#and (b) I’m not taking any of this that seriously because they’re high school freshmen | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cameoamalthea · 7 years

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there is ABSOLUTELY a “wrong way to process trauma” and that is by retraumatizing yourself “to cope” and being a pedophile :/

Hi there Anon,

This will be a long response and part of it is under a read more. My theme is not very reader friendly (sorry - need to fix that) so I suggest reading on your dash if you have the extension for that or copy/pasting into a document. Sorry again.

I assume you’re referencing this post. I’m not sure what drama has gone in the thread from that post, because no one reblogged any commentary meant for me from me, but based on your ask I’m assuming some folks misunderstood me. Allow me to clarify.

The point of the post is to respond to @shipwhateveryouwant ‘s post about lack of empathy by pointing out that empathy is hard, especially if you’re dealing with triggers.

I was talking to her.

The “There’s no wrong way to react trauma” refers to getting upset other things that trigger you and coming to the conclusion ‘this is gross’ ‘this is triggering’ ‘this is wrong’

It’s OK to feel that way.

It’s OK to feel anyway that you feel, because your emotions are 100% valid.

However, as my post recommended, it’s important to fact check.

A bit of background, in case you just came here because of that post and aren’t stalking my blog. I’m a survivor of abuse, including CSA, and that left me with scars, both physical and mental. I’m in group therapy DBT, individual therapy which includes EMDR, couple’s therapy (sometimes when two people who have PTSD are in a relationship it can be hard, since we both have to cope with the effect of our partner’s abuse on the other), and I did a year of physical therapy (pelvic floor).

I blog about my recovery, and things I learn because A) Being open about being in therapy (while making me a bit vulnerable) says ‘therapy is nothing to be ashamed of’ and neither is being a survivor, I’m not pretending it never happened AND B) So people who might not have heard about these treatment options of think nothing can help, can see what worked for someone else and know what happened (literally, it took me years to find a treatment plan that worked, and I really thought I was permanently damaged mentally and physically, so it was a big deal when I found out there were things that could help me).

So in my post I used an example of one my big triggers, drugs and the drug trade (I really really have major issues here). However, when I got out of emotion mind and checked the facts, I realized fans of breaking bad weren’t hurting anyone and weren’t trying to hurt me.

I was trying to explain to OP why empathy is such hard work, especially when you’re caught up in you’re emotions. When you’re angry, or hurt or scared.

I’m not angry that people enjoy a TV show that I don’t like…

I’m angry (tw discussion of addiction, child abuse, csa)

that I was born with drugs in my system. I’m angry that my mother continued to use on and off while raising me. I’m angry she fell into heavy drug use and endangered my life. I’m angry I was raped as a kid. I’m angry my own mother threatened to sell me to self traffickers and tried to get me be sexually active at like 13/14 with boys my age she’d leave alone with me (whether I wanted them there or not) because she thought it would make me more willing to turn tricks for her because she needed money (she was supposed to sell drugs for the cartel, but she felt you had to sell drugs Mary Kay style using herself as the free demo, she owed them a lot of money).

I’m angry that I lost my mother, that the person I love disappeared inside the addiction and she became a really awful person when was high. She wasn’t great when she was mostly sober, she always had untreated mental illness and she was always abusive/inappropriate verging on incest, but she’s still my mother and she was all I had and I loved her. I was a child, you love your mommy, and I’m angry that I didn’t have a mother I didn’t have to be afraid of and I 100% blame the drug use because addiction is a fucked up thing.

So I got angry when I saw artists I liked posting Breaking Bad fanart AUs and candy meth picks, because it felt like they were treating something very not funny (drugs and drug addiction, along with the pain I’ve had as a result) as a joke.

However, how I felt doesn’t dictate facts.

I had to step back, check the facts, and realize people liking Breaking Bad weren’t trying to hurt me (or actually hurting me. What other people watch on TV doesn’t effect me).

They weren’t trying to make fun of my experiences or make light of a serious issue. I also knew from my academic research on the topic of whether media influences norm that it really doesn’t… (I did a pre-law minor focused on social justice, and Freshmen Year I set out to prove porn hurt women and caused rape, and quickly found that evidence didn’t support my thesis, video games don’t cause violence, porn doesn’t cause sexual violence – and no I don’t still have the paper, unless I manage to find it on an old hard drive and most of my sources are outdated by now, I’d have to re-research – but I’m actually not here to argue the point).

So I believed, based on evidence and my own research, that media is worthy of critique but doesn’t influence behavior directly. This is my own belief, and I don’t want to argue it. But despite that, despite the fact I didn’t think fiction causes crime, I HATED BREAKING BAD. I felt like it was romanticizing Drugs and making people not take something serious seriously…

Because I wasn’t thinking about it rationally.

I was thinking about it based on my emotions. How I felt.

In DBT we learn that to think of your mind like a Venn Diagram. Rational Mind is one circle, Emotional Mind is in the other circle, and in between is Wise Mind.

Wise Mind is acknowledging your emotions/how something makes you feel but also being able to bring in rational mind, to fact check, which means asking does how I feel fit the facts and remembering that feeling something doesn’t make it true.

If you’re just in rational mind, you can be cold and ignore other people’s feelings, which can make them feel invalidated and make you less effective in dealing with your own feelings (don’t ignore them) and others.

If you’re just in emotional mind, you’re not thinking clearly. You might break down and cry or lash out and hurt someone. You can’t really address the thing that’s upsetting you because you’re not in a place where you can even think clearly about it without getting upset.

If pure rational mind is behind the wheel you’re not a good driver, if pure emotion mind is behind the wheel you’re not ok to drive.

It’s not easy to find wise mind. Mindfulness is the most practiced skill in DBT (it’s a year long class and six months of it just repeating Mindfulness and the other six months are bringing in those skills to apply to other issues…Wise Mind is from the unit on Emotional Regulation…I’ve been in DBT for nearly four years, repeating the class, honing the skills – it’s not easy).

But we should try, for ourselves and others.

I hope OP takes from my post some understanding of where you’re coming from anon and that it’s really hard to be empathetic when something makes you angry, let alone when you’re triggered.

That it’s important to validate.

Rational Mind says ‘people are taking fiction way to seriously. It’s just a TV show, there’s no reason to be upset’

Wise Mind is realizing that feelings aren’t rational and they really are hurting. Even if they don’t lay out their feelings clearly like I did with ‘why Breaking Bad upsets me’ it’s enough to see that someone is upset. If someone is upset, it’s serious to them, validate that.

“I’m sorry that you were hurt. I understand that this reminds you of your trauma. I will tag anything you need. No one should pressure you to deal with triggers you aren’t ready to deal with and I want to make it possible for you avoid things. You seem really upset right now, though, so I don’t think we should fight about anything. We’re not in a place where we can. be calm and get anything out of it. You seem really caught up in a lot of negative emotions. Why don’t you take a break. Go get some ice cream or color or get your mind off things for bit? If you don’t think you’ll ever be ‘not upset’, then I’ll go ahead and block you since my content is bothering you. Have a nice day.”

I hope that you anon, if you bother to read all the way here, takes away from this post that it’s ok to be angry, but realize that feelings aren’t fact and being upset doesn’t justify hurting others.

And attacking people based on what they read or what TV shows they like is hurting others.

Calling anyone a pedophile is hurtful. (that’s a very serious accusation Anon, and not one your should use lightly. Don’t go crying wolf about child predators, it makes people less likely to take real accusations seriously - like if someone calls someone else a pedophile does that mean they’re a sexual predator and a child molester or does that mean they like a TV show I don’t like or read stories that I find upsetting). Again, your feelings are valid Anon, but someone liking a TV show you don’t like doesn’t make them a danger to anyone. Hurting real children makes them a danger to children. We shouldn’t water down terms. We need to take threats to people seriously.

Calling CSA survivors pedophiles, comparing survivors to their abusers or implying they are to blame for their abuse past or future is hurtful.

I like Game of Thrones. I think Jon and Danny are a good match, both as people and politically. I don’t see anything wrong with the relationship, she’s biologically his aunt but they have no relationship.

I like Ouran High School Host Club, and my favorite characters are the twins. Sometimes you can like a messed up story because it’s messed up. It’s just a story.

I ship Catwoman and Batman, and think they’re cute together in Gotham. I like that backstory. I also think Mike and Eleven are cute together.

I like reading and writing fanfic about teenage video game characters that I’ve liked since I was a teenager. I relate to a video game character and take something positive from his story and his relationship with his best friend even though the relationship in game is unhealthy.

This isn’t ‘re-traumatizing’ myself and it’s not ‘being a pedophile’.

I have a degree in creative writing and I look at books as works of art and craft, not moral guides. I look at characters as tools, not people.

That’s not ‘being a pedophile’ that’s being someone with an English Degree (I miss just being able to identify as an English major, saying I have a degree sounds so pretentious to me). That’s being a writer.

I admit that I like relationships between predator and prey, between people and monsters. That’s not ‘re-traumatizing myself’ either.

Abuse, in my experience, has been when someone you love, someone you’re supposed to be able to trust and feel safe with instead hurts you and makes you unsafe. It’s a betrayal of trust. It makes you question if you’re lovable or worthy of love because someone who was supposed to care for you hurt you.

I like stories about monsters. You’re not supposed to be able to trust a monster. The monster makes you feel afraid. It’s going to hurt you. It’s nature is to hurt you. I like stories where instead of killing you the monster falls in love with you and changes, becomes loving and trustworthy and keeps you safe. It’s a fantasy of being so special, or mattering so much, of being so love able that that you can tame dragons.

It’s about the inverse of abuse. A power fantasy. Exploring fear and helplessness within a safe controlled fantasy.

That’s not ‘re-traumatizing’ myself. I promise, I’m fine anon. I’m not hurting myself and I have a support network. Thank you for your concern, though, but please remember you’re not responsible for anyone else.

It’s scary, but you don’t control the world or others. If you’re afraid someone is doing something that hurts them, sometimes you have to accept you can’t change that. (And that’s hard, I know, my mother is a drug addict). Sometimes you have to distance yourself. If people are doing things that upset you, block them and that content, take a step back.

#Anonymous

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kinetic-elaboration · 7 years

Text

January 17: Less Than Zero

Finally finished my reread of Less Than Zero today. I had all but finished it as of late last week so reading the last ten pages was more of a chore than anything else--like well I slogged through so much of this it would be a shame to quit now! Not that I didn’t enjoy the experience it was just...

I read Zero for the first time my senior year of high school, when I was 18. So literally 10 years ago. And I just had this random desire to reread it, which I indulged as an experiment to see how my perspective had changed.

I do remember liking it in high school. It wasn’t exactly life-changing but I enjoyed it. It’s certainly gone down in my esteem by now, which is fair. I read it, a book about a college freshmen written by a man in his early 20s, from a high school perspective, and now I’m reading it from the perspective of someone who’s done the college thing and reached her late 20s, so hopefully my opinion has altered a little with time and maturity.

I called the book “nihilistic male navel gazing” to B and that’s the harsh version of what I think. The central thesis is obviously “we, the rich children of LA, are dead inside, because we have never wanted for anything and also we do a lot of drugs, and now we’re just desperate for literally anything to make us feel alive. Also our parents are pretty much the same.” Which is not that deep especially for a novel that, while not exactly War and Peace, does clock in at a bit over 200 pages. Like this is not a short story is what I’m saying.

There are certain passages that are so on the nose I can only assume they seemed deep to both 21-year-old Ellis and 18-year-old me, but now they’re almost eye-roll inducing. For example:

“Oh shit, Rip, what don’t you have?” / “I don’t have anything to lose.”

Right, okay then.

I also made the unfortunate decision to read the wiki article for the sequel, Imperial Bedrooms (published 2010, about 3 years after I read Zero), and it sort of made me hate Zero in a way. Which is a little unfair because I only read the wiki article, not the book, but it just sounded so bad. Like bad fanfic bad (everyone is married to everyone else? everyone’s in show business? random extreme violence but it’s on a smart phone so it’s like...innovative?). Like self-indulgent writer up his own ass bad. Like managed to ripoff both Zero and American Psycho even though he wrote both and shouldn’t have to rip off either bad. I also got the definite impression, again just from the wiki, that Bedrooms was supposed to either destroy any sense of affiliation with Clay, or make the reader feel incredibly guilty for that sense of affiliation Or both. Which bothered me. I read Zero, and still do read Zero, as being like a rather extreme version of a common feeling of disaffection, alienation, and confusion, and incredibly, incredibly tied to Clay’s age and position in life. Without at the time having experienced it personally, I thought it was an attempt to capture that feeling of coming home again--the freshman on winter break. Yes, exaggerated, yes, through the eyes of the Super Rich and Super Drugged Up yeah whatever. And there are certainly places in the Zero text that push against the idea that we’re supposed to identify with Clay as an everyman (his last in-person conversation with Blair, for example, where she says that he doesn’t even try to be present with her, unlike other lovers of hers, implying that he is actually much worse than those around him) and other places that force you to feel guilty for any connection you do, inevitably, feel with him (for example, although he doesn’t participate in the rape of the girl in Rip’s apartment or watch the snuff film with his friends, he doesn’t truly condone either the video or the real life violence, and he certainly doesn’t do anything like call the police or so on). But frankly I find it kinda hard to take the scenes of violence seriously. I feel like they’re mostly there to show just how Serious the author is about his My Lost LA Generation Is Without Feelings thesis. They’re the sort of scenes that I feel are there to try to gross out the audience and, like much of Naked Lunch (which I just read so nice try Ellis you’re not going to impress me), they take me out of the story almost entirely. Like ‘I see what you’re doing, author.’

All that said, there are parts of Zero I liked. While the style becomes grating after 200 pages, it’s understandable why Ellis made a splash at the time, like when he’s good, he’s very good.

When I read it the first time, I inferred a sort of supernatural presence to it, like the narrative isn’t entirely set in the Real World. This read through, I didn’t see that undertone as much. The supernatural stuff I read into the Palms Springs narrative I now see as more human horror now, and a lot of the other scenes that push at a sense of creepiness now strike me more as the hallucinations of a kid who’s pretty much constantly high, more than anything else. The only outright supernatural bit is the short paragraph about the strange visions people see on Sierra Bonita, and though this is enough to make me think maybe teenage me had something here, it’s not enough to please adult me, really. (Oh also the ‘ghost story’ about the kid who liked to throw parties, then had his house burn down after a girl was brutally raped and murdered at one. That was outright supernatural in a tall-tale sort of way.) I actually think the book would be greatly improved by increasing the creepiness and the hints of something a little...otherworldly. It would be more interesting at least. Places where this could be done include the Palms Springs flashbacks, the almost-final scene where Clay visits the carnival in Topanga Canyon, the scene with Rip looking at the car graveyard, the part where it rains a lot (pages 114-115) and the section on page 77 going to 78.

I also think that pretty much everything in italics is great and I sometimes sort of wish it was the whole book. Like a short story encompassing just those sections. Ellis is at his most precise, most poignant, and most darkly beautiful in those sections; they really stand out amid a lot of emotionless depictions of parties, drugs, and vapid conversations (all of which just make that same point over and over and over: we’re dead inside, dead, dead, dead). TBH the part where Clay and Blair visit Monteray (pages 59-61) could be a stand alone short story all its own.

I obviously have mixed feelings about Clay, especially taking what little I know of Bedrooms into account, but I have stronger feelings about most of the rest of the cast of characters. I hate most of them, except for Julian and Blair. Blair is like pretty much the only one with a soul and Julian is the only one whose unhappiness actually makes me feel something, because his story is so truly tragic. (And, it goes without saying, so much more so in the book, where it’s just left hanging there, where his future is an endless cycle of the same torture, where he does not get the rest of resolution, even the death-resolution of the movie.) (It should also go without saying that I’m talking in terms of narrative here, not real life.) (Also I am semi-confused about the existence of a Julian’s girlfriend character in Bedrooms because I really thought he was gay, like I thought the writing on the bathroom wall at the end was his about himself and maybe he meant ‘I’m a faggot because I sleep with men for money’ and not ‘I’m a faggot because I’m gay’ but I just, yeah, sort of read it the second way anyway is that bad of me?)

I wouldn’t say I was especially moved by Julian’s story but I would say I was closer to moved by it than by almost anything else in the novel, which in all ways tries to keep you numbed from feeling anything real absolutely as much as possible, through the first person narration.

Finally, the movie is still obviously one of the worst movies ever made but I stick by the idea that 18-year-old me had that a much better adaptation would be in the style of a documentary: some faux-artist’s b&w camera recording of his winter break in star-studded LA. I mean it reads like that on the page so why not just make the cinematic equivalent of it?

...I know I said ‘finally’ but I was also going to talk about the weird tense stuff going on but I ALSO want to not think about this book any more so maybe another day if I feel like it or never if I don’t.

#the year 2017 #2017: reading

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