or like a kid used to breezing through things on an easy understanding doesn't get used to having to learn how to study and focus the way other kids do, gets praised for doing what comes naturally to them, and then it turns into "but this should be easy for you!!" "why aren't you doing better than this" "but you're so smart!" etc
gee, it isn't like a kid that basically gets sabotaged by not being challenged properly, and never actually builds up the study-disciplines needed later would ever have issues, and then feel bad when everyone makes it clear that they expected the world from them. this should be easy for you! but we didn't teach you what you needed; what's wrong with you?
I love the bit posted a while ago, about how if something's worth doing well, then it's worth it to half-ass it too.
is it worth it to eat your favorite fancy foods when you're hungry? yes? then it's worth it to munch on crackers, when you're not up to the task of cooking for hours.
is it worth it to brush your teeth for two minutes? then 30 secs can do.
While I'm among those who've linked the two videos linked inside for truth... the one in the OP I personally had to tune out as soon as he brought up emotional control.
Funny thing is, part of that aversion to the very idea of emotional control is actually associated with my own experiences of high expectations of what a smart person "should" be able to do easily.
he mostly brings it up in two main contexts there, if I recall right: using emotions to manipulate others (throwing fits and/or making others feel responsible for how happy someone is) and the kind of emotional regulation humans normally develop as they age (ie, no meltdown over how it's the end of the freaking world because you can't have a second cookie)
Namely, I've had people in my life, especially my father (rest in pieces, asshole), insist that a smart person "should" be able to just think their way out of emotional problems.
the latter is more... simply just brain development? and some measure of it being learned - oh okay, maybe a lack of a second cookie isn't such a world-ending tragedy, and there's no need for that kind of meltdown response; experience has taught that it'll be okay.
I couldn't help but be immediately reminded of the victim-blaming "the boys 'tease' [verbally bully] you because you react to them!" aspect of all the negative ways people have used the concept.
the former, he's directly addressing how to deal with people trying to make others responsible for their emotions - when someone's dumping exactly the class of bullshit on you that you just used as an example, or things like, on the extreme end, the "look what (horrible thing) you made me do" "I'll do (horrible thing) and it'll be your fault" garbage.
And how could I not be familiar with the idea of "not rocking the boat"? A lot of people's entire problem with me is that I dare to question anything or even acknowledge that a problem exist.
just wasn't sure if you'd read the whole description, or just picked up the term in passing. I recently enough had to explain to someone that "gaslighting" was not, in fact, a catch-all term for lying and general bad behavior.
um, yes, but I wasn't questioning if you knew what gaslighting meant, as a term. I was just using it as an example if "one would think, but sometimes not, so I don't want to assume either way, hence asking"
the point I was trying to make was simply that he gives an awful lot of good advice/perspectives/understanding about how to deal with people who try to use emotional manipulation to make others keep the boat from rocking.
he does that in that video, especially. so I'm sorry to hear you had to back off from it. it's pretty much exactly the kind of thing I'd have loved to learn years ago.
Emotions as immature, emotions as proof of idiocy, emotions as an exploitable weakness, emotions as an obstacle to being a good little cog in whatever machine will take you.
but see, that's not how I interpreted that? more, that trick where they fly off the handle, so their victim gets upset/raises voice in reaction (matching what they're getting) and then the manipulator uses that upset to paint their victim as the "unreasonable" one.
so, noting that if you can manage to not react, it's a way of refusing to feed into the scenario and end up in the trap they're trying to shove you into.
he's specifically not victim blaming here; he's saying, here's how this terrible tactic works, here's the dynamic it uses, and if you can refuse to play that game, you can take the upper hand like this~
I mean things come in degrees, so even if it doesn't set off a panic attack, I think it's probably fair to call it "triggering" if it kicks you into a not-able-to-listen-to-it state of mind
it's served me well, in some situations where I've managed it. my dad has notably all but entirely given up on rage-fits-ing at me, now that I'm able to just... act like I'm bored during it. /shrug.... not all tactics work well, or at all, for everyone.
Exacerangutan
: Fair; I just have actually had panic attacks that sometimes involve memories going fuzzy before, generally if people actually say things my teachers would have said.
I suspect we've all got some things that light up pathways with loud emotional crosstalk. Like, I have some major narcissism-aversion stuff, so a lot of self-affirmation strategies make me very twitchy and uncomfortable.
agreed. I tend to think of the term "trigger" as a little akin to "squick" - it's just a kneejerk bad reaction (of a different response) that doesn't really have a judgment element to it, so much as it just... is what it is?
Ultimately, I want to explain so badly when things in that general range that people take for granted are innocent or necessary have made me upset. I actually want people to understand for once.
I don't understand the... insisting that you shouldn't/explaining why you won't. you don't need to justify anything to me. just... move along without watching it, if you don't want to. I'm not interested in making you watch.
Not to put words in anyone's mouths, but my impression is that the essential positions here are "oof these seem valuable in general but that one is upsetting to me" as an emotional sharing statement, and "there is a valuable idea being expressed in it" as a rational statement, which are both true, and both sound dismissive in the other's context
could very well be. I'm not trying to argue anyone into anything, just pointing out what a thing is. and am probably much too tired to catch the other side of that properl- oh hey there's that usb drive I lost. ....what's processing power, again? (hence the memo-to-self post...)
hm. I wonder if a lot of some of my issue tends toward "I don't know what to do with this bit, so I'm just going to move on to something I can brain a bit about instead".... ...probably as a sort of Part Two of getting constantly derailed in conversations irl...
Pteryx
I don't think that was intended, and definitely not on my part. My general take is that feelings are always valid and the only question of right/wrong/etc is how people handle/respond to/cope with them.
'Sail
: ...fffff yeah I can understand that... although I tend to be more in the hyperfocus side of things and want to Not Let Go Until The Problem Is Solved.
There is also an element of disappointment in the content creator involved in my reaction to this, too. Now I feel like I can't be sure he too won't just go off into uncomfortable territory for me.
I have a discord server I made with the intention of using its folders/categories system as a way of organizing notes on a thing... and some of the friends in it with me to add to and take advantage of said notes have had a persistent habit of turning wherever they're typing into another chatroom.
One thing text is nice for is coping with being interrupted, honestly. Probably not going to be broken into mid-sentence, and can put something in a Notepad file temporarily if things go off on a tangent and thus not be afraid I'll lose my original train of thought.
area for posting info on items of a certain class? insert commentary about if they should put X or Y here, or should they make another section for that? lol, so many sections, and- oh oh check out this emote I added!!!
me: ....so much for my organization; the numbers are three pages up now.
Pteryx
and honestly I only know one or two of his things so I can't help much one what to expect from him... maybe the youtube video description says more about what gets covered, usually? idk. ...I hate to say it but there may be some unavoidable element of occupational hazard, so to speak.
mm, mostly in the video in question, he... iirc, despite tired and having watched a crapton of other vids in between then and now... he kinda goes over bad behaviors of others and various ways for dealing with that? from Dad being manipulative because he didn't want to join you in making dinner too and is now sulking and not eating the food (example being a
...and yeah, a good therapist should be sensitive to those things and find ways to help that don't step on the raw nerves, but I know finding a good therapist can be dicey
(-scenario where all the women spend hours in the kitchen while the men are out there watching sports and relaxing, ~because tradition~, and how to break that cycle some too) and how to disarm that type of emotionally blackmailing kind of hmph fit... to... uh... hmm. what was another example...
I guess it's kind of like... if someone has had a traumatic experience involving a fire, they maybe can't sit through an informational video talking about fire safety. Not because it's advocating traumatic fires or diminishing traumatic experiences, but because anything you can say about fire safety just rhymes too well with their own trauma.
...but in any series of videos about home maintenance there's some risk of fire safety being mentioned, so... idk what to do about that, besides just not watching home maintenance videos, or being strategizing around the possibility of having to bail on a video or at least a section of it.
I've been spending the majority of the last few days working like nuts on Animal Crossing style plushes. currently hand-stitching the pink bear I originally set out to make for my nephew....
fwiw, half the time I just... have no idea how to respond to a lot of things in general, so tend not to. combination of "I get people upset at me for missing a thing, or saying something they didn't want to hear (at the moment?)" and part just "I don't feel I have anything meaningful (or meaningful enough?) to contribute here, so I'll abstain"
my solution is to live in constant anxiety in all social interactions, and out of a dread of saying too much or too little, manage somehow to do both at once
'Sail
rofl well some of that also, I've spent the last 16 hours trying to get myself to be productive only to end up distracted with All The Things and I'm only sitting up awake rn because I have a morning appointment I didn't want, so
Me: "OK so that thing we've been putting off for a month that's like... literally just scanning a document and emailing it..." Brain: "Hey what about literally fucking anything else."
like I'm trying to do the CBT thing and ask myself what I'm feeling and what I'm reacting to and all I can think is "I'm feeling pissed off that I can't seem to get this stupid thing done so I can just stop needing to do it already ffs"
like, I get it, when your society is so hand-to-mouth that anyone not doing their share of labor is endangering everyone else's lives, you don't have the freedom to stop and worry a lot about mental health, but that's... not... how things are or have been for a long while now
Oh, one more frustrating thing about that video being unwatchable for me: I'm all for opposing narcissists. I even have this sneaking suspicion that our society has been molded around accommodating narcissism and that's one of the roots of its problems.
so moral judgments (i.e. "you should be doing that thing and you're bad if you don't") are just... not especially valid, compared to therapeutic inquiries (i.e. "that behavior seems counterproductive, let's see if we can help to either correct the behavior or strategize around it")
Pteryx
: Hrm... I can definitely see how it's a valid hypothesis, at least, but I'd have to think about it more. I feel like there's also an element of... maybe "human nature" is overstating it, but some kind of pretty deep-seated features of how people socialize.
like, all else being equal, confidence tends to be attractive and infectious to humans, so a smart narcissist just has to learn how much confidence is too much and avoid crossing that line out loud
It strikes me as horrifyingly bizarre in a near-eldritch-horror sort of way that people on the autistic spectrum are the ones that have parents loudly and offensively lamenting the death of the child they wish they had, while being a thoughtless follower of authority figures is considered perfectly normal up until the actual danger happens.
For me, it'd be blind obedience of authority and uncritical absorption of social noise that'd prompt the "I want a replacement child, this one's broken" response.
at the risk of rhyming with the sort of thing my edgy 16-year-old self would have said, although hopefully with a little more nuance, "broken" from a mental health standpoint is honestly kind of subjective
...at 16 it was more of a "heh what if madness is the REAL truth?!?!?" gothic contrariness thing, but... in a more serious sense, thinking differently isn't necessarily something in need of fixing, although it sure can interact in a problematic way with social structures not designed to account for it well
I am so feeling the "can't bring self to do this thing I need to do even though it's not hard" thing right now. It's actually gotten so bad I have had a hard time playing video games because of the psychological impact of committing to the time and focus I know it's going to take.
(Doesn't help that FFXIV strains my situational awareness limits fairly often. Party was making fun of my "running for life" on PLD when the main tank died due to healers having an issue. From my perspective, I dodged a rather tricky sequence of AoEs, then... lost track of where the boss was for about a second or two.
and another going around in the same plurks, which likewise makes far too much sense....
....
is it worth it to eat your favorite fancy foods when you're hungry? yes? then it's worth it to munch on crackers, when you're not up to the task of cooking for hours.
is it worth it to brush your teeth for two minutes? then 30 secs can do.
spoilers, I'm lying"oh, speaking of bags, (insert anecdote here about a find at a store)"
"...went to pack my bag, and I found the thing I couldn't find to bring to you yesterday sitting under it. do you still want it?"
which makes it really hard to just back out of an argument and leave it alone because I want to resolve the problemI so relate to that.me: ....so much for my organization; the numbers are three pages up now.
my solution is to live in constant anxiety in all social interactions, and out of a dread of saying too much or too little, manage somehow to do both at oncebut also hard same on that anxiety at times, oopsBrain: "Hey what about literally fucking anything else."
don't mind me sleepily lurking in my own plurk, lmfao