Excruciating period pain that would leave me fainting and vomiting every. Single. Time.
“Every girl goes through this” said the doctor, convincing my parents that I was just “dramatic”.
Turns out I had huge polyps growing out of control! Left scarring in my uterus and high-risk when pregnant.
Dealt with that hell every fucking month since I was 11 until I got onto birth control in my 20s.
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Getting locked in the basement without water, or thrown out into the streets for half a day, when you misbehaved as a child.
I mean, yeah? Is that really so bad. I guess it depends what the intent was. The town I grew up in was pretty tame, and the room I’d get locked in without food or water if I’d misbehaved had books
I was locked outside of the house for long periods of time and had to drink from the garden hose / garden faucet, and pee in the bushes. We also had like 10+ apple trees. It wasn’t that bad. A bit boring sometimes.
But that’s because it was outside and I could get my needs covered and meet friends.
Locked inside without these needs covered for extended periods is a lot worse in my opinion. Even cats and dogs have those needs covered.
It’s also about the lack of freedom when locked inside.
I would not treat my own children like I was treated, and especially not like you were.
Yeah, I just remember it being boring too. I’m also not really a person who can’t go a few hours without water, so I never felt I was being neglected.
I dont think I’d lock my kid indoors, but I do admit that when it happened to me after I’d been fighting my siblings or something, it was just treated as a time where I would chill out and read a book to wind down. Once dinner was ready, I’d get called for dinner, and everything seemed normal.
So I’d probably try to create a cool down zone with my kids if I ever have them, maybe a comfy chair they’re not allowed to leave for a few hours?
Children (humans) should always have access to clean water. That is not normal in the slightest. A time out shouldn’t include torture.
That not everyone secretly wanted to be a woman.
Well, not the women, obviously, because they’re already women.
Lucky bastards.
I don’t know if this counts, but when I was little I’d go to friends houses, then later in high school to my first serious girlfriends house, and I remember their families were like… loving? I loved spending time at my girlfriends house especially, hanging out with her Mom and her Dad even if my gf wasn’t there. They were so nice, and you could tell had genuine affection for their children (and to some degree, me). I miss you Mr. and Mrs. Miller!
Knee pain. Everyone told me it was normal growing pains, until one little league coach notice I run weird. Queue years of doctors and specialists and tests and scans and surgeries, and now I’m a 40 something guy with advanced arthritis that could have been much much worse if left untreated.
way to go attentive little league coach!
also wtf parents?
“Well it’s not hurting me so it can’t be that bad.”
Being unable to think of something without a prompt.
I guess most people can just remember things without sticky notes and calendars.
You can actually train for this!
You can train yourself to become more attuned to your interoception. This will make it easier to identify internal prompts like anxiety or hunger. In fact, a friend of mine was studying to become a psychotherapist and last year had me serve as a guinea pig for interoception interventions. In summary, if you find mindfulness practices that involve your body and your own thoughts, you’ll be more attuned to your interoception. Things like active meditations can help a lot. You can check out evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs like Healthy Minds.
You can train yourself not just to notice your interoception, but also to use interoception to build habits. I suspect this is what the people who do not use external prompts (like stickies) do: they have habits that kick in with not-so-evident prompts. They could be using something called an ‘action prompt’ or an ‘internal prompt’. I’m using the language of Tiny Habits because it’s helpful in this context.
Tiny Habits can teach you how to create habits of all kinds, whether you use external, action, or internal prompts. Tiny Habits prefers prompts that are actions (e.g. “After I put the toothbrush down then I will pick up the dental floss”). But internal prompts are perfectly viable (e.g. “When I feel the heat on my skin and the tension in my jaw, I will describe my inner emotions to myself as if I was listening to a good friend”).
You can understand cues and habits more in depth with contextual behavior analysis. CBA or a qualified professional can help us notice when we struggle to pay attention because of conditions like ADHD or anxiety. Something else that CBA can reveal is that, sometimes, we struggle to pay attention because we haven’t developed the mental information highways that can make our thoughts flow freely. Things like relational frame training can help us build those highways faster. Another option is to learn to think visibly (Harvard’s Project Zero) about our everyday life, so that we build dense information highways that we can later use in daily life.
Of course, the fact is that plenty of humans use external prompts deliberately to help them coordinate and remember things. There’s a reason Scrum boards and Kanban are so popular. There’s a reason calendar apps and Getting Things Done are so popular. There’s a reason many societies have daily, weekly, or yearly rituals. You’re among friends :)
Sharing socks. My family used to have a sock basket next to our shoes. You didn’t own your own socks, you just grab a pair when you need them.
I mentioned “the sock basket” offhand to a friend in elementary school and she thought it was crazy. That’s when I learned that not every family has a community sock basket. Looking it up though, I find a couple reddit threads from people with the same experience (and people replying that it’s weird) 🤷♀️Don’t you have different sized feet?
Nobody “dresscoded” me at home. As soon as I was old enough to pick my own clothing, I could. What skirts or jeans or dresses I wore was my choice completely. My school also didn’t care much.
Blew my mind when I realized how many other girls had to sneak out with their clothes because the parents had a rule against tight jeans or whatever.
I still think my parents were right with this one. The kids with the strictest rules were always those with the craziest outfits. Can’t blame them, I’d have done the same.
When I was a teen, I believed in that too. The most strict parents had the most wild kids.
As an adult, it’s now verified.
My parents were the chill, openly weed-smoking guys that wouldn’t rat you out to your parents if you needed help (like a place to stay while coming down or whatever)
This policy was explicitly because my dad worked yard supervision at the local elementary schools and 100% knew that those with the strictest parents were the ones who needed it the most as they had nowhere safe to go. The abused kids were second, many of them were neglect babies in our area so they got fucked up and went home to parents who didn’t care
I went to a charter school for my freshman year that was mostly full of people who were kicked out of the school they kick you out of if you’re a problem child. Almost all of them were children of parents who worked long-ass days and came home to be strict as fuck
Why were you at the charter school with all the naughty kids if your parents were super chill allies?
