thats gay

Class Expectations

If you’re watching TikToks during class, please at least drop the links to the really funny ones in the chat.

I don’t care if you are wearing pajamas or not, but please wear clothes of some kind.

Class Materials:

Bring your brain to class at least 50% of the time

Your dog is not a class material

I still want to see it on camera if

a) he’s in the room

b) he’s a good boy yes he is

this is what i used to draw this

Hi!

This is another (genuinely quick) PSA to address confusion that we’ve seen in the community and to expand on a topic that we frequently get asks about.

This post is meant to help clarify what being diagnosed with a dissociative disorder entails: where the line is drawn between normal, abnormal, and pathological experiences. What’s important to understand is that experiences can fall under several categories: normal experiences; abnormal but not dissociative; dissociative but still normal; potentially dissociative depending on context; and clearly both dissociative and pathological. It’s also important to understand that people with clinical dissociative disorders are likely to have experiences from all of these categories at some point or another; having issues with dissociation does not mean that all of your issues are dissociative or that all of your dissociation is an issue! 

Normal non-dissociative experiences

Humans are diverse beings with a wide range of potential experiences. Only a minority of these experiences have anything to do with dissociation. All or most people will experience these at some point in their lives. Examples include:

Normal, everyday forgetfulness: not remembering where you put your keys, sometimes forgetting what other people tell you, getting distracted and losing your train of thought

Difficulty remembering what happened while you were half asleep or drunk

Not remembering early childhood; having no memory of being a toddler or infant and very few memories of being in early primary school

Occasionally not remembering something that friends or family tell you happened

Sometimes being surprised when you’re reminded or shown evidence of something that you said, wrote, or did, especially if the event in question happened a little while ago or when you had a lot else on your mind; not remembering all of the details or specifics until you’re reminded

Sometimes acting impulsively and then having trouble understanding why you acted that way

Acting different in different contexts: being more professional at work and more relaxed with friends

Roleplaying; feeling connected to your characters; having a sense for how your characters would react under different circumstances

Talking to yourself; internal self chatter; imagining conversations with other people

Abnormal but not dissociative experiences

Some experiences may look dissociative but aren’t. The underlying cause of an experience can determine if it’s dissociative or not. Individuals with dissociative disorders may experience these due to comorbid conditions. Examples include:

Anxiety, depression, or other intense distress

Constant forgetfulness and distractibility due to ADHD

Rapid and intense mood changes due to a bipolar disorder

Hearing voices because of auditory hallucinations

Feeling like your body is being controlled by an external force, such as the government through radio waves

Acting out of character and later being being unable to remember or explain your actions because of alcohol or another substance

Losing the memory of something traumatic because of an associated head injury and subsequent neurological dysfunction; not remembering something traumatic because it occurred while you were blackout drunk or drugged

Organic (neurological) seizures

Normal dissociative experiences

Despite this being a blog to talk about abnormal and pathological dissociative experiences, some dissociative experiences are normal and even healthy! Many people will experience these periodically or while stressed. These include:

Absorption: getting so mentally and emotionally invested in a good piece of media that you disconnect from everything around you

Over-identifying with a fictional character and using them as a comfort object

Mild feelings of depersonalization or derealization (that you or the world aren’t real) when you’re very stressed, tired, or anxious

Feeling like your memory for a very stressful experience or time is cloudy, abnormally sharp, or otherwise altered

Being able to react calmly to a stressor in the moment and only feel frightened or upset once you have the space to

Putting stressors at home out of mind while you’re at school or work

“Faking it until you make it”: acting like a more confident version of yourself until you feel confident or at least calmer

Potentially pathological dissociative experiences

Most things in life are not cut and dry, and dissociative experiences are not an exception. There are many experiences that are not inherently dissociative but can indicate the presence of dissociation. Other dissociative experiences can be normal or pathological depending on their frequency and severity. Examples include:

Constantly checking calendars

Some people are just disorganized and need the reminders

Some people feel compelled to check everything repeatedly to make sure that they’re not going to lose track of a commitment

Some people with dissociation-related memory issues need to keep checking to see if a part has written down commitments that they won’t otherwise remember

Self confusion

It’s normal to not know exactly who you are or who you want to be (especially as a teenager); it’s normal to have trouble deciding between careers; it’s normal to want to experiment with looks and change your appearance frequently 

It’s not so normal to be extremely confused about who you are to the point where this distresses you; to feel like completely different people in different contexts; to experience internal backlash and conflict every time that you consider cutting your hair short

When coming to terms with being LGBT, it’s normal to be unsure what your gender or sexuality is and to consider using different labels; it’s normal for someone who’s bisexual to experience fluctuating levels of attraction to different genders over time; it’s less normal to experience periods of being attracted only to the opposite sex when you’re normally gay and repulsed by the opposite sex or to feel like a man but be confused and upset when you sometimes find yourself identifying and presenting as a woman; it’s not normal to begin taking steps to medically transition to male only to suddenly be extremely distressed by the idea of being perceived as anything other than female and to have no understanding of why you were trying to transition

Fluctuations in your memory, skills, preferences, and views

It’s normal to occasionally forget a well-rehearsed fact, but it’s not normal to have no idea where you live or even what state you live in or to not recognize your spouse even when they try to remind you who they are

It’s normal to have trouble with something that you can usually do well because you’re tired or burnt out, but it’s not normal to never know if you’ll suddenly have trouble with basic math or reading clocks; it’s normal to occasionally get lucky and do well at a task you usually struggle with, but it’s not normal to occasionally find yourself excelling at something that you normally can’t do and don’t remember learning to do

It’s normal to get tired of something you used to like or to want to change things up a bit, but it’s less normal to have drastic alterations in your likes and dislikes that are unpredictable and confuse you

Changing your mind when presented with new evidence or over time is normal; repeatedly going back and forth on an issue when trying to figure it out can be normal indecisiveness; alternating between periods of extreme views over the course of days, weeks, or months can be dissociative

It’s not normal to find yourself doing something that you would normally never do and know that you’ll be angry at yourself later but be unable to stop

Occasionally feeling younger or childish is normal; sometimes enjoying watching old cartoons is normal; enjoying playing children’s games with younger relatives is normal; feeling like you’ve regressed back to a child is abnormal; finding yourself thinking or acting like a child and being unable to stop (or even recognize what happened until after the fact) can indicate a dissociated child part 

Some people have trouble remembering what they said or did while upset, but this can be abnormal if it happens frequently or if the actions in question are very out of character or extreme; it can be abnormal to be genuinely shocked to realize how you acted or to be confused or disoriented when faced with the consequences of your actions until you’re reminded of the actions

Pathological dissociative experiences

Some experiences, no matter how rare or no matter the context, are inherently dissociative and often indicate a clinical dissociative disorder or related condition (such as posttraumatic stress disorder, a conversion disorder, or borderline personality disorder). Examples include:

Flashbacks in which you relive a traumatic memory; becoming disoriented and thinking that you’re still being hurt; becoming overwhelmed by the emotions, thoughts, or urges that you had at the time of the trauma

Experiencing seizures, muscle weakness, transient blindness, or other seemingly neurological or medical symptoms due to stress in the absence of a neurological or medical cause

Chronic episodes of depersonalization or derealization that frighten you, make it difficult for you to maintain relationships, or make it difficult for you to care for yourself and keep yourself safe

Whenever you get too upset, becoming so disconnected that you have an out of body experience and watch yourself acting from a third person perspective

Having no memory for an adult trauma that you for all intents and purposes should remember (ie, that occurred while you were awake, did not involve psychoactive substances, and did not involve a head injury or other potential cause of organic memory loss)

Having a significant gap, such as years or decades, in your memory of your teen or adult life; not remembering many important life milestones such as graduating from college, the birth of your child, or the death of a close family member

Becoming upset and suddenly “coming to” somewhere else

Finding evidence that you very recently wrote a paper, cut the lawn, had a long text conversation with a friend, changed your appearance, or hurt yourself and having no memory at all for this (without this being associated with substance use, sleep walking, or organic memory loss)

Loved ones telling you that something upset you and caused you to act in a very different way, to go by a different name, or to not recognize them, and you don’t remember this

Hearing the voices of dissociated parts; hearing distinct people holding conversations internally; hearing internal crying 

My activity spikes every Wednesday because of this post 

ness

My fourth grade teacher thought it was wrong for my dad to be teaching me complex math because it fascinated me.

My elementary school music teacher hated the way my piano teacher taught me, and how I was more advanced than many of her students, and so told me, in front of my peers and my mother, that I was not good enough to participate in the state solo festival. She would not give me the form. We had to procure it from the district instead. She also hated how I excelled at reading and playing music for the recorder, and so she refused to give me my “belts” (colored beads to signify our level) and humiliated me in front of the class repeatedly.

My eighth grade algebra teacher used to fail me on take home tests because I didn’t solve problems exactly the way she showed us in class; I used methods that we had learned for other types of problems that also applied to these. She took points off my tests because I didn’t bring a calculator even though I got 100% without it, because I was able to do it by hand. I had to call my father, who is an engineer, down to the school to shout her down and give me back my A in the class.

My 10th grade Spanish teacher yelled at me in front of the class numerous times because she didn’t like the way I took notes; she thought that since I didn’t write every word off the slide, I wasn’t getting it all down. I had to explain to her that people who have taken advanced courses, like AP or IB classes, know that in a fast-paced learning environment you need to take quick shorthand notes that contain the necessary information rather than wasting time writing every word. She almost gave me detention.

My 11th grade English teacher gave me a poor mark on my first short essay because she believed that I was looking up unnecessarily complex words in a thesaurus to try and get better marks. The phrases in question: “laced with expletives” and “bombarded”. She wouldn’t hear any defense from me.

My 11th grade history teacher failed me on an essay about the 1950s because I misread the prompt. Except the prompt wasn’t words; it was a political cartoon. One of the figures was clearly president Eisenhower, but the other I couldn’t place. My teacher would not tell us who it was. I labelled him as the governor of Little Rock Arkansas during the integration period, and wrote an essay about that subject. My teacher said that no, it was Joseph McCarthy, and that there was a small picture of the man in our textbook and therefore I should have recognized him instantly. Half the class, apparently, did not.