depressed–and–underdressed:

smokescreens-n-otherillusions:

jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

owlsofstarlight:

owlsofstarlight:

In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.

This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.

So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.

after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.

these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.

but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.

triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:

– if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.

– if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.

Triggers are a case of classical conditioning, where association between a stimulus (In these cases, forms of trauma) and a neutral stimuli (such as the garage door or scent of bath products) becomes so interlinked that you associate them as one. This happens a lot to those going through chemotherapy, where the nausea they feel from chemo medication becomes linked with everything they interact with while feeling nauseous (it doesn’t help that this sort of conditioning is super strong when linked with nausea) so even after all chemo treatment is done, they can’t stand to eat what they ate at the time, can’t look at the doctor, or a white room, or smell cleaning products without feeling extreme nausea.

Triggers are subconscious, and we haven’t really got control of them. Even if you go through therapy for them, because they’ve now become learnt, they will still be there and mess with people. Don’t make assumptions about triggers, and try to be accommodating.

this is why if anybody asks me to tag smth, even if it seems really random, (for me a big trigger is don’t hug me i’m scared, so the whole “green is not a creative color” meme is Bad News for me) i’ll tag it!!!!

project-free1ancer:

naamahdarling:

crystalfiend:

captioned-vines:

thehorribleghost:

fullpunk-rockalchemist:

little-hits:

just-shower-thoughts:

To help kids learn how to read, all children’s TV shows should be captioned

Also, to help deaf kids enjoy tv, all children’s TV shows should be captioned.

It would also help remove the negative stigma that seems to surround putting on captions

To help immigrant kids learn the local language, all children’s TV should be captioned. I wasn’t really an immigrant per se but my English was bad and awkward until I was about 8 or 9. Before then watching TV with captions on helped me learn what normal conversations sound like and American phrases/idioms. Basically, I wasn’t really a native speaker until I learned English from captions.

I didn’t speak English a lot as a kid, but because of closed captioning, I’m able to run this blog with ease! 🙌

Captions are also useful even for people who just dont have good hearing 🙂

CAPTIONS!

I use captions cause seeing the words as they’re spoken helps a lot even though English is my only language

pastel-pwussy:

theamazingpeggycarter:

ofmicnmen:

cumprise:

girls need to stop thinking it’s okay to touch another girl inappropriately just because they’re girls
I had a girl go up to me and spank me and tell me I had a “fat ass” and I looked at her like she was fucking crazy
On god I did not even know her name
If it’s disrespectful for a man to do it it’s disrespectful for you to do it too??

Y’all also gotta learn not to touch guys too. Like it feels mad awkward when girls rub my arms or body out of nowhere.

It’s also not cool when gay guys grab my boobs and say “it’s okay, I don’t like girls”.

Basically respect people’s personal fucking space

zvaigzdelasas:

fledgling-witch:

Friendly reminder that it’s okay if you’re 21 and you still can’t turn yourself into an entire murder of crows! any species of corvid is fine

Needed this

twoblackcatsandglasses:

“I don’t really know, I mean it seems like society is over medicated and we’re all just selling out to big pharma, but i’m not a doctor”

then you don’t get to have an opinion on whether or not medication helps mentally ill people

do you really think that psychiatrists get their education on mental illnesses, which are incredibly complex, go “oh darn I have to medicate my patients” instead of “I have more access than ever before to treatments for mentally ill people and I can help correct their brain chemistry with medications which is a godsend previous generations didn’t always have”

it isn’t random, it comes from years and years of research and trial and error, and it saves fucking lives

more and more people are coming forward with stories of struggling with different mental illnesses and disabilities and that’s fantastic because it means stigma is lessening

and there is a big problem with Big Pharma, yes, but jesus christ stop sitting there and saying “Oh my gosh they’re medicating kids? that’s so messed up” when that medication can save that child’s life and the person prescribing it studied for years how to help mental illnesses and medications in children are approached with extreme caution anyway when you didn’t fucking go to medical school and don’t actually know what you’re talking about 

“when I was a kid this wasn’t an issue” yes it was but there was a lot more stigma and less treatment available but regardless it isn’t like psychiatric medication is brand spankin’ new at all and people need to stop acting it like it is some new concept 

maybe don’t get your view on mental illness from your biased cousin, how about ask a mentally ill person, we have stories to tell and you could learn a lot if you would simply listen to what we have to say

floofthebpdfox:

Gentle reminder that if you’re feeling better you shouldn’t stop taking your meds abruptly

Just wait a few more weeks and then contact your psychiatrist to discuss it.

THIS IS IMPORTANT AND COULD PREVENT RELAPSING

esthershapiro:

violetfaust:

randomslasher:

adhd-anti:

adhd-anti:

We almost impeached a president for cheating on his fucking wife but we can’t even impeach Trump for putting children in fucking cages

Y’all are fucking annoying

It’s worse than that. We didn’t almost impeach Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was impeached–the senate just ruled to keep him in office.  

And what we impeached him for was perjury and obstruction of justice. 

Aka lying and getting in the way of official investigations.

You know. The things Trump has been doing since day one. On live TV and twitter. Where we have fucking proof of it. 

Yet here we are. And there he fucking still is. 

This is why we have to vote this November, guys. We have got to take back congress. Trump will almost certainly be impeached if we can get enough seats back. 

Please please, I beg of you. Even if you don’t love your democratic candidates this November; even if they’ve done ‘problematic’ things in the past–please vote. The people who sat it out in 2016 because they didn’t love Hillary, or were bitter about Bernie, or fucking voted third party–they are the ones who carry the weight of this administration. The republicans went in undivided. The democrats went in split. And now children are being torn from their families, legal citizens are being deported, and we have fucking Nazis on the rise again.

I get that you want your politician’s views to align perfectly with yours. I do. But sometimes in politics you have to chose the lesser of two evils. We didn’t do that in 2016. 

I beg of you. Do it this year. 

You may not be able to find a progressive candidate whose ideas precisely align with yours…but I PROMISE you that the fascist racist misogynist white supremacists have candidates whose ideas EXACTLY align with theirs.

I can’t remember where exactly I read this, but I remember someone complaining in 2016 about how they didn’t feel good about voting for Clinton, so they were just declining to vote, and then someone popped up as the voice of reason and said

Voting isn’t about making *you* feel good. In fact, it’s not about you at all. It’s about the collectively best choice our citizens can make, based on the options available.

Please go vote for the least evil politicians you can, because goddamn, life in America is getting really scary for so many people.