Real Social Skills

Noticing when someone is using your triggers to disorient and confuse you

May 14, 2013June 20, 2021 Real Social Skills

When someone is using your triggers to disorient and confuse you, it’s confusing. It can take a long time to figure out what’s going on.

Here are some things I think are red flags:

If someone seems to like you more when you’re triggered than when you’re in control, something is seriously wrong

For instance, if a therapist only listens to you when you’re sobbing and otherwise acts as though you couldn’t possibly understand anything about yourself
Or when a friend suddenly finds you fascinating when you’re triggered and they’re supporting you through it, but they half-ignore you most of the rest of the time

If someone feels entitled to discuss triggering subjects with you (absent an immediate practical reason to), something is seriously wrong:

For instance, if you say that you’d rather not discuss dogs right now because it’s triggering and you’re close to the edge already, and they say “but I thought we were friends! How can you shut me out like that?”
Or if a therapist tells you that you’ll never get better unless you are willing to discuss once again, in graphic terms, the ways people abused you – and they refuse to say, help you figure out whether the medication you are taking is working, or whether the side effects are dangerous, unless you do this over and over

If you end up triggered every time you try to reject personal advice, something is seriously wrong:

For instance, if someone regularly wants to tell you how to dress, and every time you try to wear something different, they push you until you end up sobbing and apologizing, something is wrong
This is particularly the case if they’re always bringing triggering things into a conversation that didn’t need to have anything to do with them
Your desire to wear a red hat rather than the blue on they want you to wear is probably because you want to wear a red hat
It’s very unlikely that it’s because you have no perspective on clothes because your abusers damaged you
And even if that was the reason, it would still be ok for you to prefer a red hat, and wrong for someone to try to force you to wear a blue one by triggering you

Beware of folks who trigger others on purpose

May 13, 2013June 20, 2021 Real Social Skills

There are people who like other people to be intensely emotionally dependent on them. They like to control people through this emotional dependence. And they like to think of this control and forced dependence as understanding the target on a deep level, rescuing them, and helping them to heal.

One way this happens is that the controller will deliberately trigger the target over and over. And then get really good at triggering them and then comforting them. And this can – in the short term, make the target feel safe and understood. Because having someone react in a way that feels comforting when you’re triggered can be really reassuring, especially when people have reacted with fear or contempt in the past.

And it can be really hard to figure out that someone is intentionally and repeatedly triggering you. It can be *especially* hard to realize they’re doing this if they also have some actual insight about the issues you’re struggling with. And it can also be harder to understand what’s going on if they’re also supporting you in other ways, like offering a place to stay or help finding a job.

And the longer this goes on, the more they know about you. And the more they know, the more power they have to trigger you at will. And when you show independence, or do something they don’t want, or do something on your own initiative rather than relying on their help, or say no to help they’re offering – then they don’t react reasonably. They use your triggers to disorient you. They convince you that you don’t really understand anything that’s going on, and that you are just reacting to past traumas. And that in order to approximate being a real person, you have to rely on their judgement rather than yours.

A wide range of people do this. Sometimes it’s a friend. Sometimes it’s a licensed therapist with a good professional reputation. Someone’s it’s a coworker. Sometimes it’s a social worker. Sometimes it’s a partner. It can arise out of a lot of different kinds of relationships. It’s always wrong, no matter what someone thinks their intentions are.

And it’s not your fault. If you’re in that situation, someone’s probably got you half-convinced that this is only happening because you’re broken and need help. But that’s not what’s going on; this is something someone is doing to you, not something that inherently happens to people like you. No one, no matter what problems they have, should ever be treated like this.

Life after ideology

May 1, 2013June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

Note: This post is for people who this post about being seen as real through ideological affiliation applies to. If you don’t have that history, this post might not make very much sense.

When you need to break with an ideological group, it can be really difficult. It can undermine your sense of self.

Partly because of the way ideological group members treat you when you stop fitting their worldview. When other people stop treating you like you’re real, it can be hard to remember that you’re real.

But not just that. It’s also, when you see the problems with the ideology, when you see the huge gulf between what its words say it is and what it actually is, sometimes it’s easy to feel like there must be something wrong with you to have ever wanted to be part of that group.

You can feel like you were really stupid and that everything was rotten, and that you just need to root out parts of yourself that you developed in association with that group.

But… keep in mind… that you were attracted to the ideology for reasons. And some of them were good reasons. And you learned a lot in your time with the group. The growth that you experienced was real. Your learning counts.

And you don’t have to reject everything you learned in order to move on. You don’t have to reject former versions of yourself, either. You don’t have to throw everything away, to get away from the ideology.

What you have to do is move on. Not reinvent yourself. Not throw away an old version. Not find a new group. Move on. Keep trying to find out what’s true, keep looking for good things to do, and keep looking for good people to do them with.

And moving on by building things takes time, and it’s not exhilarating like throwing yourself into a new ideological group would be. But in the long run, it’s much, much better.

Don’t assume you know the reasons someone needs accomodations

April 30, 2013June 20, 2021 Real Social Skills

So, here’s a thing that happens:

Person with a disability: I need accommodation x.
Person with power: Oh, you have condition y! No problem!
Person with a disability actually has condition z, which needs some of the same accommodations as y, but also different ones.
But they’re afraid to correct the person with power, lest they think that the actual reason isn’t a good one, and stop being willing to do the necessary accommodation.
And they’re also afraid to ask for some of the other accommodations they need for the condition they actually have, because then they’d have to change the conversation.

For instance:

Student with an audio processing disorder: I need to sit in the front in order to understand what’s going on in class.
Teacher: Oh, because you can’t see the board otherwise! Sure, I’ll make a note of it on the seating chart and be sure not to assign you anywhere you can’t see the board.
The student is afraid to correct the teacher, because they might not think audio processing problems are a real thing. Or the teacher might feel like the student lied to them, even though the student never said anything about vision.
On a field trip, the teacher doesn’t realize that the student needs to be near the tour guide. The exhibits are large, and students gather around them and can see them equally well from any point, so the teacher doesn’t realize there is a problem.
And the student is afraid to say that there is a problem, because the teacher hasn’t shown that it is safe to do so, and has given some indication that it isn’t.

So, do not be that guy. Don’t tell people what their disability is, or what their needs are. Doing so makes it harder for people to tell you what accommodations they actually need in order to be able to participate.

Instead, ask. Don’t ask invasive personal questions, just ask what people need.

When food preferences complicate social food

April 27, 2013June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

attenua asked:

…How do you deal with stating inconsistent preferences? I do not like some foods (e.g. cheeseburgers and pizza) because their high grease/fat content makes me feel bad after eating them. I frequently have to explain that a restaurant that has those foods or other high grease/fat alternatives will not serve me anything I will eat. This can look like I am criticizing other people’s eating of those foods, which is not helped by sometimes eating those foods anyway.

I think the most helpful thing is usually to suggest something specific that would mean everyone could get to eat something that they want.

For instance, if everyone wants to go to McDonalds, and you don’t feel up to eating greasy food that day, it could work to say “How about we go to Whole Foods instead?”

Or, “How about you grab a pizza, and I’ll grab something from the supermarket and we’ll meet up in the park?”

You don’t necessarily need to say why you don’t want to eat that kind of food. It’s hard to go into detail about that without sounding judgmental, and it’s also no one’s business, and not super-relevant to the practical problem at hand.

One thing you could say if you want to give a reason is something along the lines of: “I’m kind of not feeling up to eating greasy food today. How about we go to Place That Has Greasy And Non-Greasy Food?” That wouldn’t sound like a categorical statement that you will never eat greasy food ever, and it might not sound like an objection to others wanting to do so either.

(Saying explicitly that you’re not judging anyone would probably make matters worse. “I’m not judging anyone but…” is usually the kind of thing people say to get away with saying judgmental things, similarly to “no offense but…”)

Generally speaking, people are a lot more willing to do something that will solve a problem if they don’t have to come up with the actual solution themselves.

Something about privilege

April 20, 2013June 20, 2021 Real Social Skills

Some people have way more power over others than they should.

Having too much power over another person is always harmful to that person. Even if you’re good. Even if you’d never intentionally misuse it.

Sometimes this plays out between groups. For instance, if you’re white, you virtually always have a kind of power over people who aren’t that no one should ever have over another human being. That’s not always the most important power dynamic in a given interaction, because real situations are complicated and there are a lot of different privileges (as well as power dynamics that aren’t reducible to privilege). But it’s still always *there*. (Some other dynamics that are also always there: male/not male, cisgendered/trans*, disabled/not disabled, intellectually disabled/not, poor/not poor. These are examples. It is not an exhaustive list. There are many dynamics like this, and many of them have not yet been named.)

And the power dynamic is long-term, it’s been that way for generations. And there are deep-running wounds that are going to take many generations of concerted effort to heal. You can’t make that go away by your good intentions.

You can be good to others; you can and should learn how to treat people well. But you can’t, on your own, fully undo the power dynamic and the harm it does. And part of the way to be good to people involves understanding the position you’re in, and being aware of the power you have and the obligations being in that position creates.

If you ignore the power you have, or pretend you can make it go away by being a good person, you will harm people in ways you could otherwise avoid. (One instance of this is constantly talking about how you’re checking your privilege – it doesn’t actually work that way. That tends to turn into flaunting unjust power, even when it’s done with the best of intentions.)

If you want people to treat people right, you have to understand and be willing to face the consequences of the power you have.