SoH Mercy

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

I have been observing things about relationships. while I think resolving conflicts the (stereotypical) Redneck Way like some of my kinfolks, by beating up or shooting people, is definitely bad, resolving conflicts the opposite of the Redneck Way like other acquaintances I have come to know, where everyone talks openly about Boundaries and Communication but disagreement, anger, or boundary-enforcing are so uncomfortable that conflicts plink their way through a maze of gossip and conversations in closed pools before getting resolved through unexplained ghosting or ignored through manipulation and grudge-holding, is also bad

people who think that yelling is always bad have the worst relationship skills. If you can envision enforcing boundaries through politely saying “no” but can’t imagine yelling at someone, the concept of boundaries hasn’t quite been applied yet

What i’m saying is, if I was being assaulted, I would hit someone. That is in my toolbox at all times. The goal isn’t to completely eliminate aggression from your toolbox, it’s to communicate well enough that aggression isn’t your only tool, and people KNOW long, long before they reach your Danger Zone

when you can’t say “no” but you can punch someone, you end up killing your brother accidentally over a donut.

When you can say “no” politely but you can’t raise your voice or be a little bit of a bitch or whatever is needed, you either don’t have a Danger Zone (bad!) or don’t know where your Danger Zone is (bad!)

a lot of people function that way and they have interactions that leave them feeling uncomfortable and disrespected but they don’t really do anything about it until a line is crossed that potentially neither person really knew was there, and the only solution those people can think of is to end the relationship or cast the other person as a horrible person or whatever

(via butchcurious)

grison-in-space:

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

I want to talk real quick about something really important to me:

When you have something important to say on the internet that you care about, you will be most successful at changing people’s minds if you take care to state your ideas in an understanding, non-aggressive, and non-accusing manner.

There has been a conversation a while back about how people of color should not need to be “nice” and “polite” when they are resisting being dehumanized and abused. This is true and I 100% agree with it.

However, it seems like some people have taken from that a principle that “if you really care about the truth, you should be willing to accept it even if the person saying it is not ‘nice’ or polite” and applied it to everything.

This is not good.

Emotional discomfort at being nice to someone who disagrees with you on a topic you are very emotionally invested in is not the same as the dehumanizing and demeaning experience of being “nice” in response to oppression and prejudice from people who think your life and the lives of people you love don’t have value.

What I’m saying is, if you are talking about why spiders are important to the ecosystem, why cats should be kept inside, or why public transportation is a good idea, it will not hurt you to be patient and kind.

You may not feel like the person arguing with you deserves kindness. You may not think that being kind will help them get their stubborn opinion unstuck. But not only is understanding and patience much, much more persuasive, it makes people comfortable enough to ask questions. If they don’t ask questions they will never get past their misconceptions.

People that would otherwise say “huh, I didn’t think about it like that but now I see what you mean” get defensive when people present new ideas to them like an attack.

I have done it. You have done it. When someone on the internet is making what feels like nasty, rude accusations about you, demeaning you for not knowing a piece of information, or haughtily proclaiming how Right and Correct they are, your instinct is to get defensive.

So put your ego up on a high shelf and show grace and kindness to people who are ignorant. This is just how persuasion works.

The indoor cats debate is the biggest and worst example of this I’ve seen recently.

People feel like they have to defend themselves when they are called an animal abuser that doesn’t care about their pets. Most people love their pets a lot, and most people think of “animal abuser” as an unspeakably evil category of people.

I get defensive about the indoor cats thing, because I had outdoor cats as a kid and bad things happened to many of them, and I used to feel incredible guilt about that even though I couldn’t have done anything because I was a kid.

The main things that people are actually getting stuck on with the concept of indoor cats are:

1. they grew up with outdoor cats, everyone around them growing up considered keeping cats outside normal and harmless, and it’s just weird to have a Literal Stranger expect you to accept that literally every person that ever loved you or who was kind to you growing up is an Animal Abuser
2. they think that cats, as a species, literally need to roam around outside or they will not be having their needs met.
3. These people are not at all wrong to worry about how to provide enrichment to an indoor cat!!! Cat furniture and puzzle toys and ipad apps with fish swimming around for your cat to paw at are not known to everybody. There’s also a persistent myth that cats cannot be trained and therefore training one to walk on a leash or play fetch is absurd.
4. (It also at least deserves mentioning that there are public outdoor spaces, activities and sports events meant for dogs.)
5. It has literally never occurred to many people that cats are an invasive species. They don’t know where cats are native to. They don’t know that there were no cats in their area before humans brought them there. It seems strange, I know, but you are ignorant about something that seems obvious to someone else, so please stay humble.
6. When you describe cats as “cold-blooded serial killers of native wildlife” or things like that, it really does sound like you are moralizing an animal being a predator. Cat lovers grew up suffocated in cutesy animal books, shows, and cartoons that demonized cats and other carnivores for being carnivores. Assigning morals to animals goes all the way back to Aesop’s fables and Pliny the Elder. You have to make sure it’s clear you’re not doing that. 

I write this because I wrote something about the harms of outdoor cats in a reply one time and went back and read the tags on that post later, and the sheer number of people who had written that my post specifically had changed their mind because it was the first post they had seen on the subject that wasn’t needlessly hateful and aggressive blew my mind.

Educating effectively requires you to think about the effects of your words. You can’t just say things you Know are right and consider your job done.

Here is another truth: the most effective tactics to create social change are not necessarily the easiest to sustain. If you can’t sustain being mild and approachable and patient while people ask the most frustrating, repetitive questions…

that is a sign that you need a break, or that you need to consider devoting yourself to a different kind of trying to do good in the world for a while, or that you need to rest. You do not have to be a teacher at all times. This is good, I say (as a teacher) because being a teacher takes work and skill and hard emotional control, especially when you are trying to teach people about something that you care very intensely about. Teaching is skilled labor, but it is always labor.

Speaking as someone who has done that work on the marginalization end as well as on the animal welfare end, on the science literacy end, on a lot of things I’m very earnest about: you have to set limits on education, and you have to be extremely clear with yourself about what is teaching work and what is self-protection from things that make your soul ache. When you’re teaching, starting from a non-confrontational place and encouraging people to view you as a trustworthy, safe figure who won’t judge them is absolutely crucial when it comes to establishing the basic safety necessary to consider changing our beliefs. The moment you make it an Us Vs Them fight, you lose the game. Doing it the hard way takes time and it takes effort and patience, and not everyone is suited to that work and no one is suited to it all the time.

When you’re trying to just keep the space from punching you in the soul on a deep bruise one more time, though, you have other goals. You don’t act from the desire to change the hearts and minds of the people you’re talking to; you’re acting from a desire to just get that crappy thing away from me. And sometimes we can orchestrate that within our social spaces, depending on who is watching and what our relative positions are, and sometimes we can’t.

The danger, the riptide that will drag you under, is calling yourself a teacher when you are acting like someone trying to preserve the comfort of a community for yourself and other people like you. That second goal isn’t necessarily a bad one to have! Sometimes we all have to engage in that kind of social behavior, because everyone needs a space in which they can feel safe to relax sometimes, even if that is a space that only a few kinds of people are allowed to come into. But lying to yourself that this kind of behavior is teaching, and that you are engaging in a higher form of moral wossname by doing so–when you don’t have the bandwidth to do that properly–that can really get you into trouble. First, it can get you into trouble by encouraging you to frame picking certain fights as a public service rather than an act of survival, which can cause you to overweight the possible successes of starting a conflict and underweight the possible consequences. Second, it lets you frame behavior that can be really quite bad for the overall project of changing minds in the general public as effective activism, even to yourself, which leads you to forget that activist initiatives should be measured in terms of efficacy rather than in terms of how they make you feel at the end.

Now, I’ve seen the scars from people who always focus on efficacy over being able to feel safe and to rest. I have those scars. People with the best intentions and the highest moral goals have thrown one another into a meat grinder of yearning for a better world that way. I’m not saying you always have to drop everything and be a teacher.

I’m just saying that you should keep your tactics distinct, your short term goals clear in your mind, and above all else, figure out where you can find a place to rest.

(via vassraptor)

ciaran2020:

trans aggression, or transgression

wetwareproblem:

So I just saw a post claiming that distinguishing between ‘pedophile’ and ‘child molester’ (as we do here chez wetwareproblem) is “designed to normalize pedophilia,” and you should “question what people have to gain from acting like this.”

You know what? They’re right on one count: I want you to think long and hard about who benefits from this, and how. I want it burned into your mind.

Putting this below the cut because it’s liable to be super-triggery. Abuser tacics, violence, implied CSA and COCSA below.

Keep reading

(via wetwareproblem)

Do cheaper morning-after pills work as well as brand name pills?

plannedparenthood:

Someone asked us:

I was at the drugstore and I saw that they had a few different brands of plan b. Some of them were cheaper than others so like, do they all work the same or are more expensive ones stronger?

Short answer: all morning-after pill brands that you can buy without a prescription work the same, regardless of price. It doesn’t matter if you get it at a pharmacy, convenience store, health center, or a reliable online drugstore. Get yo bargain on!

Like most medicines, there are different brands of morning-after pills. They may be different prices, but they all have the same active ingredients and have the same effectiveness.

In the U.S., all over-the-counter morning-after pills use 1.5mg of levonorgestrel to prevent pregnancy. Levonorgestrel is a type of progestin, the same kind of hormone that’s in all hormonal birth control, like the IUD, pill, and shot.  

Some brands of levonorgestrel morning-after pills that are sold in the U.S. include:

• Plan B One-Step
  
• Next Choice One Dose
  
• My Way
  
• Aftera
  
• Take Action
  
• EContra EZ
  
• Option 2
  
• Athentia Next
  
• Fallback Solo
  
• Opcicon One-Step
  
• Morning After
  
• AfterPill (only available online)
  

Less expensive brands are often called “generics.” The FDA requires generic medications to have the same active ingredient, strength, dosage, quality, and effectiveness as name brands. So why can they cost less if they work the same? Because the companies making generics don’t usually pay for advertising, and they don’t have to run the expensive clinical trials that the original brand needed to do to get FDA approval for that kind of drug.

You can always double-check with the pharmacist if you’re concerned about buying the right pill. But as long as it says “levonorgestrel 1.5mg” somewhere on the package, feel free to buy the cheapest morning-after pill on the shelf —  it will work exactly the same as more expensive brands.

-Kendall at Planned Parenthood

…limitations of intersectionality

queerascat:

…so earlier today i was interviewed for an upcoming podcast for queer people of color. it was great! i spilled my guts all over the place in a rather embarrassing way and it’ll be available for your amusement in the near future! but now i feel a need to unload some disjointed, messy feels about intersectionality.

tl;dr: it’d be nice if intersectionality could happen on more than just two (occasionally three) axes at a time, but that’s unlikely to ever happen.

Keep reading

(via blaqueer)

Red flags to look for in psychiatrists

vagaybond:

monstermonstre:

- if they do not like that you research your disorder/s and treatment/s
- if they do not explain the reason/s behind certain treatment/medication that they are prescribing you
- if they are reluctant/refuse to let you access your medical records
- if their first response to symptoms is medication without any talk therapy
- if they say they “don’t believe in therapy”
- if they say they “don’t believe in medication”
- if they insist on seeing your parent/legal guardian without you being present
- if they tell you that there are no other treatment available if you complain about your current treatment/medication not working/having unmanageable side effects
- if they diagnose you without explaining how they came to that diagnosis, what it entails, and which treatments you have at your disposal
- if they fall asleep during a session (you’re laughing but it happened, several times, and i’m not boring)
- if they assure you that you cannot have [insert disorder here] because you are too young/wealthy/poor/fat/skinny/smiling/old/whatever bs (the only valid reasons for not having a disorder is if you do not meet the minimum criteria for it, age/body/ethnicity/etc are not criteria)
- if they tell you that you obviously do not want/are not ready to get help (that’s a super abusive technique, would only see this as a valid comment to make if you are pressured into seeing them by someone who has authority over you)
- if they insist on you continuing to take a medication despite the side effects very negatively affecting you (for example: if you are recovering from an ED and you get the “gaining weight” side effect and that is very triggering to you)
- if they are flippant about/disregard your feelings

i’m probably forgetting a lot. feel free to add.

if you go in explaining that you are concerned you have certain symptoms and they try to “reassure” you that they do not think you have [some scary disorder] instead of looking at it neutrally and having an open and fair discussion about it and consider your words seriously.

if they use vague language about treatment options that they aren’t willing to elaborate on, or provide specific plans of action for. (ideally, with most conditions and illnesses, they should give you a variety of options and freedom to have input regarding your treatment options, hear out your opinions and concerns, answer questions about them etc.)

they use outdated language for your condition or are not aware of or concerned with recent laws and regulations regarding them. (for example, they use terms like “multiple personality disorder” instead of DID, etc.)

if you are trans, they consider your identity to be a delusion or other kind of symptom. (similar goes for orientation probably.)

if they consider you standing up for yourself to be irrational/acting out/being manipulative

dissociacetion:

psy-faerie:

Weed 👏🏻 can 👏🏻 cause 👏🏻depressed 👏🏻anxious 👏🏻 or psychotic 👏🏻 behavior 👏🏻in 👏🏻some 👏🏻people

Doesn’t matter what strain. Doesn’t matter if it’s high grade medical.
If you support weed for health then you need to support that is also not okay for every single human being.
For some of us it aggravates our issues.

(I’d really love to see some support on this from weed blogs, because that’s who I’m aiming at who usually refuse to accept this fact)

My friends + peers are always telling me I need try weed for my anxiety but I don’t feel comfortable enough to tell them I’m Schizoid + Schizotypal and it could really fuck shit up for me. 😰😰😰

A lot of people I know who support marijuana usage will also adamantly declare that there are NO negative outcomes of using weed EVER, for ANYONE. Which is like… a blatant lie. All drugs have the potential for negative effects, whether they’re related to withdrawal/dependence (even if it’s only psychological) or things like delayed reaction time (ie why you shouldn’t drink and drive).

It’s absolutely fine not to want to use weed (or any other drug) because it may aggravate an existing condition. It can do a lot but it can’t help everybody.

(via )

kucala:

ok listen up i’m about to make a post that might make some people very unhappy with me because it’s an ~unpopular opinion~ but I think this is important.

there are a lot of reasons someone might cheat on their partner.

not all of them are equal or make them a bad person.

someone cheating because they’re in a shit/abusive relationship and don’t know how to leave it…

or because they don’t know how to say no to what’s happening…

or because of factors related to trauma [for example a lot of sexual assault survivors deal with hypersexuality, or having sex to ‘recreate’ the trauma to try to process it, or have sex to self harm, or dissociate so strongly they don’t really know what’s happening, etc]…

or because they’re realizing they’re not straight and trying to explore that but aren’t ready to come out/deal with it, or don’t feel safe breaking up with their partner because they need a ‘beard’ to survive…

are not the same as cheating because someone is a 'player’ who wants to use people, or because they’re inconsiderate and placed their wants over their partners trust, or because they just don’t care about their partner.

like those are on different levels

and talking about how 'all cheaters just want to use you/don’t care about you’ or 'once a cheater always a cheater’ or really anything that throws a villianizing blanket over all cheaters just

isn’t accurate? and can be really harmful overall

[and cheating definitely isn’t inherently 'the worst thing you can do to someone’ jfc there are so many other things I could name that are, as a whole, worse?? [like uhhh rape and abuse for instance? just as an example?? ]]

is cheating a good thing to do? of course not.

are there people who cheat just because they’re an asshole? yes.

can cheating be a part of an abusive relationship? absolutely.

is it valid for someone to be upset or even traumatized by being cheated on? of course. regardless of why, it’s a betrayal of trust and you have every right to be upset and hurt, or not want to be in a relationship with someone who has a history of cheating, or have issues trusting people.

but not all people who have cheated are bad people. there are so many factors that go into situations like these and ignoring context to yell about how if you’ve cheated on someone you’re unforgivably awful 5evr doesn’t do any good

anyway this has been a PSA

thebibliosphere:

I know I’m just an old timer but kids, if you’re out there protesting, for the love of god, don’t check in on facebook, don’t text to random numbers claiming to want to know how many people were there. They know, they don’t need you to text. All they want is your number and personal data so they can keep an eye on you. You are not as anonymous online as you think you are, even if you are not using your real name.

Just…take care of yourselves, and don’t give the authorities any ammunition against you. They have enough fire power as it is.

Also if you’re uploading pics from marches, please be considerate of those involved. If you don’t have express permission to take the picture of everyone involved in the image, blur out their faces. You don’t know who is watching and what kind of shit you might land someone in just because you wanted to post a selfie of you in your pink hat. 

(via howprolifeofyou)