One of the things I’ve found most difficult my entire life is the disconnect between what others see and interpret versus what is going on in my head.
I had this realization the other day while reprocessing things. There are a lot of times I’ve been intentionally invalidated, but there have also been a lot of times that it’s not even intentional. I’ve spent my entire life doing the “Don’t you hear that?” and “No, I cannot be around that smell that seems to bother none of the rest of you!” which all feels really invalidating, but the reality is they were just being honest. They didn’t notice it.
Yes, there is so much gaslighting and invalidation on an intentional or willfully ignorant level, but there’s also a lot that happens simply based on very different realities.
That’s not minimizing the trauma as a result of those differing realities, but this is different than someone telling me that I don’t hear or smell the thing…. They’re just being honest that they don’t ...
And then you’re like “Well, what’s wrong with me?!”…
And this is why self-diagnosis matters. This is why the ability to understand our own brains matters.
This also just made me think of a tangent that I don’t want to go down right now, but someone was venting about the medical model and diagnoses on one of my recent posts and…. I don’t disagree with a lot of what this person said, but there’s a difference between a personality disorder and a neurodevelopmental disorder. Literally, neurologically. I’m not interested in the complexities of personality disorders and I absolutely think we can talk about how many of them are just coping mechanism BUT, we can see brain differences. And those neurological differences affect every part of our being, which is the part I’m interested in.
If I can see if in your brain, it’s also going to show up somehow in your bautie, and that’s where I want to help.
Stay regulated bbs,
Shauna
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