There is still power here, in this body of mine.

One of the most popular theories of trauma says there are three steps.

Escape the trauma and find safety.

Process the trauma.

Consolidate the trauma.

Sometimes this can be a relatively quick process. If you get into a car accident while turning left in a busy city street, you might get trauma symptoms that cause feelings of fear and anxiety when you're driving your car, or travelling by car through a busy city.

"Finding safety" would mean learning to handle your anxiety and fearfulness by re-training your body to seek calm, even when reminded of the trauma. This might include things like breathing or muscle relaxation exercises that actually affect an anxious brain and help you stay centred, as well as slow exposure to situations that are stressful and traumatic so you learn to tolerate them again.

"Processing the trauma" means to look back at what happened that has given you significant psychological symptoms, and re-process those memories and the lessons you took from them so they are less damaging or hurtful. That might be revisiting your memories of the accident until they aren't so painful to think about, or it might be working to be more comfortable with driving again.

"Consolidating the trauma" means that when you've settled those memories, you take your new, healthier understanding of yourself forward into your life. That might make you a more cautious driver, or cause you to be more mindful and value every moment because you've seen how quickly your life can change. It is what you make of it.

When you try to do these steps out of order, that's more of a problem. If you want to dive straight into revisiting your memories of something that happened, but you have no defense against the panic attacks and nightmares that remembering causes you, you're not safe, not so far as your brain thinks. Your brain experiences raw memories of trauma as though it were still happening all around you. You can end up even more traumatized than before, so that even seeing a picture of a car makes you feel like you're back on that street waiting to turn left.

If a trauma is particularly old, complex, or strong, it can take a long, long time before you actually feel safe enough to go back into the memories that haunt you most. That's especially true if you're still in a situation that feels threatening, like if it's your job to drive around downtown. Or in other situations, if your abusive parent is still alive and in your life, or if you're still a member of the group or club you were abused in.

I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

Just because I wasn't deconstructing the shit that happened to me when I was 4 for the past couple decades, it doesn't mean I wasn't working on my own healing. I did all the work that got me to here and now.

Also this bit from Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold:

I'm not dating or married or related to anyone I live with, and our household of four adults can't get any kind of financial or food or housing aid because we count as three separate households despite our semi-blended finances and living together for a decade. There are laws that have been proposed (at least, I don't know if any passed) that limit housing to nuclear families.

because with autism for instance people will say it's a spectrum but then will only perceive there to be 2 groups of autistic people: former gifted kids and "people who can't use the internet". level 1 and level 3. where's level 2. what are people with level 2 like. you don't know. you don't know what level 1 or level 3 can be like either for that matter. i'm serious you don't know what level 1 can be like

people don't even know what ID is, they think it's like having every single learning disability at the same time. ID people may or may not also have a learning disability, or multiple, but ID isn't like having every single learning disability

people with williams syndrome are known for having good language abilities but are worse in certain areas related to language, i don't understand stuff like that, i also still don't understand what adaptive skills are, but

i just feel like people have this one view of ID/DD, there is only one way someone with ID/DD (including autism) can be, but i honestly don't even know what it is. people don't really talk or know about anything but autism and ADHD, unless they're the people who will argue that people with severer autism "really have something else", but with those people i wonder if they can even name another developmental disability, and tell me also how that developmental disability can present, what issues it causes

did you know down syndrome can cause heart issues and that one of the reasons someone with DS might have trouble speaking is because of muscle weakness or anatomical differences

did you know people with williams syndrome often have a wider mouth

did you know a lot of developmental disabilities cause intellectual disability, learning disabilities, low or high muscle tone (hypotonia and hypertonia), and strabismus (misaligned eyes)

do you know how varied presentations of ID/DD, including autism, can really be

some people are better at reading and writing and worse at math and science and some people are worse at reading and writing but better at math and science

but then like i said there may be exceptions to what you're good at too. i think people understand this about everyone else but not people with ID/DD, both due to lack of information about ID/DD and because disabled people are constantly scrutinized for signs of faking. i don't think people even know though that different things are different at all, like understanding grammar is not the same thing as being able to understand an ADL. those are two different things. i've also run into a lot of people who don't actually know what is and isn't math. like, spatial awareness, which is your subconscious knowledge of your proximity to objects around you, is math. if your spatial awareness is impaired, you may bump into things more often, because you don't know distance, or think a room is bigger or smaller than it really is, because you don't understand size. you may also not recognize when a portion is too big or too small, and may not be able to cook because you don't understand measurements

like, i don't know

my bottom line, constantly, especially these days because people are just getting more ableist toward them, is that i just wish leftists cared about ID/DD people

and that people, especially autistic people and people with ADHD, who are developmentally disabled themselves, already knew what ID/DD stands for

and what it can do. what symptoms it can cause. and that those are symptoms and not deliberate misbehavior. and what people do to us. and how often we're abused and neglected and die because of it. and how hard it is to do anything "adult" when you're ID/DD because it's all forms and emails and phone calls and appointments and dates and times, especially when we may not even understand how to navigate a website, or how to go through a specific resource's numbered system, i can't even explain that, do you realize how much red tape is all around you, and what kind of people it's meant to keep out. do you know how many homeless people are ID/DD and how many ID/DD people are homeless. how little resources there are besides group homes (expensive) and assisted living (expensive)

if you're ID/DD and have cognitive issues that prevent you from doing it, you can't even apply for disability on your own

and if you don't have someone else who can reliably and responsibly do it for you, you don't get it

a lot of us do just sit or lie in our own body fluids all day because we don't have a choice, we can't move or stand or walk, can't go to the toilet on our own, can't bathe or brush our teeth or brush our hair on our own, can't change our clothes. we get infections and sores and we get parasitized and infested. people don't take us to a doctor so our disabilities or illnesses get worse or we have complications from them or we get new disabilities or illnesses and we die

plus the bullying from other kids and the abuse from teachers and aids and caregivers and parents

did you know doctors are likely to think an ID/DD person seeking help for what seems to them like a new, unrelated issue, whether it is or not, is just attention-seeking both because ID/DD can actually cause attention-seeking (and bragging, showing off, etc) as a symptom and because ID/DD people are inherently viewed as attention-seeking, especially ID/DD women

i want you to care about people, in general, but i want you to care about ID/DD people, i want you to care about and be kind to and support and listen to people with intellectual disability, and people with developmental disabilities, including autism and ADHD, but also besides autism and ADHD

However. I do not think "just fucking get over it and talk to people lol" is a helpful thing to tell people with social anxiety. I don't think telling people to just get over their fucking disability will help them manage their fucking disability. How about some of y'all get over the idea that social anxiety is some non-issue that only lazy people who "don't want to put in the work to be healthy" struggle with.

Have you instead considered posting actual encouragement? Scripts to ease their anxiety? Teaching people the game of worst case, best case, most likely case? Literally anything else?? "Just get over it" is the most bullshit "advice" in the world. "If you have difficulty talking to people you're a loser who needs to grow up and just do it anyway" is, believe it or not, extremely unhelpful! So perhaps STFU!

Other useful AI Removal/Detection links

How to spot AI Hallucinations like a Reference Librarian (originally on Substack)