nobody understands how to spot terf dogwhistles anymore bc everyone on this fucking site agrees with radical feminist theory as long as it doesn’t explicitly say trans people are fake lmao
a post: liberal feminism is bullshit. women can’t make their own decisions bc they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy. kink is disgusting and abusive. heterosexual sex is inherently oppressive. all men are garbage and women should not date them. bisexual women who choose to date men are complicit in their own oppression and abuse. age gaps are inherently predatory as the man is always the older party and even if the woman is in her 30s, 40s, or even 50s, she cannot be consenting to an older man. all consent is invalid as it exists in a patriarchal and violent society. except consent to vanilla sex between lesbians, as that is the only non-oppressive sex.
tumblr.com users: well it doesn’t say trans women aren’t women so this is all fine and i agree with it!!!
you forgot the part where like a week later someone reposts the whole thing and adds “OP was a terf so I’m stealing this post”
Remember today when you see 100+ articles about how ‘civil’ and ‘noble’ H.W. Bush was that today is World AIDS Day. That 100,000 people, many LGBT+ individuals, especially gay men, died under his and Reagan’s watch. That he banned HIV+ people from entering the US, reduced research funding, and prevented educators from speaking about safe sex in favor of abstinence only education.
Anti-queer Tumblr: I guess it’s OK if you use q***r to describe yourself but don’t EVER call someone else q***r.
Also anti-queer Tumblr: What do you mean you’re q***r? What else are you? You must be a dirty cishet for not giving me all of your labels.
tumblr: I see you’re following a lot of ace blogs, would you like to follow these blogs that hate aces?
me: *blocks the aphobes*
tumblr: I see you blocked these LGBT exclusionist blogs, would you like to follow these homophobic blogs?
me: goddammit.
I injured my shoulder last night. I wasn’t really doing much, just putting my drink down, and there was a loud snapping sound and it’s been agony since.
If I didn’t have RA, I’d go to the doctor, but I’ve learned they just kinda go “joint pain is expected in RA patients” and send me home. I’m not sure what to do for home care for this kind of injury either.
I’m just venting, but if anyone does have a suggestion beyond RICE, I wouldn’t object to hearing it.
That’s sort of the impression I’ve gotten. Like, I don’t deny that I see it in a lot of ADHD people, but I also see it in a lot of others.
i do have it, but when i try to unpack it, it doesn’t go back to ADHD, it goes back to emotional abuse in school. and for me it’s very centered around situations that came up back then.
like, i have no problem with romantic rejection. when i’d ask someone out and get turned down, i was just disappointed a normal amount, and could still be friends with them, and could let it go. maybe after a weekend of ice cream and playing with the dog, if i really really liked them. so basically, a healthy and reasonable response to getting turned down for a date.
whereas when i bring a problem with peers to an authority or regulatory figure – or just someone i expected to be above it – and get told it’s my own fault, whether that’s true or not, my autonomic nervous system goes into Robot Rampage Destroy Everything Mode, and i lose the ability to think. emotional regulation is a thing of the past. it took until my 40′s to learn to not respond at all until the sirens stop going off. i do not expect to ever be able to respond gracefully in the moment.
not that that comes up a lot anymore, now that i don’t work outside the home. not a lot of instances for a house husband/writer to get smacked down by bosses. really, most of those situations i’m sensitive to just don’t come up much anymore.
tl;dr: yeah, you’re right, it’s not ADHD, it’s PTSD.
Hmmm. @star-anise, any thoughts? Seems like it could be pretty hard decoupling ADHD – or any kind of neurodivergence really – from PTSD in any case, given the kind of treatment disabled people usually go through…
Yeeeeah I’ve got no firm answers. PTSD stemming from childhood, and ADHD, are really hard to untangle at present and I suspect it’ll only get moreso as new research comes in. It’s all kind of vague and interconnected and the word “implicated” starts to feel really useful here.
A lot of researchers are starting to point to ADHD itself as being intensely connected to poor environment and lack of parental attunement during ages 0-3 which prevents proper brain development in areas to do with reward and self-soothing (see Gabor Maté’s Scattered Minds for a summary) which people think means “everyone with ADHD was abused as a child” and is more like “kids with biological vulnerability to ADHD need special attention during infancy and their parents need extra support.”
And then having ADHD makes you more likely to be rejected as a child because of behavioural issues, and also less resilient when it happens, because of trouble with emotional regulation and self-soothing. So even if you don’t buy ADHD as a form of Developmental Trauma Disorder, ADHD in children creates an underlying predisposition for PTSD around social situations (and also academic environments).
So Dodson is seeing something real with the huge number of ADHD adults with rejection-sensitive dysphoria—but I would direly love to see more research on it as an independent phenomenon, and in people who don’t have ADHD. (And I’m about to dive into a bunch of literature on Avoidant Personality Disorder, so I might even find it!)
Thanks a lot! And yeah, the idea that “poor environment = abuse” is one I personally don’t like much. I mean, abuse did play a part in why my childhood was often tough – but even if my dad had been a perfect human being, there was just so much he and mom didn’t KNOW, that they couldn’t have known back when, that could’ve helped them provide a better environment for me.
Regarding ADHD and rejection sensitivity:
I’m glad that some people are finally recognizing this instead of automatically reblogging whatever Tumblr claims about the subject. Rejection sensitivity is extremely common, especially among psychiatric samples, and there’s no evidence that it’s uniquely related to ADHD. If anything, it’s related to anxiety, attachment disturbances, and past social experiences. To be clear, the concept originated with Karen Horney, a neo-Freudian, and had nothing whatsoever to do with ADHD. It’s also been examined by other well known attachment researchers (x).
It is true that ADHD (and executive dysfunction in general) can lead to trouble inhibiting reactions, calming oneself once upset, and switching emotional tracts. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that people with ADHD are more sensitive to rejection, merely that once they are upset, it’s harder to return to baseline, and they might be more likely to react in ways that they’ll later regret. Ruminating can also increase rejection sensitivity, but rumination is a common feature of anxiety and depression as well.
Regarding ADHD and PTSD:
It has been shown that not only do adults with ADHD have a higher rate of PTSD than controls, so do their relatives (x). One major reason for this may be that ADHD can increase children’s risk for experiencing trauma or other negative events due to impulsive actions, peer rejection, or neglect or maltreatment from parents who don’t know how to handle the child. Another major reason may be that individuals with ADHD (and executive dysfunction in general) often have difficulty regulating their emotions and lack healthy coping mechanisms for handling stress, increasing the impact of traumatic events. Finally, ADHD is often comorbid with disorders such as depression and anxiety, and these are also associated with a higher risk of PTSD (x).
That said, there are concerns that PTSD can be misdiagnosed as ADHD because of overlap in symptoms (e.g., dissociation can be confused for inattentiveness or hypervigilance for hyperactivity, and both ADHD and PTSD can involve increased emotional reactivity; x). As well, I want to make sure that it’s clear that ADHD is primarily not comorbid with PTSD. Lifetime prevalence of PTSD for individuals with ADHD is still “only” in the range of 10% (x) to 26% (x). That’s high, but it still means that the majority of individuals with ADHD will never meet the clinical criteria for PTSD.
