In recent years, people have used increasingly mixed metaphors to obfuscate partisan loyalty tests and characterize objections as suspiciously avoidant or condescendingly elitist so that they can make friends with bigots online and feel a part of something bigger than their lonesome, superficial lives.
For example, the list in the meme hardly makes any sense. It’s true that some people consider some harsh words to be ‘violent’ but there is no reason to believe they are the same people who conflate ‘stress’ with ‘trauma’. So the question “Do you agree?” is a poor question because any straight answer risks confirming the implication inherent to the list of metaphors in the meme: That there is a specific group who believes each of those statements and that group is being “increasingly extreme”.
The meme itself is a political wedge device to make people feel bad and neg on the disaffected and vulnerable in our society so that people who feel tough right now, most of whom have not been through trauma or discrimination, can also feel correct and ethically justified by virtue of not being part of the vulnerable group being called out as “increasingly extreme”.
What’s sad, or funny depending on how you look at them, is that this kind of meme is so awkwardly transparent to both the political left and center that it makes the right seem pathetically ignorant. That’s a shame, because stress is not trauma and only certain words actually lead to violence and disagreement isn’t related to gaslighting at all and being irritated is a matter of opinion while harm is most often not a matter of opinion and people who are repeatedly difficult for the sake of being difficult really are toxic personalities and really do exist in the world.
Any one of these statements make for decent conversation, but this meme turns them all into one long and fruitless gish gallop so that nobody can really discuss any of it and all we’re left with is a loyalty test and virtually zero substance.
I fully agree and just want to add that long-term stress can be traumatizing, just like being berated over long time can be violence and abuse. So yeah, there is no room for differentiation in that meme, it does discourage discussion in favor of being a purity test for right wingers.
True. I never quite got the concept of “microaggressions” until feeling myself how modest disapproval can become a fucking burden if voiced regularly by someone you can’t avoid. You go from having interests that someone doesn’t happen to share to feeling that everything you care about is invalid and you’ve failed at life.
It doesn’t help the discussion that a behavior can be perfectly fine normally but can be hurtful to specific people because of specific things that happened to them. So this is a nuanced problem, which already doesn’t bode well for reasonable public discourse. And then we have have assholes who deliberately don’t want the discussion to happen because psychologically vulnerable people are a minority and minorities getting harmed is a desired outcome for them.
I have nothing to add as this is the perfect reply.
This is beside the point but this isn’t a meme. Screenshots of social media posts are not memes. It’s not even an image macro.
I’ll show myself out.
No, I do not agree. People may have better and more fitting words to describe what they suffer. It’s not for me to judge.
Na, it is for you to judge. The entire world feels like it has gone crazy recently because of therapy-speak language and people with social issues. I’m allowed to call an asshole an asshole, and allowed to recognize when someone is oversensitive about every little thing they dislike.
^ sensitive asshole.
I think it’s a bit of both.
Some people are manipulative and will say someone is/was gaslighting them when in fact it was just a disagreement.
In other cases the person was actually gaslighting them, and could say it was just a disagreement.
What I’m saying is it depends and is complicated
If we take the idea as true, as it’s presented in the image, why might people do that?
Could it be that people believe that unless they shout and scream, no one will hear them?
Where did they get that idea from, and to what degree is it true that only the loudest voices get heard?
It’s the ratchet effect of language. The bar for using a stronger term is lowered, thus strong terminology becomes the minimum, and new superlatives arise for extreme circumstances.
Tragedy of the Commons: fight for attention edition
tragedy of the commons is a capitalist myth
It’s a phenomenon directly caused by capitalism, what are you even saying?
it’s not true that people ruin commons. people preserve commons. the tragedies that have occured happened under capitalist enclosures of the commons, but the story that goes “people sharing resources don’t share nicely and ruin it for everyone else” is a capitalist myth designed to encourage privatization and non-cooperation.
Can we flip it? I think its prior to now people have been ignoring what the problems actually are.
Speaking as an actual therapist both are true
Some people have their experiences minimized through others using language to make them feel that what they went through was insignificant. Sometimes this is directly malicious (eg an abuser downplaying what they’ve done) and sometimes indirectly malicious (eg someone unrelated to the event accusing them of being dramatic), but it is generally always harmful
Some people feel the need to maximize their experiences through inflammatory language. There are many reasons for such a thing: sometimes it is innocuous and due to a poor understanding of terminology (eg what constitutes trauma). Sometimes it is malicious as well and the person aims to be manipulative or gain attention.
These are also not mutually exclusive and a person from one category can exist within the other. I have worked with cases for example where someone is healing from trauma but plays up minor issues that occur later on because they have created an illogical belief structure that they have to be damaged to gain love and approval. For some people they first find sympathy, empathy, and attention by opening up about their trauma to others and then end up in a position where they are unsure about how to engage in deep social connections going forward without connecting over damage.
As with most things we do ourselves disservice by over generalizing the situation and removing nuance. Mental health philosophy and treatment is not something that you describe in 120 characters. That’s why credible sources write books and articles on the subject, not fucking tweets and youtube shorts that oversimplify things to a cool sounding sound byte or easily digestible webcomic or whatever
Very true, and i agree with what youre writing. I definitely see both sides here. Ive learnt alot regarding mental health over the past few years after having people close to me dealing with it (in both good and bad ways).
I see that my comment can make it look like im oversimplifying the issue, so im happy you took your time to elaborate. To be more precise i think we have historically been more prone to have our experiences downplayed, either to cope or ill intent and i think this has acted as a precursor to the mental health issues we see today. I think todays trends of toxic masculinity, sexism and misogony are all closely related to how we percieve and handle mental health today. At the same time we’ve normalized a crazy work ethic and work environments which torment us daily.
I probably have a lot of things i want to say but have a hard time putting it into words right now. To summarize, mental health is indeed a way more complex issue than can be summarized in a few paragraphs. I think all of us would benefit from seeing a therapist, i probably should aswell. I do think that my initial comment is more aimed towards how previous generations have handled their situations. Which then let that behaviour live on without much self reflection and by extension affecting the peoples, society and environment of today.
There’s nothing conflicting or controversial in this post. Trauma, harm, toxicity, gaslighting, verbal violence are all sadly quite ordinary experiences. This person is just pointing out the language, surely no therapist could be that careless and unempathetic.
A) mental health is becoming less of a taboo subject so people are more open about their feelings.
B)Language changes, for example literally used to mean something was real, now it means the same as figuratively in common usage.
but literally has literally always meant figuratively.
I see what you did
Yes and no. Some things are, indeed, gaslighting for example, while others are, indeed just disagreements. Saying that all things “disagreement” are gaslighting is just as lacking in nuance as saying “people are calling every disagreement ‘gaslighting’ nowadays.”
And I think that’s the main bit, the lack of nuance. It has been slowly disappearing from both everyday discourse, as well as high-level communication, reducing the greyscale to a black-white binary. There is a tendency to buzzword-ify pretty much everything, so that it’s easier to fit in just the two boxes.
To be clear, I’m not defending people who, indeed, call everything “trauma,” or “gaslighting,” or whatever else, but I most certainly don’t agree with people who say “everyone’s exaggerating,” either.
OK? I guess it’s good that we talk about things instead of surpressing them.
I think it’s a double-edged sword sorta situation. Yes, it’s good that people are talking about issues they would have suppressed in the past, but there are also those who do actually use this language to elevate minor conflict to abuse.
I used to live with a guy who dated a string of them. I have vivid memories of this exact behavior. One girl was living on our couch because she was broke from calling out of work to do whippits and play video games; one time I heard her on the phone with her dad, calling him abusive because he wouldn’t send her $100 for a haircut. That was a long conversation with some extremely charged psychological accusations.
So yeah, it’s good that we’re talking about actual trauma and abuse, but it also introduces undesirable side effects.
In recent years, malignant narcissists (the definition of a “toxic person”) have literally enacted violence to cause trauma and harm. Now we have to contend with snarky social media therapists who want to tone police us. Truly, the devil shits on the biggest pile.
One word is never enough to describe an experience. People can say they’re okay when something is wrong or they can over-exaggerate. The last thing we want is more people reading this is thinking their trauma is actually stress and it’s in their head. They don’t want to be one of the people overreacting. They’re “okay”. Those people need help and shouldn’t second-guess theirself.
If you call in an emergency, they don’t make you prove you’re not lying or overreacting. The ambulance comes either way. Once they arrive and assess the situation, they react appropriately.
If you feel you need help, use language that you feel fits. Once people understand the situation, they should react appropriately.
I’ve had friends that were in pain, but said they were okay. Up until things got critical. I don’t want people hiding their pain because they don’t want to be a burden. If you are in pain and need help, express it.
this post is violence
I have literally never heard anyone interpret literal words for physical violence. Are you stupid?
You just assaulted me with your micro aggressions! The police are on the way!
/s, but there are people that stupid…
I’ve literally been shouting this for decades.
Yeah I kind of do actually.
