{"id":8864,"date":"2016-04-02T21:53:40","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T21:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/2016\/04\/02\/kiriamaya-cutiequeercris-clatterbane\/"},"modified":"2016-04-02T21:53:40","modified_gmt":"2016-04-02T21:53:40","slug":"kiriamaya-cutiequeercris-clatterbane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/2016\/04\/02\/kiriamaya-cutiequeercris-clatterbane\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

kiriamaya<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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cutiequeercris<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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clatterbane<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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averyroundbird<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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emeraldembers<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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funereal-disease<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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earlgraytay<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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awbrainno<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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tenaciousberry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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awbrainno<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I love seeing those posts where people are like \u201cif you have headmates<\/em> or whatever you should be on meds because that\u2019s not okay\u201d posts. Like neurotypicals just think that there\u2019s some magical pill out there that will \u2018cure\u2019 anything they don\u2019t consider \u2018normal.\u2019 Meanwhile, in the land of reality, my shrink thinks it\u2019s pretty healthy that I\u2019m finally getting to know my headmates, and has no intention of putting me on magic pills,<\/em> because as long as I\u2019m not hurting myself or anyone else, who cares what neurotypicals think is \u2018normal?\u2019 Actually, let\u2019s be real: who cares what neurotypicals think at all?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is not a magic pill, it is called \u201cTherapy\u201d and you can even do it in groups!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

i\u2026 literally mention my therapist\u2026 right there\u2026 in the original post\u2026<\/p>\n

did you not actually read this\u2026 do you honestly believe telling someone who has already admitted to being in therapy\u2026 to go to therapy\u2026 is a\u00a0\u201cgotcha\u201d moment???<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Okay, so there\u2019s a relevant quote from Slatestar Codex<\/a> here. (The link is to the source; attribution is a Thing.)<\/p>\n

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Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she\u2019d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn\u2019t really<\/i> checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.<\/small><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job \u2013 I think a lawyer \u2013 and she was constantly<\/i> late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn\u2019t able to go out with friends, she wasn\u2019t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She\u2019d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she\u2019d done all sorts of therapy, she\u2019d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.<\/small><\/p>\n

So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her \u201cHey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?\u201d<\/small><\/p>\n

And it worked<\/i>.<\/small><\/p>\n

She would be driving to work in the morning, and she\u2019d start worrying she\u2019d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she\u2019d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.<\/small><\/p>\n

And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous<\/i>, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car<\/i>?<\/small><\/p>\n

I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard and the guy deserved a medal. Here\u2019s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. <\/small><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is not a therapist\u2019s job to make you normal. <\/i>It is a therapist\u2019s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you. And if your therapist can\u2019t do that, you need to find a new therapist.<\/p>\n

For some people, having headmates and\/or alters is a debilitating condition. They\u2019re losing large amounts of time, having trouble going to work and\/or school, or hurting themselves or other people. In that case, they probably do need help, but I think most people who are getting fucked up by their headmates that <\/i>badly are willing to seek out help on their own anyway<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Other people who have headmates and\/or alters find it to be a neutral thing, or even a positive thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Have you ever been in a roommate situation where different people do different chores, because, (say) Kate loves to do the dishes, but can\u2019t stand to vaccuum, and Toby\u2019s the exact opposite? If Kate and Toby are headmates, they can wind up doing the same kind of thing. Headmates can also comfort you when you\u2019re sad, remind you that your depressive or intrusive thoughts are not true, or help you deal with difficult people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, if you\u2019re in that kind of situation, where your headmates are helping you to be more <\/i>functional than you\u2019d otherwise be? A good therapist is going to treat it like the hair dryer on the front seat of your car.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sure, it is a Weird Thing. It makes you look a bit eccentric, and it\u2019s not normal. But if having headmates keeps you from having repeated nervous breakdowns, helps you hold down your job, or makes it so that you can deal with your abusers? Then it\u2019s a win, and a good therapist won\u2019t try to\u00a0\u2018fix\u2019 that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is not a therapist\u2019s job to make you normal. <\/i>It is a therapist\u2019s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While I was working in the local hospital a few months back, part of the training included a dementia awareness course, and one of the stories I thought was very telling regarded a woman who had kept stealing towels from others in her residential home and leaving them to soak in her sink. After talking to her and her family, they found out she used to make a living doing laundry when she was much younger, so the residential home invested in one of those old washboard-and-bucket setups for her, and would leave some clothes by it in her room for her. The stealing stopped, and she became much more lively and talkative now that she had something to do that felt familiar to her.<\/p>\n

With disabilities and mental illnesses, the reality of it is that many of them won\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0go away, not with medicine or therapy or wishful thinking. Treatments are there to manage the conditions. And if the condition is being managed in a way that doesn\u2019t cause harm to the person with that condition or their friends and family, then why should anyone look down on that management?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This just tells me what I\u2019ve known all my life; neurotypicals don\u2019t often care about mentally ill\/cognitively disabled people living to their fullest, they just want them out of the way. Out of sight and out of mind.<\/p>\n

Sure, a person with headmates who deals with them healthily might be living to their fullest and without repression or discomfort, but then neurotypicals would have to suffer them. Stimming might help a dyspraxic or autistic person express themselves and soothe anxiety, but its annoying and embarassing! And we can\u2019t have that can we?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton<\/a>:
\u201cTreatment\u201d isn\u2019t a penalty cage you put crazy people in until they\u2019re not crazy anymore<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

we dont have to be the same as neurotypical people to be healthy and have good lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I can\u2019t reblog this enough.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

kiriamaya: cutiequeercris: clatterbane: averyroundbird: emeraldembers: funereal-disease: earlgraytay: awbrainno: tenaciousberry: awbrainno: I love seeing those posts where people are like \u201cif you have headmates or whatever you should be on meds because that\u2019s not okay\u201d posts. Like neurotypicals just think that there\u2019s some magical pill out there that will \u2018cure\u2019 anything they don\u2019t consider \u2018normal.\u2019 Meanwhile, … Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3279,3281,3280],"class_list":["post-8864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-i-love-this-post","tag-that-hairdryer-story-is-the-best","tag-this-is-perfect","without-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}