Tag: mental health

as the neurotypical whisperer, do you have any advice on explaining executive dysfunction to people that have never experienced it and want to chalk it up to laziness?

~ Sephira ~ Leave a comment

roachpatrol:

you know how when you drive your car into mud, you can rev the engine and switch gears and jam the pedals all you like, but the car won’t go anywhere because there’s no traction? the wheels just go around and around in the mud no matter how hard you push the gas pedal. you have to pile rocks and sticks under the wheels to get the car some traction to get going. if you don’t change the conditions the wheels are turning in, you’ll just be sitting in your car all damn day, wasting your gas. 

in this case executive dysfunction is having mud under your wheels and the rocks are medication or therapy. you don’t need to ‘try harder’ or spin the wheels faster, you need actual legit help to fix the road conditions. 

for people with a chronic condition, life is one long washed-out mud lane to drive across. so being told ‘just go faster!’ or ‘switch gears!’ by people driving paved streets is not helpful. executive dysfunction isn’t the laziness of not wanting to put in the effort, it’s having no traction for that effort to get you anywhere. 

~ Sephira ~ Leave a comment

roachpatrol:

@ teens because i’ve gotten a lot of asks along the lines of ‘i think i’ve got depression/anxiety/a personality disorder but my parents and teachers and counsellors just say it’s teen angst and won’t help and won’t get me to a therapist and i’m so tired and scared’. 

your primary emotional state should not be exhaustion, sadness, fear, or stress. seriously, even if you’re an adolescent. ‘teen angst’ is an awful dismissal of how emotional distress is a natural human reaction to the circumstances we force teens into: long work hours, few rewards, routine privacy invasion, unjust punishments, gruelingly unhealthy sleep schedules and food, and rigid prison-like social systems.

in addition to this, somewhere between half and three-fourths of mental illnesses show up before age 18. this leaves tons of people struggling for years to manage symptoms, alone, until they’re adults and it stops being so ‘normal’ for them to be miserable. or, you know, they treat themselves with drugs, abusive relationships, or suicide, and then everyone is like ‘why did this happen???’. 

you are not supposed to be in constant pain. you’re not even supposed to be in frequent pain. take your mental health seriously. 

Are You Dissociating?

~ Sephira ~ Leave a comment

deadly-voo:

littlemissantisocialite:

sickenening:

justborderlinethings:

lavendertheatre:

Dissociating is one of the most common responses to abuse and trauma. It involves feeling numb, detached or unreal and (while it happens to everyone once in a while) is experienced more frequently and severely in survivors. Dissociating people vary widely in symptoms and may experience any or all of the things from the following list.

You may be dissociating if you:

  • find yourself staring at one spot, not thinking anything
  • feel completely numb
  • feel like you’re not really in your body, like you’re watching yourself in a movie.
  • feel suddenly lightheaded or dizzy
  • lose the plot of the show or conversation you were focused on
  • feel as if you’re not quite real, like you’re in a dream
  • feel like you’re floating 
  • suddenly feel like you’re not a part of the world around you
  • feel detached and far away from other people, who may seem mechanical or unreal to you
  • are very startled when someone/something gets your attention
  • completely forget what you were thinking just a moment ago
  • suddenly cover your face or react as if you’re about to be hurt for no reason
  • can’t remember important information about yourself, like your age or where you live
  • find yourself rocking back and forth
  • become very focused on a small or trivial object or event
  • find that voices, sounds or writing seem far away and you sometimes have trouble understanding them.
  • feel as if you’ve just experienced a flashback (perhaps rapidly) but you can’t remember anything about it.
  • perceive your body as foreign or not belonging to you

(likes and reblogs always taken as support)

To my anon asking about dissociation. I hope you see this.

I thought dissociation was only when I have straight up out of body experiences turns out I’m dissociated like 99% of the time lmso

As it turns out, I dissociate rather a lot. Mostly when I’m stressed, but also because of exhaustion or pain. Too bad the latter two are pretty much standard operating procedure for me.

jfc I must dissociate like 90% of the time

Actually the other day I had an interesting period of derealisation, I still can’t work out what made me have that “is this a dream, I can’t tell” thing going on, whether it was a smell or the way the light was falling or what. I felt completely disconnected temporally. As if I could be walking my dog for a hundred years.

Of course maybe I’d accidentally stepped into Alfheimr for a moment, and time really WAS meaningless.

“What if they really hate me?” (They probably don’t hate you.)

~ Sephira ~ Leave a comment

skaletal:

I see a lot of posts on tumblr in this vein:

“I feel like everyone around me secretly hates me.”

“I can’t help feeling like I’m being humoured.”

“I know other people find me annoying even if they don’t say it.”

Sound familiar? Probably. Tumblr is a haven to all sorts of anxiety-burdened folks, and there’s a reasonable chance you’re one.

The above is a type of distorted thinking called Mind Reading. It’s an extremely common cognitive component of social anxiety. 

It’s called mind reading because the essential nature of it is founded in the assumption you know what other people think and feel without concrete evidence that this is the case.

Logically, you can step back and tell yourself that maybe your friend is feeling a little unwell or has something on her mind she’s not ready to talk about yet, but we both know your anxiously vibrating brain has already decided that it’s because she views hanging out with you as a chore.

But here’s the thing: recognizing distorted thinking is the first step to changing it. Cognitive distortions aren’t totally unlike addictions in that way- once you truly recognize and accept that you have one, you can go about doing something about it.

This is a key component of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

It’s a form of therapy that bases itself around the principle of giving sufferers of mental illness the tools they need to treat the peripheral symptoms of their core anxiety. Medication can be great for treating that core, but it doesn’t actually alter the behaviours or thought processes that you’ve developed as a result of years spent trying to cope.

If you have a habit of trying to read minds, you’re probably already really good at constantly questioning yourself. Self-doubt is definitely a thing in anxiety sufferers, too.

So question yourself productively: when you find yourself deciding how someone else feels about you, ask yourself if you’re being fair to them. Do you like it when people make assumptions about you? (They probably make you anxious, don’t they? Especially when they’re positive assumptions, because you’re sure you’ll disappoint.)

Question yourself when it matters. You’re really good at that, right? It seems like such a little thing, but it makes a world of difference.

Don’t let the only time you trust your own judgement be when it’s saying terrible things about you. That’s the starting point you need to go from.

When your mind tells you,

“You know they’re just putting up with you because they’re nice, right?”

ask yourself,

“Yeah, but how do you know?”

Because you don’t really, do you?