Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

It was around those very first times I went up to my teacher to tell her what kind of things my classmates were putting me through on a daily basis that I remember her giving me the ultimate solution to every one of my problems.  "You need to stand up for yourself more." It always struck me as an odd piece of advice, especially when it was coming from a trusted adult who was supposed to be there to help me do just that – to stand tall and fend for myself. Because the thing that gets overlooked so very often in this conversation is the fact that children should NEVER have to be the ones to keep themselves safe from abuse and violence.  "But kids need to learn the way the real world works–" No. No, they don't. They will learn that well enough when they've grown up into adults. If you try to justify any sort of child abuse with this rhetoric – that the world is a cruel and unjust place and kids need to learn that sooner or later – I am begging you to stay away

 I absolutely despise the majority of representation bullying gets in the media. Every time I hear there's a new movie or TV show with bullying as a theme or major story component, I don't even want to have a look at it. It's extremely frustrating because somehow, I also manage to come across this content extremely often purely by accident. "Hey, check out this cool YouTube video on something funny that happened on the Internet– oh no, not THIS again, fuck me." "Here's a new TV show made from the perspective of young adults, trying to figure out their lives– when will this STOP???" Now don't get me wrong, I encourage representation – in fact, the more we talk about it, the better. Although the benefits of simply talking in the name of awareness does barely anything, it's still a good place to start with.  But when that representation is insanely stereotypical and sometimes downright insensitive, I can feel the BPD emotions brewing inside of m

 It is strange how often I see people equating bullying to degradation. The internet is fantastic for this kind of rhetoric, especially in the form of memes. While irony dominates the humor and jokes of the online world, I find it interesting and also beneficial to analyze this kind of rhetoric as something more than just that. Because humor in itself is a rhetorical device that's used to convey different messages and tones – some more truthful than others. And in the case of these bullying/degradation jokes, I believe that there is at least some truth to them. Let's explore that thought here! There are two demographics who typically joke about bullying: the people who have been at the receiving end of such treatment, and the people who have no connection to it. What I have noticed over the years is that former bullied kids tend to joke about the experience of being bullied rather than the issue as a broader concept. In turn, those who have no personal connection to bullying a

 It feels completely unreal that 18 weeks has already passed. 18 weeks since I started going to DBT sessions, 18 weeks since my treatment actually took off. At the beginning, it felt like such a long time, and I was wondering if I'd even be able to concentrate on therapy for so long and so intensely. But now, those 18 weeks have gone by, and I had my last session on Thursday.  I had been waiting for DBT for about a year at that point when I got accepted into the program. I knew it would be the first step I needed to take in order to help myself feel better. And sure enough, DBT proved to me why it is classified as the main therapy program for people with BPD. I learned so many new skills, so much about myself and other people alike. I was introduced to a whole bunch of practical methods I can do to cut down on the psychological pain I feel every single day – and that was exactly what I needed.  But that wasn't even the best part to me.  gratitude.  When I discovered that the pr

 Victims of all kinds have always had to defend their status as victims. They've always had to fight for the right to declare that they were wronged by other people, with no justification. Oftentimes, it is particularly those people that have not experienced any form of abuse who feel the most strongly about the victim label: no one becomes a victim for no reason, which means you must have done something to deserve it, or at the very least, to instigate the abuse! There is no such thing as the perfect victim, that is true. But as much as the victim is not exempt of human imperfection, as much is the perpetrator at fault for victimizing someone in the first place. Two things can be true at the same time, remember that.  Bullying is an interesting form of abuse, because it seems like everyone always has an excuse, a justification for it. Sure, there are a lot of people out there who still think being sexually assaulted is the fault of the woman of dressing too provocatively, but the

 Violence is never an act of love. It's a myth that we have been force-fed, especially women and female-presenting people. That the reason that boy is being mean to you is that he just likes you. We've been conditioned to expect violent behavior out of the people closest to us. Almost everyone has some type of experience this with this, I'm pretty sure.  In Finnish, there's this saying that translates to "it's out of love that the horse kicks you, after all" . I remember hearing it for the first time in kindergarten, though it was in elementary when the phrase was actually directed at me. Funnily enough, it was always about boys – that if there is a boy in your group or class that is "giving you a hard time", it's because he has a crush on you. As a lesbian, this doesn't really affect me in any way. The same statement was never aired about girls, though. I wonder if there is a reason for that.  i just like you a lot.   "If I bully y

 When you were a child, did you have an imaginary friend? Someone completely fictitious that you had created in your mind to keep you company? Kids are extremely creative and they have a wild imagination, and imaginary friends are one manifestation of that creativity. It is all part of the play of pretend, which used to be my favorite kind of play. Typically, imaginary friends are characters the child has created for themself to play with when they're alone. They are a placeholder of an actual friend, and even though the child can become very "close" with their imaginary friend, they are usually able to realize that the friend is not real, that it's just the product of their own imagination.  Sometimes, though, that imaginary friend can become one of the only "people" the child can confine to, can rely on for comfort and safety and just company. That's when the line between fiction and reality gets a bit muddled.  When I was still in university studying