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.
@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.
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.
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@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.
@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.
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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.
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@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.
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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.
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@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.