Folks have got to understand that they probably aren't messed up by some Secret Big Trauma that they just can't remember; but rather by a million tiny microtraumas that they do mostly remember but don't even register as traumatic because nobody actually understood that these things would cause trauma, much less stack on each other over the years.

Whether you're carrying one big rock or a big ol' bucket of sand, it's going to weigh on you just as much.

This is why psychologists have started taking more of an interest in CPTSD in the last 10-15 years. What most people know as PTSD is a response to a single, intensely traumatic event (or even a series of events). However, CPTSD (chronic post-traumatic stress disorder) is caused by living for years in a situation where your nervous system cannot catch a break. Even if nothing huge ever happened to you, you always had to be on guard for a thousand little things that could and did happen.

After years and years of this, your nervous system gets "stuck" in an activated threat response. It never really lets you rest, and if this started when you were a kid, you may not develop a lot of neural pathways that you should have, because your brain was too focused on keeping you safe to bother with little things like "genuine human connection" and "interpersonal attachment."

No lie, Complex PTSD/CPTSD is HUGE.

If you are disabled, if you are queer, if you are chronically ill, if you are the survivor of a toxic but not abusive relationship, if you grew up or lived under the threat of harm but no "actual" harm (or "very little" harm) was done, you may have CPTSD that isn't getting caught because CPTSD looks different from PTSD.

At the risk of falling into a trivialization trap, a lot of things you may not perceive as traumatic actually are. I was embarrassed for a long time in both group and individual therapy to say anything in my childhood was traumatic, because I was sitting with people who had suffered horrible physical or sexual abuse. But here are some things that are, in fact, traumatic and - when they occur over a long period - can set you on a course of maladaptive coping for decades if not addressed:

If you constantly feel unworthy, afraid, ashamed, or even flat and emotionless, it's worth exploring why. And, because you've been so consistently undermined and minimized, you may feel like a fraud for being upset or functioning poorly. You're not a fraud; it's years of conditioning telling you "I should be able to handle this" or "lots of people are worse off than I am so I shouldn't complain." Your conditioned brain is lying to you; you won't be able to open yourself to the joy of trusting relationships with others OR do meaningful things to help those who are worse off until you do the work to melt the block of ice surrounding you. All my love to you, friends.

Pete Walker is a therapist that's been on the cutting edge of this for many years, and he has a website here with plenty of free resources. (Just straight PDFs of parts of his books!)

Also, his books are not that expensive, well-written, and truly helped me process a lot of my trauma. I did a ton of it alone because I couldn't find a therapist for years, and those books (complex ptsd: from surviving to thriving & the tao of fully feeling) really changed the trajectory of my life.

He talks about grieving, about changing our internal dialogue to one that's positive instead of negative, talks about SEVERAL trauma typologies, and more.

As someone who has been diagnosed with the big trauma PTSD but most of their problems were coming from the little stuff that was CONSTANT and made me run on 2000% all day every day, this guy is a lifesaver. I'm so different from how I was before, especially with the help of some in-person therapy. Finding the right person makes all the difference, truly.

You can pick up his books on the website, but if you're looking for resources on this and you have the space and support to be able to do some of your own work (please don't do it completely alone unless you must) check out the sidebar over at pete-walker.com. He made this incredible resource that not everyone knows about and I try to share it where this comes up.

Thank you for informing people about this.

Reblogging for the additional info and resources, and to emphasize that the C does indeed stand for "complex," not "chronic." (Understandable that people would get mixed up, though.)

internet politics and real-world politics have gotten so separated, and pretty soon all this internet weirdness is gonna come crashing into real life and politicians are gonna start throwing around words like “SJW” and “anime communist” and “dark enlightenment” and it’s just gonna be the most ridiculous fucking thing

date of origin: 13th of april, 2015.

happy 10 year anniversary!

This post.

This fucking post.

It is in some ways, the only piece of evidence I have that there was a time Before.

i have so much respect for people who put ego aside, take responsibility, apologize and actually change their behavior. emotional maturity will always be attractive to me.

You can say you don’t like when dogs jump on you in public and there will be dog owners out there who want you to die

actually you know what fuck it i'm breaking gimmick some of y'all have pissed me off

genuinely why are you following a gimmick blog if you don't like gimmick blogs. if you're going to complain about having to remove the little silent bit, just don't fucking follow me. like i don't need to hear about how annoying you find it. that's not my problem. you do not need to follow me or reblog from me

i'm not giving y'all a separate blog that i reblog things on without the gimmick because i don't have one. my main is mainly just original posts and maybe the occasional reblog of some art my friends made. i stopped reblogging on there as often after i made this blog since most of my mutuals also follow this one

so just shut up. please. before i have to start blocking anons

Requesting you not be rude and please just leave if you hate gimmick blogs

Requesting you not

be rude and please just leave if

you hate gimmick blogs

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

ERSATZ - An indie animation, created by @clownsaint

The Ascetic from Ersatz created by @clownsaint

Fun fact, The Questing Beast of Arthurian Legend is the result of people attempting to describe what a giraffe was, then being explained and drawn by people who have never actually seen it.

The Questing Beast was said to have a head and neck of a snake (long neck), body of leopard (coat pattern), hind legs of a lion (tufted tail) and feet of a deer (”hooves:).

I’m having emotions at this artwork. It’s caught between fright and awe; fascination and fear.

Behold, a unicorn.

He got two horns tho

*record scratch*

*music starts back up*

BEHOLD, A UNICORN

Albrecht Dürer drew this Rhino Unicorn 1515 purely based on descriptions of people who had actually seen one. He got it pretty close, though.

I have made some memes to commemorate the day

Official Post of Massachusetts

"being a human is so boring why can't I be one of the COOL animals" okay hey. I hear you. but I actually really super love being an omnivorous persistence hunting primate with a stomach capable of dissolving many literal poisons and the ability to smell geosmin (released in the soil after it rains) at five parts per trillion. I super enjoy being a bipedal terrifyingly agile mammal with some of the most efficient sweat glands in the animal kingdom. I find a lot of joy in being an endotherm with mimicry abilities that rival most other animals with vocal chords. it's sick as hell I'm having a lot of fun

awawa :3 awawa....

[ID: tags reading "and i'm using that vocal mimicry to go awawa!!" /end ID]

obsessed with the fact that howl movingcastle is, like, the ideal portal fantasy protagonist. he's a welsh rugby-playing grad student who enters a magical world where he discovers he's a wildly powerful wizard. there's an evil witch out to get him and the king needs his help and there's a curse catching up with him. he has a magical creature sidekick and an orphan apprentice and a mentor who gets killed by the evil witch halfway through and a love interest under a terrible curse. the story is BEGGING for him to be the main character. and he's just like. no <3.

So turns out the US are setting babies up for a lifetime of illness and increased likelihood of liver cancer in Guinea Bissau in the name of “research”

7000 newborns will be denied the neoneatal HepB vaccine until 6 weeks to ‘prove’ that the HepB vaccine is linked to neurodevelopmental disability on the directions of the Department of Health vis RFK Jr and in collaboration with researchers in Denmark, despite the fact that the vaccine’s efficacy rate and best protection is when administered to newborns, and the total lack of correlation between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disabilities.

Guinea Bissau has some of the highest rates of HepB on the continent, and infants are the group at the highest risk of contracting HepB, leading to chronic hepatitis & long term hepatic diseases like cirrhosis and liver failure as well as increased chance of liver cancer.

The study can’t be carried out in the US or Denmark because it fails almost every benchmark for medical ethics — surprising absolutely nobody, it is in fact heinously unethical to expose babies to preventable disease that causes liver failure and liver cancer, but the “study” has been green lit in Guinea.

Fuck the US imperial project in Africa, fuck RFK Jr and the US Department of Health, and fuck every single collaborative researcher in Denmark. This is some nightmare Tuskegee Study shit and every single individual involved deserves to be in The Hague.

Good news: cancelled as of this morning.

So turns out the US are setting babies up for a lifetime of illness and increased likelihood of liver cancer in Guinea Bissau in the name of “research”

7000 newborns will be denied the neoneatal HepB vaccine until 6 weeks to ‘prove’ that the HepB vaccine is linked to neurodevelopmental disability on the directions of the Department of Health vis RFK Jr and in collaboration with researchers in Denmark, despite the fact that the vaccine’s efficacy rate and best protection is when administered to newborns, and the total lack of correlation between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disabilities.

Guinea Bissau has some of the highest rates of HepB on the continent, and infants are the group at the highest risk of contracting HepB, leading to chronic hepatitis & long term hepatic diseases like cirrhosis and liver failure as well as increased chance of liver cancer.

The study can’t be carried out in the US or Denmark because it fails almost every benchmark for medical ethics — surprising absolutely nobody, it is in fact heinously unethical to expose babies to preventable disease that causes liver failure and liver cancer, but the “study” has been green lit in Guinea.

Fuck the US imperial project in Africa, fuck RFK Jr and the US Department of Health, and fuck every single collaborative researcher in Denmark. This is some nightmare Tuskegee Study shit and every single individual involved deserves to be in The Hague.

Good news: cancelled as of this morning.

Hey babe, are you a book? Because I kinda wanna break your spine

Are you a furby? Because I'm doing everything I can to turn you off

Are you. A bottle. Cause I want to throw you in the ocean. to send a message

Are you. Marijuana? Cause I wanna plant you in my backyard. and lie to the cops about it.

You must be vodka. The way my affiliates could arrange for you to be smuggled across eastern europe in a series of small, discrete packages

You are.... a spider. The way you are widely disliked across multiple continents for reasons that appear irrational but likely stem from a primitive survival instinct

You must be a prion the way you're still capable of fucking with my head after I lit you on fire

Are you a spoon. Because I think if I bring you home you'll end up in my roommate's bedroom

You're like a new MRI machine they way you need someone to put you in the hospital

You and I could be a miracle. The way we could never be a thing without the interference of a god

You have me feeling like a fly. The way I need to desperately throw myself at the nearest window

Looking at you is like staring into the sun. It feels bad and the longer I do it the worse it gets

You remind me of my dad

Baby you're like the ocean. Because you're cold, salty to the point of being toxic, and have driven countless men to madness and despair

Girl are you a three legged wardrobe cause you are just the worst dresser

You remind me of an exotic flower the way you keep killing house cats

You make me believe in destiny. The way my struggles to divert you seem futile

Honey are you from Tennessee? Because your crime rate is 63% above the national average

My man is like a cup of coffee, the way his existence is highly dependant on inhumane business practices

If loving you is a crime, then send me to jail. For unrelated charges. So I can get away from you

Who hurt you teaboot?

You want that list alphabetical or in ascending order of severity

i'm begging you guys to start pirating shit from streaming platforms. there are so many websites where you can stream that shit for free, here's a quick HOW TO:

1) Search for: watch TITLE OF WORK free online

2) Scroll to the bottom of results. Click any of the "Complaint" links

3) You will be taken to a long list of links that were removed for copyright infringement. Use the 'find' function to search for the name of the show/movie you were originally searching for. You will get something like this (specifics removed because if you love an illegal streaming site you don't post its url on social media)

4) each of these links is to a website where you can stream shit for free. go to the individual websites and search for your show/movie. you might have to copy-paste a few before you find exactly what you're looking, but the whole process only takes a minute. the speed/quality is usually the same as on netflix/whatever, and they even have subtitles! (make sure to use an adblocker though, these sites are funded by annoying popups)

In conclusion, if you do this often enough you will start recognizing the most dependable websites, and you can just bookmark those instead. (note: this is completely separate from torrenting, which is also a beautiful thing but requires different software and a vpn)

you can also download the media in question (look for a "download" button built into the video window, or use a browser extension such as Video DownloadHelper.)

if the "Complaint" links are not visible for you:

personally, i'm a huge fan of r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH. they keep their links up to date and they also rank them, basically. they also have all kinds of little pages explaining how to safely pirate shit.

^^^^what they said. I'm surprised people are still reblogging this post now that google's flushed itself down the toilet. so here is your

2026 UPDATE:

just go to r/FreeMediaHeckYeah and r/Piracy. it's easier, more reliable, and will take care of all your piracy needs!

a lot of you on this website have never examined your politics around things like sexuality, filth/cleanliness, disgust, etc. and it’s making you conservative btw. even when you think your motivations are social justice-y, harassing trans women into silence, advocating for the censorship of queer stories you dislike, etc. are actions that align you in material ways with conservatism, with far-right fascism