holy fucking shit. rape culture.
Akhav
I spend too much time in my own head.
I run in lots of circles.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
“ The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only in reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.
1984
“Uncontrollable disruptions or distortions of attachment bonds precede the development of post-traumatic stress syndromes. People seek increased attachment in the face of danger. Adults, as well as children, may develop strong emotional ties with people who intermittently harass, beat, and, threaten them. The persistence of these attachment bonds leads to confusion of pain and love. Trauma can be repeated on behavioural, emotional, physiologic, and neuroendocrinologic levels. Repetition on these different levels causes a large variety of individual and social suffering. Anger directed against the self or others is always a central problem in the lives of people who have been violated and this is itself a repetitive re-enactment of real events from the past. Compulsive repetition of the trauma usually is an unconscious process that, although it may provide a temporary sense of mastery or even pleasure, ultimately perpetuates chronic feelings of helplessness and a subjective sense of being bad and out of control. Gaining control over one’s current life, rather than repeating trauma in action, mood, or somatic states, is the goal of healing.”
- Source
I realize finally that I am not evil.
Whole Foods Market sells its own brand of organic coffee using one-dimensional depictions of the people of color (presumably coffee pickers) and the text “organic coffee makes us happy” rendered over them in a playful font (you know, to convey a child-like innocence). Needless to say, this is racist as shit, normalizing of neo-colonialism and predatory international capitalism, erasing of the narratives of actual farm workers, infantilizing of people of color particularly farm workers, and all kinds of other fucked up.
This is a big ‘ol FUCK YOU from me to you right here, Whole Foods Market.
tw: self-harm, reference to mutilation
I’m writing here because I haven’t been able to go to therapy, and I have no other way to talk about my feelings, and I really need to in order to keep from hurting myself.
My depression has been getting worse. Much worse. Something happened, I don’t know what exactly, that made it so that all the fantasies and lies I used to tell myself to keep myself going just dissolved in an instant. I know my recent decline is due to the anxiety medication I’ve been taking. I just can’t think a happy thought. I can’t see myself as anything but intrinsically fucked in the head. I can’t see myself anywhere a year from now but dead or alone in a room in some city feeling more trapped and more miserable and even more damaged than I am right now. Everything is triggering me right now. Everything.
I am seeing a psychiatrist on Thursday. The thought terrifies me. All doctors, clinics, hospitals - they terrify me. I know how they work and what they’re capable of because I watched them mutilate my mother, physically and emotionally, and then treat my dad with condescension and inhumanity. I don’t trust their medications, their concern, or anything about their process. I’m nauseous writing this even thinking about it. I just can’t do nothing.
PTSD and Isolation (tw: violence, mention of rape, abuse)
“One of the classic traits of PTSD is isolation. PTSD sufferers often feel unable to relate to other people. Sometimes this results from a feeling that others can’t possibly understand them, and sometimes it’s not a conscious thing at all, just an uncomfortable or even aversive feeling around other humans.
I say “other humans” because people with PTSD often feel comforted by animals. Animals will love you unconditionally, and often will protect you during an episode of symptoms. The mere presence of an animal can sometimes be comforting enough to head off a full-blown episode.
One problem with isolation is that it is self-perpetuating. Who the hell wants to be around a touchy individual who tends to disappear off the map for reasons most people cannot fathom? And if concerned individuals ask why, they are not likely to get a straight answer, because who wants to go through the whole “I have PTSD” explanation to somebody who is not on the “need to know” list?
As for people who are on the “need to know” list, their job is so difficult that many of them bail out. Here you are with this lovely person, going along just like usual, and something you do sets them off, and all hell breaks loose.
Granted, the triggering behavior often resembles the original wounding behavior itself: aggression, threats, or actual acts of violence. And there are, unfortunately, individuals who thrive on the power trip of controlling a person with PTSD, as is seen in domestic violence, and in the pimp-prostitute relationship.
Among returning veterans with PTSD, the rates of divorce outstrip the rates of marriage success, among preexisting marriages. Likewise, the rates of homelessness among vets with PTSD are astronomical. Much of this is due to simply being unable to reintegrate, unable to relate to civilian society.
Other groups that show similar social isolation patterns are domestic abuse survivors, rape survivors, and survivors of prostitution and human trafficking. Much like combat veterans, these people find it hard to integrate into a society that not only has never had to deal with the traumas they have been through, but also may look at them as pitiful, dirty, or damaged people. In addition, survivors of domestic abuse and sexual trauma have difficulty knowing who to trust. Repeated experience of betrayal of trust erodes the foundation of the ability to trust, making isolation preferable to being abused once again.
Suicide is the ultimate act of social isolation. I don’t have the numbers handy at this moment, but the relative risk of suicide is much higher in people with PTSD than in the general population. This is greatly multiplied if the person with PTSD also has an additional psychiatric diagnosis such as Major Depressive Disorder or Bipolar Disorder.”
A New Focus on the ‘Post’ in Post-Traumatic Stress
“…a significant body of work suggests …. that the environment just after the event, particularly other people’s responses, may be just as crucial as the event itself.
The idea was demonstrated vividly in two presentations this fall at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Culture, Mind and Brain at the University of California, Los Angeles. Each described reframing a classic model of traumatic experience — one in lab rats, the other in child soldiers.
In the first case, Paul Plotsky, a neurobiologist at Emory University, described what happened when he tweaked one of the most widely used models of how maternal separation affects young rats.
The model was created in the early 1990s by Dr. Plotsky himself to bring consistency to the way maternal separation is studied. Earlier experiments kept mother and pups apart anywhere from 1 to 24 hours; Dr. Plotsky reset those periods to 15 minutes (the amount of time rat mothers in the wild routinely leave their litters to get food) and 180 minutes (a traumatic separation, he says, because in the wild it would mean that “the mother became a meal or roadkill”).
After a 15-minute separation, a mother would typically sniff and lick each pup, then gather and feed them, all the while conversing with them in gentle, ultrasonic warbles. After a 180-minute separation, however, most mothers would dash about emitting panicky squeaks, often stomping on the pups or ignoring them. The pups too would squeak loudly. And for the rest of their lives, they had outsize physiological and behavioral reactions to stress and challenge.
This “15/180” model quickly became a standard, generating scores of studies showing that long separations created anxious rodents with permanent changes in stress-hormone activity, brain structure and many other measures. These findings became foundational to our view of trauma and its effects.
Then about five years ago, Dr. Plotsky was thinking about the mother’s post-separation panic when, he said, “it hit me: maybe she views her environment as unsafe” because she and her pups are back in the same cage as the one they were taken from.
So he upgraded the simple cage to a complex one: a maze devised to test rats’ navigational skills. The separated rat family now reunited not in the kidnapping site but in the antechamber of an eight-room condo.
Now, even after 180-minute separations, things went fine. The mother would sniff the pups, check out a couple of rooms, then move everybody to one of them and coddle and nurse the pups much as she would after a 15-minute absence. Even if Dr. Plotsky separated the family again the next day (or even eight days in a row), she would do the same thing, usually choosing a new room.
But maybe the pups still suffered? Actually, no. Few showed any signs of trauma, either immediate or lasting. A separation that had been considered permanently scarring proved routine simply because the mother, having a more varied, secure environment in which to receive her pups, felt calmer and more in control, and she passed that on to the pups. Trauma seemed now to rise not from the separation alone but from the flavor of the reunion…..
Since 2006, Dr. Brandon Kohrt, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at George Washington University, has followed the fates of Nepalese children who returned to their villages after serving with the Maoist rebels during their cIn villages where the children were stigmatized or ostracized, they suffered high, persistent levels of post-traumatic stress disorder. But in villages that readily and happily reintegrated them (usually via rituals or conventions specifically designed to do so), they experienced no more mental distress than did peers who had never gone to war. The lasting harm of being a child soldier, it seemed, arose not from the war but from social isolation and conflict afterward.”
“ One study reported that PTSD developed in approximately 14 percent of those who experienced the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one, making this event the single most frequent traumatic event to occur in both men and women, accounting for 39 percent of cases of PTSD in men and 27 percent of cases in women.
http://www.impact-kenniscentrum.yse.nl/doc/kennisbank/1000010585-1.pdf
The Irish Examiner: Orders made lots of money from laundries
Orders of nuns involved in the operation of the Magdalene Laundries have been urged by TDs to make a contribution to a survivors’ compensation fund.
The four congregations which were referred to in the McAleese report on the laundries are the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity; the Sisters of Charity, which had assets of €33m in 2009; the Sisters of Mercy, which has a portfolio of assets of €1.8bn; and the Good Shepherd Sisters which, in 2009, had €16.8m worth of financial assets.
:|
until we vanish forever
tw: abuse, cancer, drug use, alcohol.
I don’t have any friends or real human connections. They don’t work for me. Or they haven’t worked for me. I know I need them, I know I’m miserable because I don’t have them, but nearly all of the ones I’ve had have hurt me profoundly in some way, in every possible way. The thought of making a new connection with someone doesn’t excite me - it terrifies me, for a thousand reasons, not just because I was abused my whole life by virtually everyone who mattered. I seem to be perpetually alone, and now I realize it’s mostly been by choice. It makes sense, everything given, but it’s something I want very badly to change. I just worry that I can’t.
Since my last panic attack two months ago - the one that nearly got me fired - all I’ve been able to do is think about this moment from years ago. It plays out in my head over and over again, like some kind of fucked up movie looping endlessly in a theater I’m locked inside of. It took me years to find out what exactly happened in this moment - my parents, both immigrants who fled their countries to escape lifetimes of abuse and certain death, went to great lengths to shelter me from the fucked up places they came from, to the extent that my dad outright lied to me about many things and continues to even to this day.
My mom was screaming. It was a long, painful scream that was seared instantaneously into my psyche, that continues to haunt my nightmares, that went on even as I burst into her room from the other side of the house. She was sitting up in her bed, her back against the wall, which told me immediately that something was seriously wrong.
My mother had cancer. She was diagnosed when I was 11 years old, weeks after I taught her how to play chess and let her draw in a game against me. For the next two years, as the cancer metastasized and spread from her breasts to her lymph nodes to her back and lungs, she underwent radiation and chemotherapy treatments and surgery after surgery until the doctors told her she would die in six months. Her mother came from Ireland to live with us then, and that was great for my mom. She loved her mom, and her being close kept her spirits up.
My mom changed her diet, began seeing a naturopath, and her subsequent check-ups showed massive reductions in tumor size. Eventually, all of the tumors in her body disappeared except for a tennis ball sized one protruding from her middle back. Then my grandmother left abruptly to go back to Ireland.
I was 14 then. While my dad was at work, I stayed home from school to take care of my mom. I made her food, and brought her teas and medicines. Every 15 minutes on the dot, I would go into her room and check the poultice on her back. If the tumor bled, and it did multiple times a day, I would clean it and reapply the poultice. My mom couldn’t lay on her back - the tumor was too fragile.
I remember that I asked her what was the matter, and her scream narrowed into a cry. She suddenly stood, revealing that the wall and the bed were covered with blood from the tumor, and sobbed. I hugged her, and she wrapped her arms around me tightly and kept crying, a pained cry that I recognize in myself years later. I asked her again what was wrong, now myself crying, and suddenly she fell to the floor, pulling me down with her.
“noooooooooooooooooooooo” she howled, and urinated all over me. The shock was almost paralyzing. I stood and got the phone to call my dad, then sat down next to her, rubbing her back and telling her I loved her until he came and helped me get her back into bed. She died five days later.
As I learned later, that day my grandmother had called my mom and told her that she was going to die. She told her that she was a stupid little girl who shouldn’t have bothered fighting, and that she didn’t love her anymore. My grandmother was drunk. I remember seeing her drinking vodka every night when she was staying with us, knowing she was drunk, but not realizing how serious a problem she had. Nevertheless, the words killed my mom’s will to continue fighting. She loved her mom and made herself vulnerable to her, even though she was the same woman who let her friend watch my mom, knowing that this man watched over many little girls in town and that this man continued to for decades. My mom made herself vulnerable to her even though she was extremely violent, beating one of her brothers once until he was bloody and unconscious - her brother who would later become addicted to anything that would numb the pain and die of an overdose.
More and more I realize that I don’t have a home. The homelands of my parents are not my homes - I was encultured in a completely different place, an in-between place, a place just in between home and oblivion. My passing privilege opens doors for me, but once I’m inside them it becomes evident very quickly to everyone involved that I don’t belong, that I’m not one of them and that I’m something very different, something else entirely. Despite the efforts of my parents and the culture surrounding me to stifle them, the cries of my ancestors continue to echo against the hardening walls of my heart, continue to shape my behavior and my language and fill my dreams with landscapes that are so different from the place I find myself in year after year, the place under the sick orange wash of streetlights illuminating lonely ghosts like me as we haunt a desert where we can only dream alone until we vanish forever.
