Positivity, affirmations, and wisdom for mental health, recovery, and anyone who needs a little more positivity in their day.

I used to turn my affirmations into graphics, which you can still find in my archive, but I don't have the time/energy for that anymore. Now I share my thoughts and affirmations as text posts.

You're welcome to ask questions. I will try to give advice and offer support where I can.

If a post doesn't resonate with you, please just scroll past it.

I'm a queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill, trauma survivor, just trying to survive and be happy. Please be kind.

Because of my limited time and capacity to research fundraiser requests I receive, I don't respond to fundraiser requests.

I hear how hurt you are and how important and sensitive this topic is to you. Thank you for trusting this with me. I hope that I can answer it with the gentleness that you need. Please know that I'm just another traumatized and (probably) autistic person. My answer might not be right, or what you need.

I can relate so much to your experiences. My mom and my maternal aunts used to accuse me of "overthinking" and criticize me for "negativity" all the time when I was growing up and that had a really awful impact on me. "You're overthinking" was used to shut down my very real fears, needs, and trauma responses. So I understand what you mean when you say that this word was used against you and weaponized to the point of being triggering.

It sounds like you do recognize that the word is useful for other people, but it is still so emotionally loaded and triggering for you that it doesn't matter. That makes sense. That is completely understandable. This word was used to hurt you terribly and you don't trust that it won't be used to hurt you or other people. To you, it is weapon-shaped.

What I think we need to keep in mind is that everyone has the right to name and label their own internal mental experiences. People have the right to name their own experiences as overthinking, and to work with therapists in a clinical setting who help them identify their experiences as overthinking. It makes sense that this causes you distress.

You've been hurt by this and it's a trigger. It is okay to avoid triggers when they are too intense and we don't have the current capacity to deal with them. So it is reasonable for you to dip out of conversations about overthinking, or to block that word on social media, or to ask people who are close to you not to use it (especially in reference to you). And any therapist or clinician you're working with should respect the trauma you've been through and modify their language to avoid triggering you.

Your trigger is valid and your feelings about it are completely valid, but your expectation that everyone stop using the word is unreasonable. These two things are true: It is a normal word that is used in normal ways AND it was a word that was used to hurt you terribly.

No. If you land with a therapist who says you do, you can find a therapist with better training.

The words they use in EMDR go something like "what is the most disturbing part of the memory?" and for most people that is an image, but not everyone experiences memory or traumatic memory that way. It might be a sound, a smell, or a body sensation.

This is especially true for people with CPTSD. People with CPTSD don't have single-event trauma. It's like instead of a flood that washed everything away in a moment, we had a trickle of water that eroded things things over years. Either way, the damage is done. But it's harder to identify where that trickle of water started and say "That's the thing that did the damage". So sometimes the prep to do EMDR for CPTSD is more involved. There might not even be a single, clear memory to go to. But it's still possible.

It has. it's been very hard and I feel like I'm going at a snails pace because of how often I need to take a break from it to focus on other things, but it really does make an enormous difference.

Something I wished I'd known at the beginning is that when your therapist asks you to "rate the distress" of the memory after you've processed it, saying that it's a zero doesn't mean that you're saying that looking at the memory is pleasant, or that what happened in the memory is okay. A distress rating of zero just means that looking at the memory doesn't make you feel that distress in your body anymore.

Even after a memory is processed, thinking about it still makes me think things like, "Oh my god, that was horrible! Things like that shouldn't happen to anyone!" But I don't panic or feel sick or have other intense trauma symptoms. Usually I just feel sad or angry, and that's normal when thinking about something awful that happened.

My other advice is to really spend the time building up your strengths and resources. Before you start processing the memories, you'll work on things like "container exercises" and "safe space" exercises. These might seem silly or pointless, but they are so important later. Practice them when you're feeling good. Practice them when you're mildly triggered. Practice them every day!

Thank you ❤️

I do still have nightmares. They're more symbolic than literal now, but they're still related to the trauma. I've been in trauma therapy for a couple of years now and it's helping. I'm doing EMDR.

Thank you for sharing your story with me and others. Your story is valid and worth telling.

I want you to know that you're not alone either. Your story is so similar to my own. I wasn't a "good survivor" and that contributed to people not believing me. When I talk to other survivors I know that they deserved to be believed no matter how they behaved or what they did, but I struggle to believe that the same is true for myself. I am trying to convince myself that I deserved to be believed too.

It's been over twenty years for me and I still struggle at times. You aren't alone in that either.

Your story is valid. You are lovable. You deserved to be believed.

Thank you.

To be honest, I'm really struggling to feel much positivity at the moment.

I haven't shared much here in the last few months because I'm still trying to figure out how to move forward. It feels inappropriate to post pastel positivity with what is happening in my country. I believe and survival is resistance and I want to encourage everyone to survive and find joy where they can. I'm just struggling to find my voice here. The thousands of you who followed me did not follow me to hear about politics, but it feels wrong to be a-political right now.

You have nothing to apologize for. I appreciate you for sharing your story with me. I haven't had the time to reply yet, but I will. You've done nothing wrong.

You didn't cry over something silly. You cried about relationships you care about, and that's okay. It's okay to feel hurt and to struggle when you're figuring out how to how to handle difficult situations, especially when you're fifteen and these kind of things are new for you. I wouldn't worry about teachers seeing you either. They teach students your age, which means they are used to seeing lots of other young people who are navigating difficult situations and big emotions. You are definitely not the first person who has cried in front of them. Students have cried in front of their teachers for much sillier reasons, I promise.

It makes sense that you were hurt by your friend ignoring you and not telling you what she was feeling. Without knowing what was going on, you assumed that she was mad at you. It's understandable that you made that assumption, but maybe something else was going on. She may have been upset about something else. It's really easy to assume that people's feelings are about us and to blame ourselves, but that's not always the case. Sometimes people are just caught up in their own stuff and don't have the space to explain themselves.

I think that if you value her friendship and want to repair things with her, you need to talk to her. Give her time and space to explain what was happening and why it happened. You can let her know how you felt by saying things like, "I felt hurt when you wouldn't talk to me."

Do you have something that you need to say?