Misery: yeah, my body doesn't make me miserable very much, these days, and when it does it's in "normal" ways (I loathe and resent having colds), or I've got coping strategies (in particular for lungs, my "I am awful and useless and don't deserve to exist in the world" gets redirected into defensive rage and fury at people poisoning me), or I'm in no fit state to string a sentence together let alone actually talk to people, so it's not going to show up online much. I was distraught, for several years, about the bit where it's highly unlikely that I'll ever do serious hiking again -- and I get much more distressed and agitated and miserable about this every single time I interact with a pain clinic or a medic who's all "so why exactly do you use a wheelchair, you're too young for that" (BECAUSE IT MEANS I CAN ACTUALLY DO THINGS LIKE GO TO ART GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS AND ENJOY MYSELF INSTEAD OF WALLOWING FIVEEVA, FUCK. OFF.) -- plus a bunch of related, but I've... mostly made my peace with it, and I've mostly adjusted.
So in fact some of where I'm coming from is having non-trivial experience with being made miserable by or being scared of my body, and knowing how much happier I am over here. (It was kind of a Revelation when I was, temporarily, on a drug regime that meant I didn't hurt. I hadn't realised how afraid I was of being in pain until I... wasn't. And then the drugs stopped working, because of course they did, but luckily I managed to keep hold of "not being afraid of pain" and wow was that a significant improvement in my quality of life.) This does, of course, mean I'm a bit prone to doing the autistic evangelism thing of "but this approach is making you sad, I promise you don't actually want to do it, do this instead" + blank incomprehension at people struggling with that because of course I've forgotten the emotional specifics of the grieving process I went through to get here, in the visceral sense, so it's very easy (isn't it always) to default to "but if you just..." when there's no "just" or "easy" or "simple" about it.
(I think this also shows up in my approach to counselling -- a lot of the time, if I'm feeling agitated or angry or distressed, it's because My Model Was Wrong and things didn't happen within expected parameters and therefore I understand Nothing about the entire world and that's terrifying. A lot of my distress and almost all of my anger just... evaporates, once I've got a working model for What The Hell Just Happened. Similarly, now that I've wrapped my head around the complex version of "loving my body", I've got the working model of "my body is not an antagonist" and it's Completely Obvious to me that All Other Models Are Broken -- that's an oversimplification, but you know what I mean -- and that therefore if I just EXPLAIN this one well enough...)
(... and on top of that, of course, there's the layered and contradictory thing of second-hand distress at, more than anything else, my body remembering how miserable hating myself like that was. I'm intellectually sort of indifferent to it? But I get a significant physical and apparently subconcious stress response to people talking about how much they hate their bodies, and talking this through is at least in part an attempt to gently persuade myself that people who are in that place aren't trying to tell me that I have to go back to hating my body.)
So. I think you are quite right about approaches, and I in fact have a post brewing (revisiting the antifa discussion) about our tendency as a species to reduce things to handy shorthand mnemonics that are actively counter-productive if they're not supplied with, as you say, all the footnotes, and about needing to try out both "extremes" in order to develop the skills to end up somewhere nuanced in the middle, but that is... not a job for tonight.
(Engaging with the permission-to-express-negativity is going in a different comment because I think it's a bit tangential and it might be easier to manage the conversation if etc etc etc!)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regna
Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.
Date: 2017-09-13 08:15 pm (UTC)So in fact some of where I'm coming from is having non-trivial experience with being made miserable by or being scared of my body, and knowing how much happier I am over here. (It was kind of a Revelation when I was, temporarily, on a drug regime that meant I didn't hurt. I hadn't realised how afraid I was of being in pain until I... wasn't. And then the drugs stopped working, because of course they did, but luckily I managed to keep hold of "not being afraid of pain" and wow was that a significant improvement in my quality of life.) This does, of course, mean I'm a bit prone to doing the autistic evangelism thing of "but this approach is making you sad, I promise you don't actually want to do it, do this instead" + blank incomprehension at people struggling with that because of course I've forgotten the emotional specifics of the grieving process I went through to get here, in the visceral sense, so it's very easy (isn't it always) to default to "but if you just..." when there's no "just" or "easy" or "simple" about it.
(I think this also shows up in my approach to counselling -- a lot of the time, if I'm feeling agitated or angry or distressed, it's because My Model Was Wrong and things didn't happen within expected parameters and therefore I understand Nothing about the entire world and that's terrifying. A lot of my distress and almost all of my anger just... evaporates, once I've got a working model for What The Hell Just Happened. Similarly, now that I've wrapped my head around the complex version of "loving my body", I've got the working model of "my body is not an antagonist" and it's Completely Obvious to me that All Other Models Are Broken -- that's an oversimplification, but you know what I mean -- and that therefore if I just EXPLAIN this one well enough...)
(... and on top of that, of course, there's the layered and contradictory thing of second-hand distress at, more than anything else, my body remembering how miserable hating myself like that was. I'm intellectually sort of indifferent to it? But I get a significant physical and apparently subconcious stress response to people talking about how much they hate their bodies, and talking this through is at least in part an attempt to gently persuade myself that people who are in that place aren't trying to tell me that I have to go back to hating my body.)
So. I think you are quite right about approaches, and I in fact have a post brewing (revisiting the antifa discussion) about our tendency as a species to reduce things to handy shorthand mnemonics that are actively counter-productive if they're not supplied with, as you say, all the footnotes, and about needing to try out both "extremes" in order to develop the skills to end up somewhere nuanced in the middle, but that is... not a job for tonight.
(Engaging with the permission-to-express-negativity is going in a different comment because I think it's a bit tangential and it might be easier to manage the conversation if etc etc etc!)