Some of the people I have seen say they have non-disordered plurality have a lot of extreme dissociative symptoms from what they post. System conflicts, huge memory gaps, inability to control switches, extreme depersonalization/derealization symptoms.

This is not to deny someone’s experience, but more of a gentle reminder that if your experiences with plurality causes genuine distress? You may want to learn more about how dissociative disorders impact functions.

I don’t really understand any labels outside of traumagenic and maybe endogenic. I can’t even begin to really wrap my head around plurality not causing dissociation—it’s just not my experience at all. It’s a big reason why I decline arguing in any debates, but I have a pretty good idea of how my DID has impacted me.

I’m not saying this as a genuine diagnosis of “You MUST have DID” because there are many different aspects that could impact this. I know that there are also like- labels that encompass different aspects that include trauma. However, this is just something I have noticed while scrolling through tumblr recently. This also isn’t targeted in any way, but if it resonates with you, I think learning about DID in medical contexts isn’t a bad idea (or at least learning of dissociation).

I have seen that a big reason many people get nervous to interact with traumagenic spaces is because of how aggressive and toxic they can be, which I understand is definitely a problem we see. It’s definitely a product of how DID is and what societal hatred does to marginalized communities. I take a very chilled and laid back approach to pretty much anything, so if you feel too scared to interact with the traumagenic community, I don’t mind trying to help!

One of the curiosities about how psychosis is defined, is the fact that clinically, delusions are defined as strongly held "wrongful" beliefs that don't respond to counter-proof, and that aren't shared with others in a subculture.

In other words, believing even very bizarre conspiracy theories such as "the earth is flat" isn't a delusion, though in a broader linguistic sense it is sometimes referred to as such.

In this post I wanna talk a bit about why that is, and why I do think that it's important to have a distinction between clinical delusions that happen in psychotic illnesses, and strange beliefs that arise in other ways.

So why is it not a delusion if it's shared with a subculture?

I think the reason for this distinction is that delusions experienced by people with psychotic disorders are something that comes from within, rather than something we've been taught to believe. Per definition. Psychotic people aren't particularly "gullible", we don't lack critical thinking skills, we have an illness that make us believe random untrue crap in a way that makes us unable to think critically about it. So while a psychotic belief could be inspired by something we've come across (like a conspiracy theory) our brain is generally gonna take it as a seed and run with it. Therefore we usually quickly get out of bounds from the 'community' that might have inspired our belief anyways.

Overall, we are less prone to having gotten our beliefs from others and are more prone to being the originator of a belief. In something like folie a deux, a non-psychotic person is taught reality from a psychotic delusional person, f.ex. a child growing up with a delusional parent. The child might appear at first glance to be psychotic, but actually they only believe those things because that's what they were taught by someone they consider an authority. If you remove the child from that environment, you will usually be able to help them regain a better understanding. Similarly someone might grow up in a cult. And they are believing what they are being taught, and their parents are believing what they have been taught. And there will be most likely an originator to the cultish beliefs. That person might be maliciously making things up, or they might even be psychotic and delusional. But the people who are being taught these things as facts are behaving like most humans, as social creatures who's reality is defined by their context.

Most people's context is defined along the lines of consensus reality, but if your social context is not aligned with the majority consensus reality, you are still aligned with the beliefs of your social context if you share your weird beliefs with a subculture. Your brain didn't independently come up with a wild belief that is out of touch with everything you know/have been taught.

Consensus reality is a consensus. And even if the consensus you follow is shared by only 2% of the population, if that 2% is all the people you relate to and consider to be the people "in the know", then you are in a way not going against your contextual consensus reality. You've just picked a less popular one.

So what defines a clinical (psychotic) delusion is that it does not align with any consensus about reality that you have access to. It's your own, and it's unlikely that you have allies who are supporting your beliefs. Though in rare cases a clinically delusional person may be contributing new material to a subculture, that others then start believing, and as a result they do share their beliefs with a subculture. But they didn't just learn the belief from the subculture, the belief is growing and morphing independent of the group.

But yeah that's all clinically speaking. In a broader linguistic sense, I think people use "delusional" to refer to anyone who has beliefs that aren't aligned with the majority-consensus-reality, or even more simplistically, that aren't aligned with the speaker's understanding of consensus reality (usually as an insult). So an atheist might refer to the religious as delusional, and vice versa.

It may be a losing battle to get wider society to stop using 'delusional' in this way, but I think it is at least helpful to talk about how such "delusions" differ fundamentally from the psychotic experience.

Is AvPD a Disability?

Oof, what a question.

This week’s research post is going to get a little theory-heavy, so before we get to that let me explain why I chose this topic.  I want to talk a little about what are called “models of disability.”  

Why?  

Because disability is an incredibly complex concept.  

Definitions are wildly different from one another depending on what you’re reading or who you’re listening to. Do we even count mental health as part of ability or disability?  And isn’t “disability” a messy word to begin with?  Is it like “autistic” or “queer,” where we should follow the lead of the people who would choose that label for themselves and not apply it where people find it hurtful?  Is it objective (anyone can define it) or subjective (depending on personal experience)?

I don’t have The Answers™ for you.

Instead, I’m going to talk about one of the most widely-used ways to define disability and then see how Avoidant Personality Disorder fits into that.  Then you all can figure out what that means to each of you personally. I do want to provide a word of caution, however.  Before you read any further, take just a few seconds to explore what the word means to you right now.  Is it a bad word?  If it were applied to you, would you feel seen or would you feel belittled?  Why?

.

.

.

TL;DR:  How we think about disability can change how we think about ourselves, what we can do, and what supports we need.  Understanding what our needs are makes it easier to know what kinds of things to ask for so we can live our best lives.

Okay, here goes.  

Keep reading

okay so I have this idea for a new therapy thing. basically the idea is after an abusive relationship or a combat deployment or anything that might conceivably leave you with PTSD and a loss of ability to reasonably gauge how bad the shit that happened to you actually was, you sit there with a mental health professional for like, a solid 30 to 60 minutes, you tell them short vignettes of your experiences and they respond ONLY by rating how fucked up each one was on a scale from 1 to 10 and then you move on. the objective isn't to reflect deeply on specific experiences but to get a sustained series of reassurances that what you went through was, in fact, That Bad and gradually rebuild your trust in your own present and future ability to judge when what you're going through isn't okay.

currently calling it Rapid Fire Affirmation and Recalibration Therapy (RAP-FART). working title, open to feedback.

Great news! This exists! It's called "critical stress incident debriefing" (CISD) and it does in fact reduce PTSD symptoms and onset!

It's usually used in a group setting where multiple people experienced the same trauma (combat, disaster, etc), so that there is an element of professional debrief and of peer support. This dual approach helps to ensure that in addition to you and your therapist being like 'that was fucked UP', you also have proof that other people in general agree it was fucked, thanks to the peers.

Who else never really learned emotional regulation as a child and now has to learn it as an adult? 🐸 Even just naming the feeling out loud can help me to feel better.

Other tips:

holy SHIT

Ooo okay, I really wanted to know what the source of this was and it’s Additude magazine, a 2021 last-updated-in-2021 article here titled Why Anxiety Disorder Is So Often Misdiagnosed.

I know I vibed with this quote and saw others do so in the tags so I thought a source would be helpful.