a devil causes him to have a flashback to the deaths of his loved ones, and to fight back against it he chainsaws a part of his brain to stop it.

Aki: Revenge. Aki's response to his trauma is to seek the devil who caused it in the first place. In spite of the severe dangers involved, and the hopes of his colleague Himeno that he'd quit, he continues on. It isn't until he finds love and family in Denji and Power that he gets "cold feet."

Power: Intimacy. After the "fight" with the darkness devil, Power latches hard onto Denji for comfort. She is scared, and as someone who had probably never experienced trauma before, doesn't know any way else to deal with it. She cuddles him, sleeps with him, allows him to drink her blood, and (in a very pivotal moment for Denji) showers with him.

These are the ones I'll include for now, but there are definitely other characters. (I'm honestly trying to think about how to put words down for Asa. She's a very interesting character with a good amount of trauma herself.)

#trauma #chainsaw man #csm spoilers #csm denji #csm aki #csm power

[fennecandco]

Hey. Check out this scuffed up Minecraft fox I found at Target. He is mine now and his name is Scub.

Also, yes, he is being posed on top of the corpses of the other fox plushies lol.

#plushies #minecraft fox

[fennecandco]

[fennecandco]

Your daily dose of cat memes

[fennecandco]

This song is so fucking cathartic for me...

-Gabriel

#generational trauma #trauma #encanto #Youtube

[fennecandco]

Scrungly old man reincarnated as 7 week old kitten

[fennecandco]

Oof. This song hits different after processing some shit...

#creep p #trauma #parental abuse #gaslighting 101 #Youtube

[fennecandco]

I feel so much tenderness to those of you who are putting the often difficult and harrowing work into working through trauma, identifying and navigating triggers, or even just realizing what you need... that's such a tall task sometimes. It's painful to push down those things, and it's even more painful to address it, but it's so worth it. I genuinely hope you can find pride and peace with the knowledge that you are enough, that whatever happened to you wasn't your fault, and that you are so fucking worth the effort of working through this.

[fennecandco]

I'm mad. I'm mad about my past, I'm mad at my parents who neglected and hurt me, I'm mad at my grandfather for hurting me, I'm mad at my grade school teachers and "friends" and everyone else who ignored my cries for help. And I SHOULD be mad. It was UNFAIR. I was just a kid. Being mad is not a bad thing. It shouldn't be considered a bad thing. So long as I'm not hurting others in my anger I should be allowed to feel mad. Anyone who's been mistreated as a kid, a teen, or even as an adult should be allowed that. It's an important part of getting through it. The pain. The trauma. But not everyone likes that. Some people just want abuse victims to get over it. That's not always possible, or really even possible at all. Feeling emotions for that pain, whether it be sadness, anger, etc. is perfectly normal and should be encouraged. It means progress! Abuse victims NEED to feel these things! So please, if anyone with trauma is feeling anger about what happened to them(or is currently happening to them) and they aren't harming others in that anger, let them feel that way. It's not a bad thing at all.

#trauma #anger #child abuse tw #therapy

[fennecandco]

For any kids:

You are not supposed to be afraid of your parents

You never deserve to be hit (not even lightly, not even if you killed someone)

No one has the right to touch you without permission, not even your family members, including your parents

Your parents can love you and still hurt you, that does not make the hurt okay

Adults you trust can still be wrong

It's not normal for everything to always be overwhelming

If you are having a problem with any of these things, do your best to talk to a licensed therapist (if they are licensed therapists they legally cannot tell your parents your personal information)

You deserve happiness

You deserve privacy

You deserve to feel good

You are not alone in your struggles

Your struggles are valid, no matter how small they are

You deserve love and kindness

You deserve to be surrounded by people who love you and care for you

Edit: lots of people are commenting saying that therapists can and do tell parents information about what their child says in therapy, the legality of this depends on your age and what type of information it is. Here is what the American Psychological Association says about it

Discussing confidentially with your therapist beforehand is a good idea so you know how your specific therapist feels, but it's horrible that that's something you have to do. You still deserve privacy as a child.

If you are in a situation where you can't tell your therapist something, please get the information out of yourself somehow. I recommend saying it out loud if you can even if it's just to yourself.

Failing that, write whatever it is down and get rid of the paper so it's unreadable if you have to, it's better than keeping everything inside.

[fennecandco]

I am begging, begging you newly discovered systems to covet your privacy, especially online.

It’s really great to keep track of your system; who’s who, interests and hobbies, symptom holders and roles… but really all of this information does not need to be shared publicly. You don’t need to have detailed abouts for every system member pinned to your profile. It is so so much safer for you to keep it on a need to know/ask to know basis, and share it with important people like those in your daily life and therapist/psych.

There are bad people on the internet. Due to the nature of this disorder we are specifically vulnerable. People can and will use information against you if they have a reason, good or not. Please please be safe. Please.

[fennecandco]

Also it demonizes those personality disorders, of which are often a result of severe abuse and trauma. It's not fair to pin every abuser as a narcissist or sociopath. Some people are just abusive assholes. (In addition, not all narcissists or sociopaths are abusive).

Stop trying to clearly distance yourself from abusers by calling them narcissists or sociopaths or psychos. It's time to face the facts and swallow the harsh truth that literally everyone has the potential to do harm - not just a specific subset of mentally ill people.

[fennecandco]

Reblogging this as a reminder to myself, and to others ^^^

For all of you who’ve been told that you are a failure – or that you will end up a failure, I need you to know that such a thing doesn’t exist. There is no person anywhere who is a failure. There are people failed by the system, people who are failed by their families, by their jobs, bosses, the economy, the law, the government, the rich, the oppression, by their own lack of empathy. But nobody is a failure.

Not doing well at any area in life does not make person a failure. People who don’t have a career are not failures, people who don’t have jobs aren’t failures. People who struggle with addiction or homelessness are not failures. People who fall thru the cracks of social systems aren’t failures either. Not finding love doesn’t equal a failure. Human beings don’t fail. We’re not meant to follow a structure of life that demands us to constantly struggle against a system that is set so that only a certain percentage could enjoy privileges, while the rest is told we’re not good enough.

We’re born to be a part of the world, to share the sun and the rain together, to form a community and live more easily relying on each other, we’re meant to enjoy affection and acceptance throughout our entire lives, to experience joy and sorrow with support of others, to fill each other’s time with conversation and laughter. A person not having these things in life doesn’t equal a failure, it’s a person who’s been denied their birthright. It’s a person who is forced to miss out and to struggle, because if they were able to enjoy what is natural to them, they would not be in so much anxiety or pain.

No matter what mistakes you make, or what roads you take, you will never be a failure. Nobody is supposed to fight their entire life alone in order to keep the fear of failure away. It’s not a real threat. You cannot fail, as long as you breathe, you’re valuable and welcome part of the world.

[fennecandco]

Living only thru fiction and ‘magical thinking’ are common childhood ways to survive the cruel reality of abuse. If you don’t find any safety, understanding, support or nurturing in your immediate environment, the only other place you can look as a child is books, series, movies, anime. Child fiction specifically deals with a lot of trauma, lots of independent and abandoned children who you can relate to, with adults being absent, uninvolved, or dead in the story. Protagonists deal with a hell of trouble on their own and succeed, and it’s hopeful that you could too. They also have loyal friend groups often risking lives for each other, which is a common desire to have for an isolated, trapped and friendless child. Having someone passionately ready to risk everything for you would do so much for your feeling of self value.

Magical thinking is another common way for children to survive abuse, and it can be interlaced with fiction. Since the forces of evil in your young life are so strong and prevalent, you have to imagine the forces of good are as strong and prevalent too. So that if you suffer pain and struggle past your endurance, then this means miracles could happen too. Waiting to be taken away, to be transported to another dimension which is your real home, to be materialized in a book or a movie, to be given your fictional friends in real life, to be given magical powers, believing you are special and chosen, believing you will become strong and powerful if you only wish it enough, and this feeling like an inevitable reality, that is magical thinking. It can get dangerous, because as a child you’ve learned that for a little bit of good, you need to suffer a lot, so by that logic, to get your miracle, it can feel like you need to sacrifice something big, pray endlessly, provide extraordinary circumstances and relentless faith, believe it into becoming the truth, or even give up on the rest of your life only to make it happen. It can go as far as a child founding their own personal religion or set of beliefs that are very removed from reality. 

Magical thinking is designed to help you survive as a child, but it can grow into an obsession, or something that takes over your life and becomes impossible to let go of, because you feel your life now depends on it. It’s a life of waiting and inability to let go of the thing you’re waiting for, because you lived just for that, it was the only thing that made sense.

Not being able to bear your reality, you can get stuck only feeling alive in fiction, or thru maladaptive daydreaming, and these strategies to protect yourself are very hard to let go of. If you’ve experienced these, it’s likely you’ve been dealing with trauma that couldn’t be faced, couldn’t be processed by a kid, and wasn’t survivable without a fictional escape. There is no shame or embarrassment in getting lost in fiction, magical thinking, or daydreaming; in fact, you’re still alive because of it. You wouldn’t have gotten lost in them if there was any other alternative. You gave yourself a reason to go on where there was none. You found a way to keep being alive thru unsurvivable. Your mind saved you in the best way it could.

#ouch..

[fennecandco]

Sad I have to write this out, but abuse and trauma have zero benefits to anyone’s life. You can learn anything the kind way. You can become anyone the kind way. There is no reason whatsoever to traumatize you. Everything can be done without abuse.