no other hope for us but that we grow wise

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

my head is full of too many thoughts and feelings all the time and if I don’t drain them regularly by making pointless texts posts they turn everything into an undifferentiated mass of mud and wet paper and I can’t find anything I want in there so that’s why I’m Like This

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

[drdemonprince]

Is it Alexithymia, or is it Dissociation Fueled by Trauma?

Emerging research suggests they’re one and the same.

Medium

Kallitsounaki and Williams found that transgender participants did in fact report alexithymia symptoms at an elevated rate, compared to their cisgender peers. This effect also held strong when eliminating all Autistic participants from analyses, which indicates that even non-Autistic transgender people are worse at naming and recognizing their feelings than non-Autistic cisgender people are.

The study’s authors concluded from these findings that non-Autistic transgender people appear to exhibit “subclinical” Autistic traits.

“Future studies mighty usefully examine whether alexithymia is a potential “marker” of autistic traits in transgender people who do not meet full criteria for autism,” they write.

To put it another way, they believe the alexithymia that non-Autistic trans people report is still caused by (mild) Autism.

But this conclusion carries with it a faulty and as-yet untested assumption: that alexithymia must be caused by Autism directly, when in reality it could just be a natural consequence of living in a marginalized and othered body. 

Just because a transgender person struggles to name and recognize their emotions doesn’t necessarily mean they’re Autistic. It could very well be the case that both Autistic people and transgender people struggle to understand our feelings, because we have experienced a lifetime of questioning and invalidation.

And if we look to the broader research literature on alexithymia, we see even more evidence that this might be the case.
…
It’s not just Autistic people who have been found by researchers to experience alexithymia. Sufferers of trichotillomania, or compulsive hair-pulling, have repeatedly been found to be alexithymic too.

Some research also links alexithymia with early exposures to trauma and abuse. People who do not know they are pregnant (also known in the literature as pregnancy-deniers) tend to be alexithymic, for instance. They also tend to be victims of childhood sexual assault. These two things are not unrelated.

We know that when vulnerable people (particularly children) are sexually assaulted, their minds tend to dissociate from that upsetting reality. Their consciousness “floats away” to a point elsewhere in the room, or they pretend the abuse isn’t happening to them or that the world around them is not real. Additional research has also found that alexithymia is associated with early childhood abuse, especially emotional and physical neglect.

It makes sense that a mind that’s well practiced in the art of detachment might stop checking on its internal states entirely. A body that has often been the site of your abuse is one you can’t dwell in comfortably. If you can’t count on your caregiver to provide you with regular nourishment, there’s little reason to make note of your own feelings of hunger. And if your cries for help or comfort are never heard with sympathy, you may quickly learn not to even recognize sadness within yourself at all.

These findings also dovetail with an observation that Kallitsounaki and Williams make in their paper, but don’t take much time to dwell on: they found that the cisgender men in their sample were significantly more alexithymic than cisgender women.

This finding also suggests that there are environmental and social factors that contribute to a person’s awareness of their own emotions — and populations that are discouraged from sharing how they feel are far worse at understanding their feelings as a result.

Women aren’t innately more attuned to emotions than men are. They’re simply expected to be more emotionally aware, and given more tools to make emotional recognition and expression possible. Men, on the flip side, are denied the freedom to be openly emotional, and also relieved of the responsibility to look after their own or others’ feelings. This results in them understanding emotions a whole lot less.

If we can’t assume that the alexithymia of men is innate, then we shouldn’t assume it’s innate in Autistics or transgender people either. For just as men are discouraged from openly crying, asking for help, or showing other signs of supposed “weakness,” both transgender people and Autistics are actively discouraged from expressing discomfort or seeking emotional aid for ourselves.

read the rest of the article for free here.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Ahhh this is tying in so much with what I’ve been thinking/talking about earlier.

People tend to take cues on what is real from other people around us, particularly very trusted people like your parents when you’re a child. (Or people who have a lot of power over you. Ditto.) When subjective experiences like physical pain, psychological pain, hunger, cold/heat, sensory overload, etc get treated like they’re real, people take them more seriously than when they’re either treated like they’re not real or like a thing that is real but which you should ignore.

If a parent or similar thinks that you covering your ears and screaming is a proportionate response to a fire alarm, you believe it is a proportionate response and are more likely to notice similar sensations in the future. If a parent or similar thinks you covering your ears and screaming because a clock is ticking at a normal-to-allistics volume is “being dramatic” or “being too sensitive” or similar, you might try to not notice that sensation going forwards. Because you were just told that you should not notice it.

(if you’re told the way you’re being bullied is something you should just ignore or just put up with, you might learn to ignore how you feel when you’re being bullied. If you’re told boys don’t cry, you might not develop the skill of recognizing sadness. If you get showered with attention when you express an interest in playing dress up and told that you like playing dress up but denied attention or get diverted to something else when you want to talk about dinosaurs, you might conclude that you like playing dress up and don’t like talking about dinosaurs, and if that is wildly out of alignment with what you actually like and don’t like, you might have trouble telling what liking or disliking things even feels like.

[freddiebeg]

I remember when I had the realization that not everyone experienced sensation the way I do, that they were not just better at compartmentalizing discomfort, and I finally understood that my sensations and feelings weren't confused and disordered. My body existed on my terms (also jumpstarted thanks to transitioning 9ish years ago, a process that took place in tandem with learning about autism) and the narrow scripts of what I'd internalized as appropriate emotion began to crumble away. What had once seemed like irrational reactions suddenly gained solid etiologies with causal factors that I could articulate. That being said figuring out how to do that articulation was often challenging. As I had really no idea what might constitute another person's sensory baseline, it took me years to calibrate my own communication to best explain my experience. Recently I've begun to exit this fog of alexithymia and I'm definitely finding certain social experiences becoming less perplexing and stressful. The ability to articulate my emotions to my self alone has allowed me to establish the boundaries I use for myself to make stressful circumstances more manageable.

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

The really funny thing is in elementary school I was in this like quasi-Girl Scout organization called Keepers at Home (the boys were Contenders for the Faith or something, you can’t make this stuff up) which I think I have mentioned before, and in this program we had to Cultivate Womanly Skills, such as Cooking, Manners, Sewing, and Embroidery. And I hated sewing and I really hated embroidery, to the extent that I never finished the project and never got the badge even though it was impressed upon me that it was Very Important to get all the badges.

Crucially, however, we were all doing the same project, which for embroidery was a sampler with like…Bible verses on it?? In a style that has never matched my taste. I generally loathe replicating other people’s designs; it means I don’t get to do what is to me the most fun step, designing, and it forces me to compare my work to an external benchmark. The adults were always telling me about how big and uneven my stitches were and how I was doing things in the wrong way or order.

I think I was easily the worst in class at both activities, and I don’t think this is shame talking; my motor skills were always a big problem, people commented on it all the time in instructional settings. Moreover, I had not yet learned to draw, which was really the first step I had to master in order to understand handicrafts.

Anyway, so for many years I absolutely despised the idea of doing any embroidery because it felt like a fruitless, painful endeavor. But now that I’ve a) taken about six levels in Art Skills, b) have full agency over the process and its result, and c) am not experiencing this as a gendered Homemaking Skill, I’m looking at it and going, hmmm, you mean I can just decorate clothes I would wear anyway with motifs I would like to have on my clothes? That’s pretty practical if you ask me….

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

I am not going to get into embroidery I am not going to get into embroidery I am not going to get into embroidery I am n

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

[triviallytrue]

i'm a taylor swift centrist. she makes perfectly tolerable pop music that i can't imagine really getting into. dunno what it is about her that makes so many people go insane

[triviallytrue]

i listen to one of these relatively bland and inoffensive but nonetheless well-crafted pop songs and everyone around me demands that i proclaim it a masterpiece or artistically bankrupt or whatever. i just want to grill for god's sake

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

Having a body with wide-ranging systemic malfunctions makes me very grateful for the systems that function on all cylinders. My autonomic nervous system may be shot and my joints may be poorly knit, but my immune system and my teeth are really keeping up with things, thank you to these important team players

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

[amarguerite]

One thing I think is very interesting (but that I have no coherent thesis about) is how the age gap “I have known you all your life” romance between Emma and Mr. Knightley seems like a repeated trope in 19th century novels and is often framed as a really good thing (eg Mr. Brooke and Meg in Little Women)

It’s so weird to me and I have such inchoate thoughts about it because it’s a trope that’s aged like milk. My twenty-first century reaction to reading that Mr. Knightley’s known Emma since she was a literal child, or that Mr. Brooke got interested in Meg when she was only 17, is “NOPE NOPE NOPE”

But… on the other hand, marriage was SO DIFFERENT in the 19th century, and ideas of what it should do and what what you should consider going into it, and how it changes a woman’s status both legally and socially are also very alien now. If you are in a system where you are raised knowing that you must marry, that that’s the only right and respectable path in life BUT ALSO that your whole life from that point will be completely dependent ton your husband and his income and his decisions…

Well, “You’ve known this guy you’re whole life and he’s been consistently a good person to you,” is actually a really good argument in his favor? It makes for a really safe option in a time when you had to gamble on some dude willing to marry you. (But then I get to the point of, ‘well why the age gap then, what’s wrong with being the same age in the 19th century,’ and I’ve got some more thinking to do. Something something economic stability or maybe some weird social ideas about gendered maturity levels?)

[lemeute]

I think economic stability and assumptions about gendered maturity levels are definitely big parts of it, and people have made good points about those already! but to me, the biggest difference between "known this guy my whole life and he is distinctly my elder" ships and "known this guy my whole life and he is basically my age" ships in this context (19th century US/Western Europe) is that, while in both of them the woman has lots of experience with how he treats her, in the first she has specific experience with how he treats her when he has significant access to power and control over her.

when a person shifts from being (mostly) your peer to being the arbiter of your legal identity, that's going to be stressful even if you both handle it as thoughtfully and graciously as possible. but you're also taking the risk that his access to control over you will dramatically change how he interacts with you. depending on the specifics of your friendship to date, you may have never seen him navigate situations where he had significant legal, financial, and/or familial control over others (maybe servants, maybe much younger siblings, but all that will still be under the father or other head of household). you can know a lot about a 19th century man, but if you don't know how he reacts to having societal power, it's still a huge risk to give him marriage-level power over you. I can't recall off the top of my head books written at the time where childhood friends/peers marry and the man then becomes far more controlling than expected--I swear I've read some, maybe I'll think of them later--but "my partner became really scary immediately after solidifying power over me" is still enough of a thing in contemporary dating and marriage that I've often seen it have its own section in books on partner abuse.

on the other hand, someone who reached the age of majority fifteen years ago? you've had far more chances to see how he wields and refrains from wielding his authority. and specifically, you've had the chance to see how he does that with you. this trope often involves a student and her tutor, or a girl and a friend of her father; these are relationships where a man could be dismissive, harsh, petty, even cruel without much consequence purely because he is the adult. for him to not just refrain from abusing his power over her, but to in fact go out of his way to cultivate a respectful relationship stands out, because children are not really considered worthy of adults' notice and conversation. it speaks well of his willingness to listen to people he has the legal right / social permission to step on or brush aside. it may also bode well for him being a decent father to the children you are very strongly likely to have, and that's a not-insignificant concern! for both yourself and your children, you probably have a good awareness of what things that bother other men he doesn't mind, and what things he does in fact take seriously. if you want to change his mind about some of those things, it'll probably be pretty hard. but that could also be the case with if you married someone with whom these things were a surprise; there's no guarantee that a younger man won't be set in his ways.

(side note, I think a lot of this also applies to Why Marry A Widower, even one without a longstanding previous acquaintance. if you talk to the right people, you can learn a wealth of information about how he treated his first wife and any kids. if you're the first wife, not even the husband himself fully knows that information until you are both living it!)

so yeah, I think part of this trope aging so poorly is both how much more legal, financial, and social control a husband inherently had within a marriage, and as a specifc part of that, how much harder it was to leave a marriage (again, in 19th century Western Europe/the US, compared to those places now). today, big disparities in age are often a sign of big disparities in power; in that context, the gap in power was so inherently large that perhaps age generally created a flavor of power difference rather than a change in its size, and it really was a question of what flavor of power difference seemed best to you.

this...does still leave a lot open in terms of re: the man's motivations, which I want to think about more (the contemporary part of me that reacts with Yikes is still kinda like! sex! on his part it's creepy and about sex! even if it makes sense from her end he shouldn't do it! and I really think there is more to it than that but this post is long enough already)

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

[txttletale]

i'm so glad someone else was bitchy about that post bc i couldn't be bothered to when i saw it. the reason that literacy rates in the usa are poor is because of rising inequality and also because kids are just straight up being taught to read wrong. not because of fucking fanfiction or YA or 'puriteens' or whatever the fuck else is the bugbear of the week for people who still stake their self esteem on their high school english grades

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

Also, quilt top!

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

[foreverial]

every single track from the 30s is called some shit like Richard Himber & His Ritz-Carlton Hotel Orchestra with Joey Nash, - You’re A Builder Upper

[foreverial]

phenomenal

[no other hope for us but that we grow wise]

my dad did not know that, when he played Bob Dylan in the car as part of the homemade 70s rock complication CDs that were all he listened to other than the radio station WYFM Y-103, he was shaping my music tastes in ways that I would only begin to understand twenty years later. He wasn’t even that into Bob Dylan specifically. I have surpassed my father by far in time spent thinking about Bob Dylan’s lyrics. I’m not proud of this or anything but it’s very startling to analyze how much that influence shows up in what I’ve liked since I started branching out post high school. The amount of internal screaming I do about the Mountain Goats and Vienna Teng is because I was injected with Ambiguous Allusive Lyrics Appreciation Disease sitting in an old Ford Taurus doing while my dad did Amish runs.