remember to cry for help without guilt-tripping. i know it feels like you’ve been abandoned and betrayed, but it’s probably not true, and it’s not okay to accuse the people around you of something they might not have done.
“i guess none of you like me” could be better phrased as “i feel unloved right now”
“but nobody cares anyway” could be better phrased as “i feel insignificant and i need reassurance”
rather than assuming others’ feelings, give them time to explain them. you’ll usually get a much better answer.
When communicating to someone about a sensitive topic, I’ve found it’s helpful to explain why you want to talk about it. If you say you’re worried, or hurt, or just needed to get it off your chest, it can help the other person not get defensive and then more completely process what you’re saying.
Many relationships die by a thousand little cuts. Little problems that on their surface are penny-ante. But the real offense, the hurt, is unresolved. And the little hurts pile up and the resentment builds until things fall apart.
It’s very easy for people to read a bad intent when you’re communicating a problem. Sometimes it’s a natural defense mechanism, if you think someone is just being shitty then you don’t have to really hear them. But it can just as often simply be an incorrect assumption. Communicating your intent can stop that from happening and help the conversation come to a more fruitful resolution.
But if you break it down, your intent is not just a lubricant to keep the conversation productive. Your intent is the point of the conversation. More often than not the problems we have with each other are not the real issue, it’s how those problems make us feel. When you communicate your intent, you’re fully explaining the issue that needs to be resolved.
“I’ve been missing you, could you skip your TV show tonight so we can play a video game together?” works better than “You don’t give me enough attention.” or “you watch too much TV.”
Or “I suspect it’s just my anxiety, but I’m worried that you’re angry with me because you’ve been kind of quiet.” is better than just “Why are you so distant?”
For years I worried that we couldn’t discuss problems because it would cause a fight. That was how the world I lived in as a kid worked. Having a partner who is open to hearing you is huge, but choice of wording helps even when you have a partner who wants to hear you.
very good advice. it really helps when you give the other person something actionable. a request, a suggestion, an offer to brainstorm. don’t complain; troubleshoot.
you don’t have to be emotionless or conciliatory. it’s ok to express anger. just be mature about it, and respect the other person. don’t go on a power trip, don’t leverage your legitimate gripes to make them grovel. keep your eyes on the prize. if you don’t know what the prize is, the next step is to tell them so and invite them to help you figure it out, not to moan until they miraculously do the right thing at random. even when you’re super upset you can still apply these skills.
wrong: “this place is a damn landfill because nobody but me does any housework!”
right: “there is some serious housekeeping fail going on around here. it’s kinda driving me bugfuck. i want to sit down and take a look at how we do the housework, because how we’re doing it right now sucks.”
see how the second one doesn’t blame? blame’s not important. responsibility is important, but that has to be worked out calmly or it’s not going to be functional. the first person is picking a fight; the second person is trying to solve a problem. you’ll notice they’re not smoothing ruffled feathers or acting apologetic, they’re clearly quite annoyed. but they’re aiming their anger at the situation, not the person.
even if they are angry with their housemate, working those feelings out is beyond the scope of the conversation. trying to combine venting with chore planning is, imo, the number one cause of screaming kitchen fights on planet earth.
The person you love is not the same as they were when you first started loving them and they are not the same as they will be when you die. Love must be adaptive. Love must be smart enough and strong enough to survive constant change. Love must not be rigid.
last week i saw some article on buzzfeed or or the cut or wherever describing the new phrase “body-neutrality” by which they mean roughly the same thing that i call “weaponized ugliness” or my other tag “existing as revolutionary praxis”. body positivity is well-meaning but not for everyone and sometimes harmful.
i have a body, it has a certain shape and function, it has certain colors and marks and scars and curves and angles and sexy parts and unsexy parts. i don’t need to love it and i don’t have to hate it. i’m allowed to just have it be there, a tool for my use and an essential part of my humanity. i can be ugly or pretty, that’s irrelevant to my right to decent medical care and clothes that fit and respect from strangers. i can be any shape or size or color or gender and still deserve those rights.
telling me to love my body is still policing my energy and my thoughts and my spending habits and my self respect. instead tell me i’m allowed to feel however i want about my body. give me bodily autonomy. body neutrality means let me decide what i need or want to do with the skin i’m in.
I think you are missing the point. In a society that holds one body type up as the perfect model to achieve, every other body is then seen/deemed as imperfect and that brings on unwanted and undeserved shame for simply not fitting into the “norm”. And while men can and do experience that, it is mostly wimin who are subjected to the most shame and ridicule, often times by some guy who really needs to look in a mirror himself. Take the 80’s, though it still happens, when wimin started to be judged by a number…“she’s a 10” or “she’s only a 4…she will be lonely her whole life”. For fucks sake, the dump asshole in the white house still does that. It’s misogynistic, hateful and should have no place in any society.
I’m glad you are comfortable with your body, I never was for other reasons, but just because you are doesn’t mean that others who are trying to point society in the direction past the shaming of people’s bodies and so support and express body positivity, it shouldn’t really affect you. Live and let live.
I understand your point, but I don’t think you understand mine. As a non-skinny woman of color I am very aware of what the “norm” is and how society has tried to force me and others into meeting it or being shamed that we don’t/can’t.
It is not about whether I’m personally comfortable with my body, it is about understanding that body positivity puts pressure on people to redefine “ugly” into “pretty” as if that addresses the reality that there is no norm and looks should have nothing to do with how you’re treated.
It’s wonderful if folks can love their body. I’m not saying no one should. But a movement based on telling you “you’re beautiful in any shape, size, or skintone” is still telling individuals (mostly women) how we should feel about our bodies. It’s just the other side of the patriarchal coin, continuing to emphasize appearance as the focus.
More radical, more empowering, is saying that beauty has a role in life but it never determines your legitimacy as a human. If you never get around to loving your body you haven’t failed the feminist movement or yourself. You don’t owe anyone that body-love in order to exist.
stop treating people you admire and love like gods. when you put romanticized versions of the people you love above the people they really are, then you’ve done yourself and them a disservice. they cannot possibly ever live up to the ideal you’ve created of them, and they will inevitably disappoint you. you will be let down by someone you previously thought was perfect, or worthy of admiration, but perfection has never and will never exist, and if you look for it in a place it isn’t, you will always be let down, and it isn’t fair to you but it isn’t fair to the person you’ve romanticized in the first place. you must realize and tear down the veil of impossible standards (whether physical or more psychological) because they were never possible to attain in the first place.
I wish someone had told me all these things when I was a confused, hurting teenager, so I am sharing them now. I hope they help someone the way they could have helped me.
One of the most useful things I’ve learned about recovering from trauma is that my decisions need to be judged according to the incomplete information that was available to me at the time.
So, say I’m deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that it’s a good idea. I’m hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.
I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.
What happened?
Trauma brain says: “This happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.”
Recovery brain says, “According to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.”
The “trauma brain” response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.
“Should I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesn’t work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality one…”
(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)
But if I foster the “recovery brain” response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.
“If I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesn’t work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesn’t work, then I’ll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.”
And then later when the mousepad doesn’t work: “Well, that didn’t work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.”
(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)
tl;dr: Bad results are not always evidence of bad decisions. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt about why you do what you do.
Here for the underdogs 