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@transcalkestis
cal kestis says trans rights

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"the jedi don't have therapists-"
jedi philosophy, and in particular the practices and teachings that jedi were expected to implement in their everyday lives, was therapy. dialectical behavior therapy (dbt), to be exact. anyone who's familiar with dbt knows where i'm already going with this, but like genuinely look up the basic tenets of dbt and it's identical with what the jedi were doing.
dbt, to put it simply, is a specific therapy technique that was designed for ptsd and past trauma. it's pretty different from traditional talk therapy. it combines a few different environments (individual, group, etc.), recognizing that no single format of treatment can stand alone.
the key focuses of dbt include:
emotional regulation- understanding, being more aware of, and having more control over your emotions
mindfulness- regulating attention and avoiding anxious fixation on the past or future
interpersonal effectiveness- navigating interpersonal situations
distress tolerance- tolerating distress and crises without spiraling and catastrophizing
i'm sure it's already clear from that list alone how much the jedi teachings correspond with the goals of dbt. the jedi value, teach, and practice the following:
identifying and understanding emotions
mindfulness and living in the present
compassion, diplomacy, and conflict resolution (on interpersonal scales, not just planetary or galactic)
accepting and tolerating certain levels of distress or discomfort (particularly mental, such as discomfort at the thought of losing a loved one to death)
idk man seems almost as if jedi mental health practices and dbt are two sides of a completely identical coin. (fun fact: both star wars and dbt are products of the 70s.)
and guess what? dbt was specifically designed as a treatment for borderline personality disorder. remember that one? or, if you don't, maybe you remember a specific character, the one who was literally used as an example by my professor in my undergrad psych class when she was teaching us about bpd?
tldr: simply existing within the jedi community, practicing jedi teachings, surrounded by a support network of other jedi of all life stages, was the therapy for anakin. even when viewed through a modern lens. it was even, more specifically, the precise type of therapy that has developed in modern times to treat the exact types of mental issues he was struggling with.
In my view, the Jedi Order teaches a skewed version of dialectical skills. They lean too far in the direction of emotionlessness to the point they don't know what to do with Anakin's vast and messy emotional landscape.
All Jedi have built-in trauma as children stolen from their homes and raised devoid of their culture and families. The Jedi Order literally traumatizes their subjects as a form of initiation.
Then, as they grow, they are demonized for expressing emotion and forming "attachments." Attachments are human relationships and relationships are integral to mental health. You don't even see Jedi with pets. They have absolutely nowhere to turn to for comfort except the unfeeling void of the Force.
The Jedi order is more akin to a cult than to DBT. They deliberately manipulate the tenets of mindfulness, sterilize them, and offer them to their members like the one true way to live. Mindfulness is *not* about eradicating big emotions, it is about feeling them. Anakin is discouraged from feeling anger multiple times in the prequels and Clone Wars. He is dismissed for his concerns and his suffering is diminished.
The Jedi may have understood mindfulness but only enough to manipulate it with the goal of indoctrinating the children they stole. Anakin is a direct product of their failure.
I think you might actually be more chill with the Jedi than you think, OP. Mostly because the vast majority of what you've said here is directly contradicted by canon and by George Lucas himself. There are tons of other people who've put time into creating much better and more researched posts about all of these topics, and I'll link several of them below. But TLDR: Pretty much every single claim you've made here is very easily debunked when you look at scripts and George Lucas interviews.
1. The Jedi steal children from their families and erase their cultures
The stealing kids thing is Sith propaganda. Like it's in universe propaganda that Sidious canonically made up, specifically to justify the Jedi's genocide. The only ones who are shown to canonically steal children are the Sith. There's a whole arc where Sidious recruits Cad Bane to steal Force-sensitive children to abuse and brainwash into becoming Sith. There's no corresponding arc for the Jedi.
All of the examples we see of Jedi taking in Force-sensitive children involve the family making that decision. Ahsoka's family are the ones who contact the Jedi after she displays Force sensitivity. The interaction is painted in a joyous, positive light, for a reason.
Shmi is the one who asks Qui-Gon if he can help Anakin and make him a Jedi. There's a comic where Mace finds out a family wants their kid back, and he gives the child back as soon as he realizes; @gffa has posted about it & has also done a larger review of the Jedi's canon attitudes towards kids here. There's an entire planet that told the Jedi to stop coming and that they wouldn't give up their kids, so the Jedi don't go there anymore. Roo-Roo Page was a Force-sensitive Gungan who was kidnapped by Sidious, and there was an entire arc of The Clone Wars where the Jedi rescued her and returned her to her family. We also have dialogue from the Kenobi series that explicitly equates the process of children joining the Jedi Order to Leia being adopted by Bail and Breha Organa, and describes said Order as their "family."
And we see so many Jedi who are still connected with their cultures. Ki-Adi-Mundi has a whole ass family with multiple wives and loads of kids because the Jedi wanted to help him keep his species and culture from dying out. We see Jedi like Depa Billaba, Luminara Unduli, and Barriss Offee wearing traditional marks and garb of their cultures:
@smhalltheurlsaretaken also has a post here where they point out how Barriss has a statue that she meditates to, likely a Miralan one. And that the doors of her quarters are decorated with Miralan markings:
So it's not just personal garb that Jedi use to express and connect to their cultures. They incorporate their unique cultures into their meditations and their living spaces as well.
If we compare the Jedi Order to the Empire, we'll get a better idea of just how culturally diverse the Jedi are. Look at these two pictures:
And you tell me which one looks like it's suppressing individuality and culture. Hint: It's not the Jedi. Note that there are no non-humans in the picture of the Empire, while the Jedi are actually one of the most species-diverse groups shown in Star Wars canon.
2. The Jedi do not allow emotion
Jedi are told to be mindful of their emotions, which as you know, means paying MORE attention to them, not less. It means noticing them, identifying them, and letting them flow and change over time. Noticing the contents of the river and letting it pass unobstructed, and all that.
The Jedi are highly empathetic and very in tune with both their emotions and other's emotions. @smhalltheurlsaretaken has a great series of examples of the Jedi being affectionate with themselves and others. They are far from cold and unfeeling.
Anakin is not discouraged from feeling anger; he is discouraged from acting upon it in the heat of the moment, especially in his capacity as first a diplomat and later a military leader. And the times we DO see him act on this anger, the outcomes are always awful!
He slaughters an entire tribe, including children who had no role in the thing he was angry about! He ignores people who are in danger, who are his responsibility! He chokes his pregnant wife out! He commits genocide!
And where does he end up, every time? Drowning in guilt, in horror, in disgust. Spiraling and catastrophizing and isolating himself from his loved ones. Acting on his anger isn't just harmful to others- it's harmful, deeply harmful, to Anakin.
Anakin's temper burns very brightly, but also seems to pass quickly. (The exact kind of thing DBT helps with, by the way...) When he refuses to let go of that anger and acts on it, he is at his worst and unhealthiest! Do you really think DBT supports acting on impulsive anger, especially when you're someone who gets violent when angry? I think not.
The Jedi are super powered space monks. With great power comes great responsibility. When you have the power to choke people out without even touching them, the power to hurl them through the air or kill them or brainwash them, your impulsive violence has a much higher capacity to harm than for a normal person. It's much more important to avoid acting on that anger, because as we see time and time again with Anakin, the effects are devastating. So, as the Jedi say: feel your anger, and then let it go before you hurt someone because of it. Again, this is the exact definition of mindfulness.
3. Attachment is healthy
George Lucas has gone on the record SO MANY TIMES to explain that no, attachment is NOT a synonym for love. "Attachment" is a Buddhist concept, not just a random English word he decided to use because he thought it sounded cool. Attachment is specifically a scenario where your fear of losing the way someone makes you feel makes you possessive, to the point that you care more about that possession than about the person.
Most notably, George Lucas defines Anakin's later feelings (RotS-era) for Padme as attachment, something that specifically was unhealthy enough to turn Anakin to genocide. Anakin cared more about possessing Padme than he cared about what Padme wanted (hence Padme being distraught by what he did, rather than happy and grateful).
George Lucas contrasts this with Anakin's love for Luke, describing it as unconditional and NON attachment, as being what brought Anakin back to the light. @gffa has another great post citing various canon sources about attachment vs. unconditional love as George Lucas sees it here.
Because George Lucas defines "attachment" in the Buddhist sense, in this sense of clinging onto something to the point of hurting it, being unattached does not mean you don't feel emotions such as love. It doesn't mean you live this miserly, lonely existence. As George has explicitly stated:
@david-talks-sw has written loads more posts about this. I do suggest you read them all. They're heavily researched and based on canon + interviews and give a much better sense of George Lucas's intentions with regards to the Jedi. And overall, a better and more open-minded understanding of Buddhist philosophies, which the Jedi were based of off, will be helpful to you here. There are tons of resources on Buddhist thinking that are freely available online.
Also, I know this is a sticking point for a lot of people within the fandom, but this message of non-attached love being best isn't a uniquely Eastern concept. Western pop culture contains tons of examples of attachment being unhealthy and non-attachment being healthy. Think of the mother who refuses to let her daughter leave for college because she wants to have her around, but eventually realizes it's what's best for her and learns to let her go. Think of the girl who learns to dump her boyfriend because he refuses to allow her to make any male friends out of jealousy. We're inundated all the time with the message that loving someone often means letting them go if it's what's best for them. It's not a uniquely Jedi concept.
4. The Jedi don't have relationships
Just because most Jedi don't have relationships with biological family or with romantic partners doesn't mean they have no relationships at all. The Master-Padawan relationship is a great example of this, and we know that closeness is deliberately fostered by the Jedi. We also see plenty of examples of Jedi having friends (Obi-Wan with Bant and Quinlan, Ahsoka with Barriss). Children are raised communally, in groups:
And we see many, many examples of Jedi turning to elders throughout their community for support when they're struggling (I've lost count of how many times people have gone to Yoda for advice). We see that Ahsoka has a close relationship with elders in her community even outside of her relationship with her Master, like Plo Koon and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
These relationships are highly meaningful to her; she continues to respect and admire them in the Ahsoka series, which takes place many years later, after the Jedi have been mass genocided.
This kind of community-based support is incredibly common in non-American cultures, such as my own. My dad was largely raised communally, by other members of his village who weren't related to him; they are just as much considered a part of our family as his biological relatives are and he values his relationships with them immensely. This social structure is also very common in queer cultures, where historically queer folks have been disowned by their families and have had to create found families as a result. Where do you think the saying "it takes a village" comes from? Because psychologists recognize the importance of this exact kind of support.
If these types of non-traditional, non-Western community structures "don't count" to you, I'd suggest that you do some reflecting as to why. They're perfectly meaningful to literally billions of people around the world. Just because something might look different doesn't mean it's inferior to what you know. And it's frankly hurtful to people from the cultures (including queer cultures) for whom these relationships are incredibly meaningful to suggest otherwise.
5. Anakin's actions are entirely the Jedi's fault
My feelings on this are probably evident from the rest of this reblog, but I feel the need to point this out: Any line of reasoning that victim blames a culture who was genocided to near extinction is one you should think VERY carefully about. This line of thinking is pretty dangerous because it implies that a culture can do something to deserve genocide. There is nothing that anyone can do, EVER, to deserve genocide. Sure, maybe I'm sensitive about this sort of thing- but then again, having Jewish family does tend to make genocide a bit of a sore topic for people.
This line of thinking skirts far too close to anti-Semitic sentiments for my comfort; it's part of why I have a blog disclaimer asking y'all to stop adding them to my posts. I'm tired of having to repeatedly defend things that are meaningful to me and to so many others. We have existed for centuries, living quite happy and fulfilled lives for the most part, and we don't need to defend our worth to you just because you refuse to see it. If you want to talk about this sort of stuff, please do it elsewhere, and tag accordingly.
For the final time: Just because something looks unfamiliar to you doesn't mean it is worthless. The Jedi are based heavily off of real-world cultures, and it's good practice to be mindful that you don't fall into decades-old forms of bigotry when you're criticizing them. There are so many ways to criticize the Jedi that do not fall into these dangerous pitfalls of dismissing Buddhist cultures and blaming genocide victims. Please seek them out.
In addition to all the great points in the previous post, I wanted to add that Aayla has a pet in some comic or other, so there is even an example of Jedi having pets (though I don't know if the comic is legends or canon). You can see the other relevant panels here, but T'da dies and there's a scene that shows Aayla grieving the little animal. This is one section:
meditation
you just hate the cis because of the things that they did
I hate the cis because it is led by the treacherous count dooku
Soo if Cal is a teacher in that comic you posted, does his lessons include the importance of poncho’s? lol
OH ABSOLUTELY!! im now using this as an excuse to draw cal as a mama poncho-duck with his new padawan poncho-ducklings

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Hes so babygirl...pathetic lil guy even
In another world.... Reva and Leia as master & padawan....
a cuter take on Cal this time! and i added bd-1 too cause he's so adorable how could i not?
you can get a print of this here (along with my other star wars prints)!
it's great that these three all became jedi knights and nothing bad happened to them ever <3 no i am not in denial
(commission info // kofi)

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hands you all this cal to announce i’ve FINALLY finished fallen order (by which i mean i finally picked it up again after those couple hours i played a few months ago and then finished the whole game in 2 days lol)
Prauf and Cal commuting to work.
new design for redbubble! not sure about this one but i spent two days on it so it better be worth it
Young Cal trying, and failing, to reach for the Force in his cramped little cell bunk on Bracca.
(It’s too bad we didn’t find out more about what he meant with “losing control” when he meditates/tries to use the Force, but I figured it wouldn’t be explicit flashbacks since we don’t get those until Fallen Order - more like just hazy, confusing pain and possible dark side emotions. I tried to include a few details like his tattoo and scar being fresh, and the remnants of his Padawan braid still being just a bit longer than the rest of his hair.)
✨a long time ago in a galaxy far far away I am emotionally compromised ….. wait, no. That’s this galaxy.

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one struggling boy who is trying his best, for your consideration.
becky kofi requested Padme and Ahsoka hugging!!
(ko-fi requests are open!!)