this might be a hard pill to swallow for college students but getting drunk all the time isnt a personality trait it’s alcoholism

Here’s another pill: companies and ad teams know that your 20s are extremely stressful and they purposely target you because they don’t care about making us all alcoholics as much as they care about profiting off of us.

cooler pill that I’d wish I’d known about when I was younger: if you’re struggling with alcohol, AA isn’t your only option. AA can be a bit dogmatic and sometimes hostile to certain communities, especially the LGBT.

there’s a group called SMART Recovery that has free meetings just like AA, but it’s all science-based and secular.

and here’s the thing for college students: unlike with AA, it’s okay if your goal is moderation and not abstinence. no one is going to make you feel like a bad guy for being young and just wanting help getting healthier, but perhaps not wanting to commit to being totally abstinent. google SMART Recovery, guys. they’re awesome. :)

Reblog for non-religious version of AA

Reblogging for science based abuse recovery

#Repost @speakeasywithme (@get_repost) ・・・ March is BRAIN INJURY AWARENESS month. Break the stigma!💙 🧠 Here are some resources and community partners to support people with brain injury, wherever they may be in their recovery: brainline.org Cbirt.org CDC.gov/trumaticbraininjury Ancds.org @sarahbellumsbakery @aphasia_network @aphasiarecoveryconnection 🧠 🧠 🧠 This brain portrait (minus the writing) is painted by Kailey Cox (who I met through the Aphasia Network) “Art for Brains” which you can find on Facebook! I have two pieces myself! 🧠 🧠 🧠 #braininjuryawareness #braininjuryawarenessmonth #braininjury #concussion #strokesurvivor #stroke #aphasia #aphasiaawareness #slp #slplife #slpgradstudent #slpsofinstagram #slpeeps #slptobe #slp2be #cognition #cognitiverehabilitation #acutecare #recovery #speechlanguagepathology #speechtherapy #medslp #slpgradstudent #motorvehicle #motorvehicleaccident #tbisurvivor #tbi #tbiawareness #acquiredbraininjury https://www.instagram.com/p/B9eUYpVAhqA/?igshid=11bm9kcsqsf37

letting a traumatized character have their happy ending where they can recover from their trauma will always be a thousand times more powerful than killing them off for shock value

Recovery is good and romanticising mental illness is bad but can some of y’all please fucking *think* before you post some shit like “recovery is always possible” “Illness is always temporary” and shit like that? I’m fuckin tired of all the posts acting like chronic illness doesn’t exist and like it’s impossible to have a high quality of life when you’re ill

and um, if i can add on? people really need to focus more on things like “there are times where it’ll be easier to cope” or encouraging them to live for better/easier days rather than planting false hope (”your suffering will be gone someday!” etc) in those theyre trying to comfort.. if you really wanna encourage someone whose pain (mental or physical) doesn’t go away, help them get through the hard days and make it to the easier ones, instead of hoping and praying it’ll just leave completely. because for a lot of people, it doesn’t.

when i watched good omens, i didn’t expect to love tv crowley, and it fuckin blindsided me. all at once, i thought, oh gosh, damn, and fuck, roughly in that order, and here’s why.

where tv crowley and book crowley most significantly diverge is the bookshop fire. in the book, “Crowley cursed Aziraphale, and the ineffable plan, and Above, and Below.” in the tv show, instead of cursing him, he calls out for him desperately before falling to the floor with a quiet “you’ve gone.” for book crowley, az is “Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.” for tv crowley, aziraphale is his “best friend.” naturally, in the bookshop fire, tv crowley is in fucking agony. this is not how book crowley reacts.

see, one of book crowley’s most basic traits is his optimism. “Because, underneath it all,” the book says, “Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times—he thought briefly of the fourteenth century—then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.”

it’s a really beautiful passage. and i can’t relate to it at all. 

after the fire, book crowley thinks he might “get completely and utterly pissed out of his mind while he waited for the world to end.” where book crowley only considers it, tv crowley actually does it. he does go to wait out the end of the world while drunk, and does give up, and he does break down, and he is not an optimist; he is a mess. that struck me. i’ve never seen a heroic character so blatantly need help before. but crowley gets help; he finds a friend and confesses how much aziraphale means to him; he gets back in the car and forges onward through the fire, even though he’s clearly Not Okay.

and there, on the flaming m25, book crowley and tv crowley diverge again. tv crowley is not an optimist; he’s not holding the bentley together with the hope that it’ll all work out. but he does it anyway. tv crowley doesn’t have optimism, but he has something that is, to me, even more important. in the show, “Crowley has something no other demons have, especially not Hastur: an imagination.”

an imagination. strangely enough, in the book, crowley admits to lacking it: “They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination,” book crowley says. but tv crowley has that imagination, and that is what saves him–and that, to me, makes so much sense.

tv crowley is traumatised. when he fell, some part of him broke, and while he claims he “sauntered vaguely downwards,” he really took a “million-light-year freestyle dive into a pool of boiling sulphur,” and it hurt. tv crowley is hurt. and so am i. 

i also give up. i also break down. i don’t, and can’t, ever believe that the universe is looking out for me–or for anyone. i am not an optimist. but you know what? i have imagination. i have friends. and if it came down to me to help save the world, that is exactly what i would rely on.

Book Crowley was written by two youngish men at the dawn of the post Cold War era. He is a young man because they were young men. He has optimism because that was the mood at the time. Optimism that decades of MAD was over.

TV Crowley was adapted by a man who is older, and more cynical, and has lost his best friend to Alzheimer’s.

 ^ Yes this.

Book! Crowley was written by young men with the world at their feet, and really, why wouldn’t you feel optimistic as your life starts out?

TV! Crowley was written by a man who lost his best friend to Alzheimer’s and no, it wasn’t a fire, but this man knew/ knows intimately that you don’t just pick yourself up from that straight away. You go and you drink and you mourn andyou grieve and you cry.

And only when that’s happened and you come to terms with the fact that this man is never going to come back, you shift to accommodate that loss and then you look toward what needs to be happening.

TV! Crowley’s reaction was so much more realistic for the relationship he and TV! Aziraphale had and it would’ve been out of character for him to just dust himself off and drive straight to Tadfield, because it would have been like saying those six thousand years meant nothing to him. But they did and so he broke.

I’ve lost someone I’ve loved very suddenly. I’ve had those final conversations, sitting by myself at a lonely table with a ghost. Sometimes there are things left to say, apologies to make. And if I could have said, “Where are you? Wherever you are, I’ll come to you,” and done one last thing to help them—I’d have done it. Even if it meant holding myself together through an inferno by the force of my imagination, even believing as Crowley did that I would still never see them again. He didn’t know Adam would give the angel back. But they had unfinished business, and he was going to finish it, if it was the last thing he did. Which it should have been. He didn’t expect a happy ending, he just needed an ending, one that wasn’t cut short.

i didn’t need my heart today.

I don’t think it would have been unrealistic for him to keep moving forward exactly - speaking as a trauma survivor, sometimes when the world has fallen apart, all you can do is throw yourself into what’s in front of you and try not to think. (This is actually my default crisis mode.)

Collapsing in the feels is for later, when you have a) time and b) enough distance that you can survive them. It’s triage, basically.

That said… The distinctions pointed out here are very real and very powerful, and can be brought together under a single heading: book!Crowley is further in his recovery than TV!Crowley.

See, I’ve been doing a lot of processing and healing lately. And you know what? Turns out that’s the difference between “This is fine!” being defiance and optimism, or cynical despair.

A freshly wounded survivor says this is fine, I’m used to it, everything falls apart.

A healing survivor learns to say this is fine, I’ve survived so much more, you think this will stop me?

And the imagination thing? Well, part of getting out from under a fog of trauma and triggers is figuring out who you are outside of that. Often, it means building new identity. Book!Crowley has had more chance to identify with humanity.

(Zukka: Remind me to write a post sometime about her vision of exactly what anguish and rage and self-loathing hide behind “just asked questions” and “sauntered vaguely downwards,” because there is a fuck load of “laugh so I don’t scream” in those phrases.)

recovery starts with deinstitutionalization. recovery starts with housing without strings attached. recovery starts with empowering people, not in the bullshit you-can-decide-which-of-two-equally-terrible-meals-you-can-eat-but-you-can’t-leave-your-room-without-permission sense, but in the you can chose your own housing sense, in the you can decide when to leave your house sense, in the you can have enough food to eat and it can be food you want sense, in the you can make choices about your health care sense. in the you can make meaningful choices just like any other human being sense

recovery starts with equality and treating psychiatrically diagnosed people as human beings and not as problems that need to be locked away or controlled and told their hopes are too high and unrealistic and that they need to accept a life of living in institutions or institution-adjacent homes where they have every meaningful decision about their lives made by them for someone else

meaningful attempts at helping people recover must address poverty, lack of housing, food insecurity, institutionalization, police violence, and countless other things if they want to attempt to be even remotely meaningful, let alone helpful to the people who need them

it’s just one of those croissant days

we love a recovery

HE IS MAKING HIS OWN CROISSANTS I HOPE HE GETS TO ADD LOTS OF CHOCOLATE

Reminder

the goal of recovery is not “moving on” the goal of recovery is not forgiveness the goal of recovery is not indifference to those who traumatized you the goal of recovery is not getting back to who you were before trauma the goal of recovery is not the elimination of all ptsd symptoms the goal of recovery is not the fading of strong emotions about your trauma the goal of recovery is not the ability to never think about your trauma anymore

the goal of recovery is getting to a place where you can prioritize your own safety, autonomy, self love, and connection with others.

Your recovery isn’t about whether you can pass as a non-survivor. Your recovery is about whether you can know and love yourself a little more today than you did a year ago. 

I think a much better way to see these things is not, “If you just stay where you are and never recover, you’re depriving yourself of happiness”, but rather “Even if this is all true, you can still find happiness despite this suffering, and as we validate each other’s suffering we should also work to help each other find those little bits of happiness.”

quick mid summer comic

hope with chronic illness is not thinking you will magically recover, or that you will have a certain level of ability in the future. hope with chronic illness is believing that no matter what your illness throws on you, your life will be worth living 

Love this, howilearnedtocope. 💙

This is really important. Like I was describing to my significant other yesterday that it’s going to be draining for me to be in an environment where people are wanting recovery at me. Like it’s exhausting, and when other people are imposing that desire on you, not only do you have to deal with your illness, you also have to carry the knowledge that your continued existence is going to be letting people down. And no one should have to deal with that.

Sometimes I look at posts and feel like Auntie Bootstraps about to give a useless motivational speech, and sometimes I look at posts and think, “Well, hell, you condescending weirdos, guess I’ll never recover.  And recover from what????  The way I am????” and none of this is a contradiction. 

Autism isn’t a mental illness in the first place.  Unless you’ve got autistic traits, or something else, you consider ill or dysfunctional then you aren’t being addressed at all in “recovery positive” posts.  The main intended audiences there are the people suffering from the huge chunk of mental illness caused or drastically aggravated by the madhouse of contemporary society and those with congenital mental illness that include symptoms that cause a lot of difficulty and struggle that one needs to learn to deal with as effectively as possible to live a life more on their own terms.

The latter isn’t even really recovery, of course, it’s adaptation, and would be a lot easier with a less heartless society, but recovery is the buzzword for people with mental illness improving themselves or their situation.

I know autism isn’t a mental illness.  I do have mental illnesses on top of autism, although one is probably related (OCD) and two are results of being treated like shit for it (anxiety and childhood PTSD). 

But yeah, it’s adaptation, and I like that word a lot better because adaptation is something feasible that I can do on my own terms instead of GET BETTER OR YOU’VE FAILED which is what recovery sounds like to me.

And you have to keep in mind 8 year old me when you use buzzwords, and of course people generally don’t because people don’t usually look at adults and think “this used to be a child and some particular things might have been done to said child”.

Child me heard recovery in the context of GET BETTER OR YOU’VE FAILED and simultaneously heard NO CURE, YOU’RE BAD FOREVER.  My mother yanked me out of therapy for good at 8 years old because ~**they didn’t cure me**~ so I got the correctional “you’re doing everything wrong” therapy as a child without getting the attempts at building someone back up therapy as a preteen and teenager.  I didn’t get the latter there until I was an autonomous adult, and I don’t know how good that is that late in the game.  That last statement sounds unnecessarily pessimistic, though.

Anyway, child me’s attitude was “if you’re trying to help me, GET LOST” aaaand to an extent I never grew out of that.  Get lost or at least ask permission, and it’s not like anyone would have asked permission when I was a minor (unfortunately). 

I don’t like ultimatums.  GET BETTER OR YOU’VE FAILED is an especially bullshit ultimatum, and when you’ve been raised to see yourself as Wrong™ all your life, when that’s not a new thing, then you’re more likely to take a Piss Off approach to the concept of recovery.

That doesn’t, to me, mean giving up and never trying to improve yourself – although I have some issue with the idea of “we never stop improving ourselves!!!” either.  Like give me a break, that‘s so easily manipulated into “you’re never good enough”.  On the other hand, it’s true we never stop improving ourselves.  But there needs to be a clear message in that message that one is already enough.

We’re enough.  We can trust our own instincts to adapt. 

“But Demeter, what if your instincts fail you over and over?” says the hypothetical person reading this, probably not the person I’m replying to.

1) They don’t.  Not on bloody everything they don’t.  You still have had instincts that were right.

2) OH WELL, YOU LEARNED THINGS.  You’re ALLOWED to learn things in real life.  Everyone’s instincts fail them, you just don’t hear about the people whose instincts fail them boringly. 

On trauma aftermaths that don't advance the plot

The way TV shows trauma can lead people to expect every reference to trauma to be a plot point. This can be isolating to people coping with the aftermaths of trauma. Sometimes people treat us as stories rather than as people. Sometimes, instead of listening to us, they put a lot of pressure on us to advance the plot they’re expecting.

On TV, triggers tend to be full audiovisual flashbacks that add something to the story. You see a vivid window into the character’s past, and something changes. On TV, trauma aftermaths are usually fascinating. Real life trauma aftermaths are sometimes interesting, but also tend to be very boring to live with.

On TV, triggers tend to create insight. In real life, they’re often boring intrusions interfering with the things you’d rather be thinking about. Sometimes knowing darn well where they come from doesn’t make them go away. Sometimes it’s more like: Seriously? This again?

On TV, when trauma is mentioned, it’s usually a dramatic plot point that happens in a moment. In real life, trauma aftermaths are a mundane day-to-day reality that people live with. They’re a fact of life — and not necessarily the most important one at all times. People who have experienced trauma do other things too. They’re important, but not the one and only defining characteristic of who someone is. And things that happened stay important even when you’re ok. Recovery is not a reset. Mentioning the past doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in crisis.

On TV, when a character mentions trauma, or gets triggered in front of someone, it’s usually a dramatic moment. It changes their life, or their relationship with another character, or explains their backstory, or something. In real life, being triggered isn’t always a story, and telling isn’t always a turning point. Sometimes it’s just mentioning something that happened to be relevant. Sometimes it’s just a mundane instance of something that happens from time to time.

Most people can’t have a dramatic transformative experience every time it turns out that their trauma matters. Transformative experiences and moments of revelation exist, but they’re not the end all and be all of trauma aftermaths. Life goes on, and other things matter too. And understanding what a reaction means and where it came from doesn’t always make it go away. Sometimes, it takes longer and has more to do with skill-building than introspection. Sometimes it doesn’t go away.

On a day to day level, it’s often better to be matter-of-fact about aftermaths. It can be exhausting when people see you as a story and expect you to advance the plot whenever they notice some effect of trauma. Pressure to perform narratives about healing doesn’t often help people to make their lives better. Effect support involves respecting someone as a complex human, including the boring parts.

The aftermath of trauma is a day-to-day reality. It affects a lot of things, large and small. It can be things like being too tired to focus well in class because nightmares kept waking you up every night this week. TV wants that to be a dramatic moment where the character faces their past and gets better. In real life, it’s often a day where you just do your best to try and learn algebra anyway. Because survivors do things besides be traumatized and think about trauma. Sometimes it’s not a story. Sometimes it’s just getting through another day as well as possible.

A lot of triggers are things like being unable to concentrate on anything interesting because some kinds of background noises make you feel too unsafe to pay attention to anything else. For the zillionth time.  Even though you know rationally that they’re not dangerous. Even though you know where they come from, and have processed it over and over. Even if you’ve made a lot of progress in dealing with them, even if they’re no longer bothersome all the time. For most people, recovery involves a lot more than insight. The backstory might be interesting, but being tired and unable to concentrate is boring.

Triggers can also mean having to leave an event and walk home by yourself while other people are having fun, because it turns out that it hurts too much to be around pies and cakes. Or having trouble finding anything interesting to read that isn’t intolerably triggering. Or having trouble interacting with new people because you’re too scared or there are too many minefields. Or being so hypervigilant that it’s hard to focus on anything. No matter how interesting the backstory is, feeling disconnected and missing out on things you wanted to enjoy is usually boring.

When others want to see your trauma as a story, their expectations sometimes expand to fill all available space. Sometimes they seem to want everything to be therapy, or want everything to be about trauma and recovery.

When others want every reference to trauma to be the opening to a transformative experience, it can be really hard to talk about accommodations. For instance, it gets hard to say things like:

It can also be hard to mention relevant experiences. There are a lot of reasons to mention experiences other than wanting to process, eg:

Or any number of other things.

When people are expecting a certain kind of story, they sometimes look past the actual person. And when everyone is looking past you in search of a story, it can be very hard to make connections.

It helps to realize that no matter what others think, your story belongs to you. You don’t have to play out other people’s narrative expectations. It’s ok if your story isn’t what others want it to be. It’s ok not to be interesting. It’s ok to have trauma reactions that don’t advance the plot. And there are people who understand that, and even more people who can learn to understand that.

It’s possible to live a good life in the aftermath of trauma. It’s possible to relearn how to be interested in things. It’s possible to build space you can function in, and to build up your ability to function in more spaces. It’s often possible to get over triggers. All of this can take a lot of time and work, and can be a slow process. It doesn’t always make for a good story, and it doesn’t always play out the way others would like it to. And, it’s your own personal private business. Other people’s concern or curiosity does not obligate you to share details.

Survivors and victims have the right to be boring. We have the right to deal with trauma aftermaths in a matter-of-fact way, without indulging other people’s desires for plot twists. We have the right to own our own stories, and to keep things private. We have the right to have things in our lives that are not therapy; we have the right to needed accommodations without detailing what happened and what recovery looks like. Neither traumatic experiences nor trauma aftermaths erase our humanity.

We are not stories, and we have no obligation to advance an expected plot. We are people, and we have the right to be treated as people. Our lives, and our stories, are our own.

every time we (disabled and/or mentally ill people) say that we don’t think recovery should be the end-all or singular or most heavily focused goal for the psychiatric system we literally always get some anti-sj person going “haha typical tumblr speshul snowflakes just dont wanna stop being different lol!!!” or “of COURSE they dont want to recover haha then they wouldn’t be *~unique~* anymore!!! XD”

and it’s like.. the most blatant attempt at completely missing the point in order to silence us that I have ever seen…

How simple do we have to make it for you before y’all get it like????

Many of us do want to recover. Many of us do want to get over our illnesses or disabilities or disorders. But just like every other person on the planet everyone is different, and when we say “recovery shouldn’t be the end-all goal for the psychiatric system” we’re not fucking saying “recovery is bad and I don’t want to get better” we’re saying let us be seen as more than something that needs to instantly be cured.

Also with some mental health issues, preassure to recover may be fatal.