daily positivity

A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.

Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.

…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.

I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:

Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)

Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?

Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?

Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?

Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?

These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.

Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.

Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.

This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.

People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.

Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.

Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!

It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.

One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…

This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.

If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.

you learn that the world is so much more complex than you were taught, and that that's okay, and that there's an endless supply of things you can learn or watch or experience or think about if you want to. if you're lucky, you loosen up, stop putting so much pressure on yourself. if you're lucky, you learn to recognize that negative inner voice, and whack it with a baseball bat until it hushes up. if you're lucky, you learn to treat yourself gently, not because you are fragile but because you are worthy of gentleness. (i hope you are lucky.)

You do not know what kind of rant demon you are summoning by opening this subject, but I love you for it.

I think your instinct is right on.

A lot of us are now familiar with the potential psychiatric diagnosis of "complex PTSD." Where current definitions of post-traumatic stress disorder focus on a single event taking place to cause the symptoms, with complex PTSD the diagnosis would encompass multiple events, long-term situations, and cumulative stress.

There was a time when I found the DSM's resistance to a diagnosis of "complex PTSD" to be fairly puzzling. It seems pretty readily apparent that long-term exposure to trauma creates a different thing than PTSD. I think the book The Body Keeps the Score is also pretty troubled about this, because what the author uncovered in a whole lot of pathologized people was a whole fucking lot of child abuse.

(Literally this seems to even have been a problem with Sigmund Freud; a current prominent theory says that his whole Oedipal Complex thing was a way to deliberately disregard the evidence of his female patients' sexual abuse.) (Link is to Wikipedia article.)

I also see kids with these absolute parades of diagnoses. IED, ODD, BPD, ADHD, depression, anxiety. Label after label after label. Dig even slightly under the surface, and you find: that child is... being raised by their grandparents! Adopted and abused in the first two years of life! Father in prison! Mom in prison! A morsel of meat being shredded between two vengeful parents in a horrible divorce! Problems suddenly started after a series of suspicious happenings with an older cousin! Constantly on marijuana! Subject to constant verbal abuse by stepmom! Witnessed one parent beating another on the reg! Take your pick.

A truly astonishing amount of the time, I end up feeling very strongly that the child should be diagnosed with "having a completely understandable reaction to genuinely horrible shit." It's hard not to start thinking "wow this all seems fake" when you get a kid with yet another arm-length dissertation of alphabet diagnoses and ONCE AGAIN you find the heinously obvious reasons behind them.

(Same with my adult clients, who have essentially fossilized versions of the same disorders. More likely to see bipolar and borderline, more likely to see schizophrenic.)

Ah, you say, Ryann, but what about the whole neurotransmitter thing? Depression is caused by low neurotransmitters, we've got that kind of cracked.

Actually, there are "huge bodies of evidence" showing that low serotonin in particular has no causal link to depression and that the affect on serotonin might not be (probably isn't?) why antidepressants even fucking work! (Best evidence: SSRIs and SNRIs work on neurotransmitters immediately, but take weeks or months to kick in to be effective against depression. Why?)

For a long time, I hung my hat on schizophrenia, actually. It's like, genetic, right? Surely we know things about schizophrenia. Surely that is real science. Surely that isn't just a response to trauma!

Well, um. You can have genetic and environmental things that predispose you to schizophrenia, but actually, as my therapist informed me, it tends to actually show up when there's a history of trauma.

This has led to me feeling pretty strongly that the DSM's method of diagnosis is wrong from jump.

Metaphor with me for a moment about the DSM and its diagnostic methods.

Now we all know of the diagnosis of Stuffynose, correct? It's when your nose is stuffy. It's an ailment that's pretty common. Most adults experience Stuffynose several times in their lifetime. There are two main treatments for Stuffynose. The first is antihistamines; the second is decongestants. Doctors are very divided as to the uses of these two medications. Studies show that both of them are more effective than placebo in the treatment of Stuffynose. If antihistamines work, you might have to be on them for the rest of your life. If decongestants work, you're out of luck after a week or two, because they can be dangerous if taken too long. Hopefully that fixes the problem! What? What's a "cold"? What is "flu"? I've never heard of these things. Yes, Stuffynose can sometimes cause a sore throat or coughing. Stuffynose is related to fevers sometimes, but we think that's just an overactive bodily response... Yes, Stuffynose can sometimes be fatal. Listen, the insurance company doesn't cover "surgery" for a "deviated septum" or for "cancer." Likewise, "environmental allergens" aren't something we check for. Thank god we live in the modern world and we've taken care of a lot of the stigma surrounding Stuffynose!

Me. That's me, w/r/t diagnoses of depression and anxiety and frankly most everything else. It's like personality quizzes. If you divide people by any quality and then make that quality a Category, you've created an Identity, not (not just?) a diagnosis. If everyone who likes candy and reads a lot of books is a Sweetreader, you'll now have a whole lot of people identifying as a Sweetreader and being like "omg trying to pass by the Nerds gummy clusters without buying any... #SweetreaderLife" while the Meatjocks are out there having a cookout, typical #meatjock behavior! Obviously DSM diagnoses are much more specific than my Sweetreader/Meatjock dichotomy but I think the tendency is very much there. So here's the thing. I don't think the reluctance of the DSM to acknowledge complex PTSD is puzzling anymore. I think there might be some people there who, overtly or subconsciously, recognize that they are playing Barbies with fake words and fake diagnoses and fake concepts, and that if they add complex PTSD, the whole party is over.

The minute you add complex PTSD, you are acknowledging that it isn't the individual person that's sick. It's their circumstances. It's society.

It's not a defiant child, it's not an explosive child, it's not a child with baby bipolar disorder but we can't call it yet so we call it something else: it's a child with developmental challenges and unlearned skills (THANK you Ross Greene PhD and your book The Explosive Child), or it's child abuse.

And currently the whole goddamn burden of identifying and dealing with developmental challenges, unlearned skills, and child abuse is on our schools, which are equipped for like 30% of that list. I think there is an absolute epidemic of unnamed child abuse in this country, some of it based on the absolutely predictable results of the war on drugs constantly depriving children of their parents (either through being high, drug-seeking, going to ineffective rehabs, being jailed, or doing fucking terrible things because of the shit they're in up to their neck or how much brain damage they've inflicted on themselves). The rest is screens and devices being heinously bad for neurological development (children must be SPOKEN TO in order to turn into people in a developmentally appropriate way!!) and constant parental supervision taking away all opportunities to learn self-sufficiency, self-regulation, and problem-solving.

So of course we pay teachers handsomely to help us raise the next generation of good citizens with so many disadvahahahAHAHAHA AGHHHHHH

So I dream of a day that we have a different paradigm for diagnosing mental illness entirely. In the novel I work on occasionally, when I have time and brainspace, Martian culture in particular diagnoses by picking out areas of the brain that are under- and over-active and using direct stimulus (like a far more advanced version of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a process I have actually undergone myself to unbelievably cool results) they will help the brain strengthen itself.

There is also some good news about antidepressants: the way they work might be in enhancing neuroplasticity, giving the brain more flexibility to heal itself. That's really cool and interesting to me, because it's like -- humans found ways to unlock our own powers of building ourselves and our identities and it fucking?? works???

The Explosive Child by Ross Greene saved my childhood, no joke.

I was in late elementary school when my social worker recommended it to my parents and the difference it fucking made!

All of a sudden, instead of punishing me, my parents were working with me? And we were coming up with plans and solutions together? And I wasn't being punished. And we retired the idea that being told "use my words" was productive or useful. It was amazing to feel like my parents were actually listening to me instead of insisting on the impossible.

Taking meds is an admission that you have an illness/disability. Most wellness & self-optimization products/treatments, however, are marketed with vague promises that make it easier to avoid having to do that.

I just came across a thread on r/migraine about pillows & the top comment was referencing the "Endless Pillow Quest". Apparently a lot of people just keep buying pillows in hopes that one will cure them. Even though it typically never works (for long).

We've all tried the lifestyle changes approach, and people won't stop trying any time soon.

In my case, it was mostly because the meds weren't working, because migraine was the wrong diagnosis. It was debilitating & I was just trying anything out of desperation. Cluster headaches will have you acting like that... it could've been worse.

It didn't do shit, but I kept trying. I even got dangerously close a few times to trying a low carb diet, which would've gone against everything I believe in.

Thankfully, I got the right diagnosis & meds eventually by being persistent & advocating for myself. Now I can actually exercise, eat well (anything I want! tons of carbs yay) and take care of myself in all the ways people associate with good health — as long as I take my meds.

Very accurate. Sometimes I read online about the kind of shit people do just to feel like they aren't "taking the easy way out" by taking advantage of medical interventions & it's like ok, come back in 5 years & tell me if you're still doing all that. I want to see you maintain that exact lifestyle with those exact supplements until you're 80.

And I know that sometime it's about finances but my parents had free health-care (that included medications too, we didn't have to pay a cent) for themselves & us kids the entire time — and they still chose to spend absurd amounts of money on sugar pills & supplements.

ID: A youtube comment with 11 likes by Niceone, it says "I've lived 46 years without knowing this. How nice of life to save some of the best bites for later." End ID.