Ms. Que BanhWhen you were young & in elementary school, do you remember what subjects that you struggled with the most & why?
I'm just curious about this. Also, please indicate if you're ND or NT - when responding. Thank you.
Quasit@PhoenixSerenity
Math was always hard for me. But what I HATED was gym class. I still remember the gym teacher. She would divide the class into two teams to play against each other, and she ALWAYS put all the good athletes together on one team. The "losers" team always got crushed.
I, of course, was always put on the loser team (I'm the kid who was always picked last when kids were picking who was going to be on their team). One day after we got crushed by the good athletes, the gym teacher started yelling at us for being so bad at sports.
I lost my temper.
"Of COURSE the score is always lopsided!" I screamed. "You always put all the GOOD athletes on one team!"
"Oh, and you think *you* could do better?" she sneered.
"Yes!" I answered.
For some reason she decided to show me up. She told me to divide the class into teams. So I did, as fairly as I could. Then we played a game between the two teams.
The final score differed by ONE point between the two teams.
She never said a damned word to me again.
Gym teachers are scum.
@Quasit I was ostracized from gym classes. It was very noticeable & made me feel like an even bigger outcast.
@PhoenixSerenity
Everyone ostracized me, too. I was beaten up several times a day, every day. Back then teachers didn't do a damned thing about bullies. If I'd had access to a gun, I'd have brought it to school.
I read all the time - in class, by myself during lunch in the cafeteria, and during recess huddled as far out of sight as I could get. But they always got me at recess. Hunting me down was one of the favorite pastimes of the many bullies at my school.
In retrospect, it's amazing that I'm not a lot more damaged than I am!
@Quasit I was beaten up a lot in elementary school days too, until I lost my shit & fought back. I broke a school window during my public freak out too, after knocking down the bully who had been terrorizing me(and others) for 2 years.
@PhoenixSerenity I fought back two times, but I wasn't any good at all. I tended to go blind, somehow. The beatings finally stopped when I decided that I wasn't going to give a damn any more. I wasn't going to cringe and hide. I told the bullies to go ahead and do whatever they were going to do; I didn't give a shit.
That was in my first year of high school, as I recall. I was never beaten up again.
Well, except by my ex-wife. But that's a different story.
sport of sacred spherical cowsOnce during a melt-down, where myself "spazzed out", my vision was reduced to black and white. That would be the time myself got kicked out of a Quaker elementary school.
@beadsland @Quasit I had a full out, autistic meltdown but didn't know what it was when it first happened to me. I was really young & unaware of my ND brain at the time.
Yeah, this was early grade school, so had no context for understanding what was happening either.
Personally, would love to be able to say my meltdown (plural? no idea, recall* too little of childhood to say for certain) was due to autism, as that would indicate being part of a group of folk with common experiences.
But the more myself am educated about the lived experiences of autistic folk, the more clear it becomes that my neurospicy brain ain't fit that designation.
*Probably only recall that event because of the trauma afterward of being told that would not be coming back to the Quaker school. Though, of course, don't recall being told. Only the fact that being told happened.
Violet Madder@beadsland @PhoenixSerenity @Quasit
Oh gawd, gym.
I've seen other kids get in fights with EACH OTHER over how badly they didn't want to get stuck with me on their team. (Even though I was a head taller than all of them and naturally athletic) And the locker room, taking off clothes?? Forget it. Just wearing shorts was bad enough-- sexual harassment etc. I still don't like showing any skin, I resent even short sleeves.
Eventually I got a waiver where I didn't have to take gym, because my parents put me in a self defense class outside of school.
Taking the class was enough for most of the bullies to magically lose interest in me, though.
I did flip out once, and it took several teachers to peel me off the guy. (that was before the martial arts training, too) Didn't get kicked out, but definitely learned I didn't have any right to stand up for myself. Ugh.
The things I'd say to those teachers today....
@violetmadder @beadsland @PhoenixSerenity
I don't think there was anything I hated and dreaded more than taking a shower at gym class. Group showers were a complete nightmare. The bullies would snap towels at me all the time and mock my body.
It felt like being sexually harassed, and I believe that's exactly what it was.
@Quasit @violetmadder @beadsland I avoided every school outing to nearby public pool after one experience. I was the only visibly disabled kid. Everyone except for 4 people, laughed & mocked my surgically scarred body & atrophied legs. I cried for days afterwards. I was traumatized & avoided all public pools for 30 years.
@violetmadder
I was suspended from school for 2 weeks. The bully got off with less than a week. He never bullied me or anyone else again though. In grade 9 - many years later, he ended up approaching me at jr. high & apologized for picking on me when we were younger. He confessed that he never really had anything against me or any other POC kids but his parents hated people who weren't white & taught him to hate POC kids. His parents were abusive to him behind closed doors & he ended up in foster care. I was approached by him, with a genuine apology & we talked for 2 hours straight. This was 4 years into his foster family life. He got help/support for the CA endured & had changed a lot. I hugged him afterwards & told him that I forgive him. I told him that I'm thankful for his apology & that I'm sorry he had such awful parents because all kids deserve to have loving parents & a safe home.
Sometimes, we are lucky enough to make peace with our former bullies.
#Forgiveness #FullCircle #MutualHealing #AntiBullying #PeopleCanChange
@violetmadder @beadsland @Quasit
My fields of forgiveness are always open for folks who have previously harmed me/my loved ones. Only if there's true repentance, genuine apologies & commitment to do better/treat people better, going forward.
I do not volunteer to travel on surface level/shallow & not genuine paths, to forgiveness.
@beadsland @Quasit I remember my full out meltdown experience like it happened yesterday. It started on the tetherball court where the longtime school bully called me a "gook chimp" & then threw a soccer ball at my head. I tried to ignore him & kept playing tetherball. He wouldn't stop bullying me. Called me a "Chink gimp" & kicked me. I lost it at that point. I started screaming at him in mixed English & Teochew. I hit him with my crutches & kicked him in the belly & balls, when he was down. I took soccer ball & punched him in face with it. I ripped his shoes off & put one into his mouth. I smashed one big school window, right after & screamed : Will you teachers listen to me, NOW?!?!
It was a dramatic day.
@beadsland @Quasit At that point, I'd already tried to tolerate 2 years of relentless bullying & getting zero help from school administration. That is why I finally lost it.
Yeah, per my reply, myself didn't really lose it from the bullying at home until was out and safe from that decade plus of abuse. Losing it only enough to hurl a book at school had only resulted in my being suspended, sent home, away from the only refuge had ever experienced, and told by my mother that they'd suspended me from school for good.
School administration and teachers were no help, despite being sympathetic, until the police finally took my abuse seriously, and the police didn't finally take my abuse seriously (had previously brought me right back home after a runaway attempt) until myself walked into the police station inconsolable, yet finally old enough to be articulate about what was happening to me, after several days of mental and physical torture, during that week of being suspended from school.
@beadsland @Quasit I don't think I'd still be here, if my parents weren't supportive. I'd likely be dead.
Once described my home life to a classmate at lunch, someone who was being sexually abused at home. (This was something we kids just talked with one another about. In the time other kids must have been talking about dating or shared hobbies, or something.)
At the end of my tale they had one question.
"How are you still alive?"
@PhoenixSerenity @beadsland
My parents didn't really know what to do. One day they'd tell me to fight back when I was bullied, the next day they'd tell me to not fight back but just tell the principal. None of it really worked out. Meanwhile my mother was incredibly abusive to me. A very frightening woman.
My parents didn't really know what to do. One day they'd tell me to fight back when I was bullied, the next day they'd tell me to not fight back but just tell the principal. None of it really worked out. Meanwhile my mother was incredibly abusive to me. A very frightening woman.
Kim Crawley 😷 (she/her)@Quasit @PhoenixSerenity @beadsland
I'm sorry that you also had a terrible mother. ❤️
Cannot imagine myself having enough awareness of my own or the bodies of others to make such a coordinated assault.
The closest comparison would be late teens. Was living in group foster home by then. Felt a rage building up for days, and wanted to just sit in the basement and fume. But the counselors had promised the other kids they'd all get a day at the mall. Told them that would not be a good idea to bring me along, but they weren't going to spare a counselor to babysit just me.
Sat on the edge of the lower level fountain at the mall, fuming. Some of the other kids stood on the upper level and started chucking pennies at me. Tore off chasing one of them (a girl that myself was quite close to, but she was the only one still present by the time myself got up the stairs), finally catching them at the other end of the mall, where the staff at Footlocker (in their referee uniforms) had to pull me off.
1/2
At the time, there were mass shootings in the news. We still called it "going postal". Someone had shot up a McDonald's a few years prior, and myself though that was my destiny, to one day snap and kill a lot of people. Not because of abuse in the moment, not because of bullying in the moment, but just because there was a lot of anger from past trauma, that had no where to go.
The last time anything like that happened was in college. Having no one that time to direct my rage toward, just spent several hours furiously kicking over trash cans in an empty Washington Square Park in the wee hours of the morning. At the end of the process, just felt very silly, and never had an episode like that again.
2/2
@beadsland @Quasit My full meltdown was nowhere close to a coordinated assault & neither was the bully's attack on me. I was just fed up & that day, the bully hit my tolerance limit. I went completely savage on the schoolyard grounds. Nothing coordinated. I was in full out meltdown, retaliation mode & I had to be pulled into school by 4 full grown adults. I was tiny but full of adrenaline & pure rage - it took all 4 of them to fully contain me, while I was screaming at them - THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT! YOU SHOULD HAVE STOPPED HIM LAST YEAR! YOU MADE ME FIGHT BACK! YOU'RE USELESS ADULTS!
Coordinated as in bodily coordination, not conspiracy.
You targeted specific body parts (belly, balls, face, your own foot to remove a shoe, his mouth). To my dyspraxic brain, that's more coordinated than even trying to dance.
In any physical altercation myself have been involved in, it's all just a discombobulated blur of limbs with me flailing hopelessly, maybe managing to hit something solid, without taking in what it might have been, by sheer accident.
The idea of being able to process the movement of my own body, let alone the position of someone else's, during an episode of rage... 404. Tilt. Does not compute.
@beadsland @Quasit I'm physically disabled so I tend to target able bodied bullies where it will help me gain more power in an unfair physical fight. It's just basic defense instinct, for me.
You are blessed with instincts that ought be cherished, as such instincts, despite what that term implies, are not evenly distributed.
It took me a year (six months? too long ago to remember exact duration) of daily reciting to myself that the next time my mother struck me, she'd get a swipe in return, to actually have enough presence of mind to respond the next time it happened.
Her boy toy spent the next hour shouting and punching and kicking me with his steel-tip work boots, on the back porch (so it's not like the cop family that lived in the next row-home over, let alone the rest of the neighborhood, didn't hear what was going on), as myself lay there huddled up defensively, before they then committed me to a psychiatric hospital, for still refusing to apologize for defending myself.
As an aside:
The boy toy, the youngest of seven brothers, moved out of his Italian-American mother's house, into my mother's bedroom, at the ripe age of eighteen, shortly after my sister responded to a spanking from our mother by turning around and laughing in her face.
He was her enforcer, for when the mental and emotional abuse and general neglect (e.g., we had no food in the house because she didn't eat food, only kitchen cabinets full of nutritional supplements) was insufficient to her desires, as it very often was not. She'd wind him up (he was also being mentally and emotionally abused by her) and stand and watch, sometimes silent, sometimes taunting me, or else disappear to her bedroom, presumably listening, while he broke the house and beat me.
Child me was never able to defend myself against him. Heck, even adult me would be pounded into the ground against teens and twenties him. But damn it if was gonna allow her to hit me again, however little force she could muster behind it. There was no answer to the mental and emotional abuse, but being struck had a ready recourse.
It just took reminding myself of that daily for months upon months to make it happen, as instinct it most certainly was not.
@beadsland @Quasit I think my instincts come via intergenerational war trauma survivor genes. All of us have different natural instincts, depending on our various ancestral backgrounds.
I believe one of my closest childhood friends from age 7-14, who lived in same low income housing complex, suffered from similar domestic childhood abuses as you had & her neurology changed due to repeated abuses & not being able to obtain the help she needed to escape from that brutal environment. A lot of what you've shared about the abuses you'd suffered in childhood, sounded eerily familiar to what my childhood friend had shared with me. Her cognitive dissonance was high in teens, for pure survival.
Cognitive dissonance how?
@beadsland @Quasit She forced herself to forget being SAed. To survive living in same household with her Mom, who brought home the man who SAed my friend. To name but one thing she forced herself to forget.
@beadsland She just didn't know it was cognitive dissonance until her mid-30s, when she finally got compassionate therapy recovery help. We didn't know those words, as kids.
Ah, okay. So SDAM isn't that. It's not repression of trauma. Myself don't have any episodic memories. Not just of childhood. Adulthood. Long after any abuse. This is a feature of aphantasia.
Not all folk with aphantasia have SDAM, but those with aphantasia, especially multi-sensory aphantasia, are much more likely to have SDAM than the general population.
Ask me to re-live an experience from a year ago, last month, earlier today, can't do it. My brain doesn't do mental time travel. Ask me to imagine my life in five years. Blank. Same reason. Brain doesn't brain that way.
Indeed, once aphantasia had been given a name, came to realize that my mother probably was also an aphant. It would explain a lot of the gaslighting at the time.
If she didn't remember something, her strategy was to make the person who had found a strategy to keep track of that information out to be mistaken about their own experiences. Rather than admit to her inability to reflect upon her own.
Folk oft mistake SDAM for traumatic repression, because the latter is more common, and because it's barely been a decade since aphantasia was even named.
It makes therapy extremely challenging, as finding a therapist who will believe how our brains work is near impossible. We have trauma (everyone does), but it isn't in the form of repressed memories.
Can't selectively repress what you don't have to being with.
Indeed, my maternal grandfather was likely also an aphant.
Once asked him about our ancestry, he went into an extended lecture about how three of his clients (he was an attorney), three brothers, came through different gates at Ellis Island and so had three different last names. The past, he explained, was all lies and half-truths, and so not worth putting any faith in. This was in lieu of answering my question about our ancestry.
That was pretty much the entire family, so far as myself knew it. At least until my sister quite literally tripped over a half-sibling neither of us ever knew, one day in a shopping mall.
Subsequently learned from the uncle we never knew that my grandfather did the exact sort of things my mother did. He'd tell my yet-to-be-father and his brother, employees of his, to paint a wall a certain color. Then as they were finishing the job, come through and yell at them demanding to know why they'd painted the wall that color. Just like my mother would demand to know why myself did a load of laundry using the settings she insisted be used a week prior, punishing me for daring to say it was on her instruction.
1/2
If it happened a generation ago, ten years ago, last week, it's all lies and half-truths and not worth putting any faith into. That was multi-generational custom.
Heck, the creation of the universe was just the same, to hear my grandmother comment upon it. So perhaps aphant on both sides of the maternal family line.
Myself learned to recite important events, making narrative of them, to preserve factually what wasn't stored episodically. Hence my telling anyone who would listen what was happening at home. Not because intervention was ever going to come, but because otherwise the memories would not be retained in any form.
Wasn't until my late 20s that realized giving a recitation of my past abuse to every random stranger wasn't the way to form friendships. That was the strategy that had to be unlearned. (Still recite, just to myself.) This thread here is the first time have talked about that abuse in years, where once it was essentially how myself made introductions.
2/2
@beadsland @Quasit She isn't diagnosed with that. I was just saying that her childhood abuses were eerily similar to the experiences that you shared here.
People emerge from similar childhood abuses quite differently. It all depends on their environment, how much/what kind of support they receive & if they're willing to enter any recovery path.
She's been diagnosed with CPTSD, clinical depression & bipolar disorder. There's probably some other stuff going on but that's not been diagnosed yet. She's doing her best & I'm glad she's fighting for herself.
People emerge from similar childhood abuses quite differently. It all depends on their environment, how much/what kind of support they receive & if they're willing to enter any recovery path.
She's been diagnosed with CPTSD, clinical depression & bipolar disorder. There's probably some other stuff going on but that's not been diagnosed yet. She's doing her best & I'm glad she's fighting for herself.
Understood. Just wanted to be clear, as it read as if you were suggesting my SDAM aphantasia was "cognitive dissonance", by way of comparing your friend's experience to my own.
PTSD is one of the things aphants struggle to get support for, as the absence of re-lived memories often means the condition isn't recognized as such.
Yet we still have triggers. We still have other manifestations of the trauma. For several years, for instance, myself had regular pain in my chest, despite there being nothing physically wrong: a hold-over from the night the boy toy cornered me the hallway of our house and pounded me on the chest repeatedly until myself collapsed and could no longer make my legs work, having to retreat by dragging myself up the stairs to my attic bedroom.
1/2
There's no episodic memory of the event. Can only reconstruct the scene as a spatial sense, in tableau, from the POV of someone above and a few yards off from events (basically hovering half a dozen meters above the sidewalk outside the house, looking through two solid walls), based on my recitation of what happened. Younger me was standing there, back to the wall, he was standing facing younger me, the woman who had wound him up was standing down the hall, my sister in her room the other side, their presence known only because they had both been taunting younger me throughout the ordeal, and so that too is part of the recitation.
My relationship to these events are those of someone telling a story. There's no flashback, no involuntary mental time travel, just narrative. My emotional reaction is of one telling the story, as the terror that is part of the story is only a description myself can provide as narrator.
This doesn't look like re-living an event, because it isn't. The event doesn't ever come back, let alone repeatedly. There's no avoidance of talking about the event, because it's just a story. Indeed, had to learn to not talk about the event because it was counterproductive to forming new relationships, once out of those circumstances.
Yet there's still trauma, still triggers. Just watch me go off when gaslit. But without the re-living bit, it doesn't present as classic PTSD.
2/2
@beadsland @Quasit No, I didn't mean to infer that at all. I just meant - you both had very, eerily similar childhood abuse experiences but you both had different life experiences in dealing with those domestic childhood abuses.
@PhoenixSerenity @beadsland I'll admit that I often wonder about the effect of war trauma and genocide on descendents of the survivors. As I've mentioned before, all four of my grandparents were child or teen survivors of the first genocide of the 20th century; they saw many of their relatives killed. A million and a half of my people were deliberately killed in a campaign of extermination.
I'm not sure how to explain this, but I believe that there's a deep grief among my people. I feel it myself. I hear it in our music, particularly our religious music.
Racial memory? I find it difficult to believe in it. More likely it's just a matter of knowledge that was passed down the generations, plus the aftereffects of the natural PTSD and depression of the actual survivors.
But still, I wonder. I look in the mirror, and I see sadness in my eyes.
Epigenetics may also play a role.
Research has shown that famine in one generation impacts metabolism in generations after. There's no reason to believe other forms of trauma would be any different in that regard.
@beadsland @Quasit It's definitely a factor that is talked about in human evolutionary science research.
@beadsland @PhoenixSerenity
That's very interesting, because my people were referred to as "the starving" in the West for decades! Mothers in America would tell their children to clean their plates because there were starving children in my ancestral country.
That's very interesting, because my people were referred to as "the starving" in the West for decades! Mothers in America would tell their children to clean their plates because there were starving children in my ancestral country.
@Quasit @beadsland My Mom tells us to never waste food to this very day. Her family suffered from famine & starvation over generations of war & then losing their food crops & 3/4 of their wild foods/medicines to foreign invader attacks. I remember my matriarch Grandma showing me photos of people who had starved to death in the village & also shown spot where over 100 of our villagers were buried after starving to death.
Cheryl G Kasson@PhoenixSerenity @beadsland @Quasit I was always the shortest kid in the class, and I think that was one of the reasons I was targeted for bullying, because I was the easiest target.
@cherylgk @PhoenixSerenity @beadsland
I was one of the tallest kids, with red hair. It seemed to attract bullies like flies.
Cy@beadsland
Interesting that you used "myself" in place of "I". I often notice when I say "I" too much, and simply delete it from the sentence. I believe that it has something to do with not wanting to be vain (oh, lol, forgot the religious trauma)
I tried to just let the "I"s come freely, just this once.
@PhoenixSerenity @Quasit
@Scoll @PhoenixSerenity @Quasit
Yeah, other than in idiomatic rhetorical clauses (i.e., "I mean", "I guess"), pointedly withhold that particular pronoun from written communication.
Though mine isn't childhood trauma, but rather a conscious adult project of challenging hegemony of accepted semantics and pragmatics of the speaker as subject.
Comparable to Bourland's Korzybski-inspired E-Prime, eliminating the verb "to be" from communication.
In part, this is a (much later than when first started this practice) recognition that what "I" means to those with mental time travel is not what my own experience as an SDAM aphant is. My past selves and any potential future selves being characters of narrative, not any unitary "I".
Sometimes make this more explicit, with "my then self" or the like.
(On further contemplation, this is, in a way, the polar opposite of pronoun use by those who are, themselves, plural. Even my present, momentary, singular self, is not, from my understanding, what a self is to those who re-live past and future.)
@PhoenixSerenity @beadsland
I think we should start a bullies thread, where everyone can share their stories of being bullied!
I think we should start a bullies thread, where everyone can share their stories of being bullied!
@Quasit @beadsland For many of us - being in school is directly connected to being bullied. I have different bullying experiences in adulthood.
@PhoenixSerenity @beadsland
So do I. Often connected with work, but sometimes in other areas of life.
So do I. Often connected with work, but sometimes in other areas of life.
@Quasit @beadsland Samsies. Mostly work related bullies, in adulthood.
Morqendi@Quasit @PhoenixSerenity @beadsland
For me it all stopped when I started martial arts. My trainer leaned heavily on the self defense side. At a certain point he told me that I changed. I stand differently and bullies implicitly notice that
I later learned that it's like that in the business world too. Humans are animals!
Look up "shit test". It happens so often when you meet a new group (also in business not just dating!). Or check "devil's horn effect".
Good news: it can be learned though
@morqendi @Quasit @PhoenixSerenity
Now it's my turn to look up and learn new terms.