trauma informed practice | Rage Blogging is Therapy

So much crazy, so little time.

I don’t have the mental capacity to write individual articles about all of the crazy going on in the world, particularly in Texas right now, so I’m going to rant in response to tweets. Enjoy.

WTF

White professors: DO NOT DO THIS. This is called tokenism and it assumes that a person who shares superficial traits with a group (such as race or gender identity) must be expected to represent that group, explain all their actions, defend them, and generally expend untold amounts of energy for no reason or compensation. Your job as a professor is to first, I don’t know, GOOGLE IT? Wikipedia? TikTok is choc-full of creators talking about the Black experience (trans, nonbinary, disabled, indigenous, and the intersections of all these identities) for free. Read a book. That’s a thing we are supposed to be able to do. And don’t assume that you know someone’s race, culture, religion, history, or experiences based on how they look. Or their health (re: fatphobia), socioeconomic status, or nationality. Just. Freaking. Stop. Also read the comments for a whole slew of just bad, bad learning experiences experienced by minorities.

Disabled people are not less deserving of not dying from Covid.

Freaking THIS. Yes, Mary, I know that you’re tired of being scared and wearing masks and dealing with the Rona. But having the freedom to pretend it’s all over and risking the lives of immunocompromised and disabled people is a crock. It was true two years ago and it’s still freaking true. It turns out people get sick and die even when the numbers are lower than at the peak of a variant surge. We did, and my husband came within about 15 minutes of a very possibly fatal heart attack. Fucking wear your mask and maybe don’t kill a kid in chemo. You know, like a human.

Get a Hobby

Give @fatnutritionist a follow. Bullying fat people is like a national pastime, and yes, Helen, it’s intersectional. I’m all for body positivity/acceptance/neutrality, but pretending that just bucking up and being less sensitive to people telling you to kill yourselves or amputate your stomach will make everything better is nonsensical. We have to live in this world, and, as previously noted, looking at someone does not mean you know anything about them, including their health or lifestyle, and it’s none of your goddamn business. Find something better to do with your time.

Maybe rethink police budgets? Maybe?

I’m just going to leave this right here. Read the thread.

High-stakes testing has ruined US education. Don’t believe me? Look at our rankings.

Read the thread. This is why I haven’t considered working in k-12 education, despite the fact that it pays more than teaching full time at a top university (I shit you not). Even if my state hadn’t muzzled teachers who want to talk about, oh, I don’t know, OBJECTIVE REALITY, I would still have to teach to a test written by people less knowledgeable than me so somebody somewhere can cash in on taxpayer dollars. Not a vibe.

Hahahahah. Hah. Ha.

I love the anti-intellectual set who thinks academics are rolling in dough. A few are; most of us, not so much. Tenured profs at private colleges make about what I make as a non-tenured prof and it is very, very little. Adjunct professors make a fraction of that. So think about it this way: A tenured prof (if they make it through all the bullshit and debt that it takes to get a PhD and get tenured) might make 100k+ at a top research institution, but not many other places. Full-time lecturers will make maybe half that, and adjuncts, about half that again (But with no benefits! Whee!). Academia, bless her rotted soul, gaslights all of us into thinking that unending intellectual and emotional labor doesn’t need to be compensated fairly, and then encourages us to exploit our students. It’s a shell game, which really sucks for those of us who love learning and teaching.

Trauma makes it hard to think.

PTSD can be short-term from a bad year or a really catastrophic experience, or it can be long-term because you were subjected to abuse and/or extreme danger for years or decades (cPTSD). We’ve been in a hell spiral from Covid for 2+ years now and everyone has some trauma (and possibly triggered -retraumatization), and many people have a whole lot of trauma and it’s not ending. Please find a soul and some compassion, and if you have these symptoms, talk to a counselor if you can.

In “Why is Texas?” news…

Criminalizing the parents of trans kids and denying them treatments that prevent suicide to boost your cred during an election year is not classy. 1 in 5 trans and nonbinary kids attempt suicide. Trans inclusive healthcare is suicide prevention. I hope Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton get their asses handed to them by the DoJ and lose their elections. In other news, why isn’t Ken Paxton in jail like three years ago?

Academia is exploitation masquerading as public service.

I see you, grad students. You don’t deserve to be abused and exploited for five years. Most of your profs and advisors stuffed down their own grad school trauma and now take it out on you. Professors: get therapy. I promise you will be happier and less destructive.

What’s for dinner? Word salad!

Um. This GenX leftist totally remembers the cold war and because my dad was a science nerd I knew exactly what would happen after I stopped, dropped, and rolled. A slow painful death from various cancers. Asshole. Also, how drunk was he when he tweeted this? The comments are gold though.

The patriarchal bargain is not cute.

Did I mention you should follow @fatnutritionist? Because you totally should. Patriarchy doesn’t just create hierarchies of race or gender, it creates hierarchies of bodies. Credit to Sonya Rene Taylor for an amazing exploration of this in her book, The body is not an apology. So every time you performatively diet, especially in front of your kids, you’re telling them that they must align themselves with thinness (by either being thin at any cost or by attempting to be thin at any cost) in order to maintain superiority over fat people. Maybe try to not to?

Race is constructed to maintain a hierarchy of bodies. See above.

Fantastic thread on the western construction of “orientalism” and how it affects AAPI actors and Asian and Asian mixed people in general. Get amongst it.

That’s all for now, folks.

I wrote quite a bit about a month ago about my tween’s experience with an abusive teacher at their school. While we finally got their 504 accommodations updated, and I’m guessing that teacher got a talking to, they continue to be unpleasant. They have continued to tell their students that they are emotionally underdeveloped because of their year (ostensibly slacking off and not dealing with any trauma or stress whatsoever with their perfectly stable and unstressed parents) off from in-person school due to Covid.

Recently this teacher decided to ask their students why they thought they were so emotionally impaired. (Who does that?) My kid raised their hand and said, we’re not impaired, we’re traumatized. This gave the teacher momentary pause, but then they responded by saying that all the students can’t be traumatized.

Really, Mary? In pandemonium? In a panorama? Two fucking years into a constantly mutating, killing people every day pandemic from hell? Just the fact that you said that indicates trauma. Our number one defense mechanism is usually denial. We ignore or minimize things that we can’t deal with. It’s the “This is fine” syndrome. And no shade to defense mechanisms — they help us function when everything is weird or horrible. We really do feel like everything is fine — until we don’t. Long-term trauma has long-term effects. We are less resilient. We have memory and sleep issues. If we have diagnoses like depression or anxiety, they can get harder to manage. When we inevitably encounter additional stressors or traumas, we don’t have the bandwidth to deal with them as well as we would during a time of relative peace and calm.

When my husband was hospitalized, people commented on how well I kept my shit together. And I did. Until I didn’t. We get this blast of hormones during emergencies that allow us to dissociate from the immediate horrors that we are dealing with and just function. But this is a temporary fix; afterward, you have to deal with all the emotions that your body helped you stuff down. I had an epic meltdown a few weeks after my husband got out of the hospital that was totally expected, and my resilience is still low while my anxiety is high. This is normal. But if you don’t understand the trajectory of trauma (and compounded trauma) you may think you are functioning because you are a superior life form and everyone else is weak. You are not and they are not.

This applies to EVERYONE. We are all living through collective trauma. Some people have been devastated by the effects of Covid, and some have just been inconvenienced, but nobody can ignore how terrifying and confusing and disruptive it has been.

However, Teacher of the Year, just because you haven’t experienced compounded, impossible-to-deny-trauma, doesn’t mean that your students haven’t. Kids have fewer defense mechanism tools in their psychological toolbox, even though they may seem super cool on the outside. Kids rely on adults for survival, so when we are unstable they often compensate by over-functioning or functioning for us. This does not make them extra great kids or mature beyond their years, or old souls. It makes them traumatized. Kids adapt because they have no choice. Adults have a choice. You can get therapy, scream into a pillow, journal, hike, whatever helps you get back into your body and your feelings, and then just fucking deal with the pain and fear and insecurity that comes up. Or you can blame your middle-schoolers for your own stress and make them feel like shit about themselves. Because apparently, that’s an option.

Once again I find myself saying to adults who parent or teach or take care of other people: unpack your shit. Your kids (and students) are an extremely convenient screen upon which to project your problems, issues, and flaws. Doing so is an abuse of power and you need to stop.

If you want to know more about how trauma passes through generations and how it plays out, I highly recommend learning about Family Systems Theory.