#that and therapy but he won't touch that with a ten foot pole | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

intheseautumnhands · 2 years

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- @nsfwitchy

( for each !! I'll introduce you to an OC )

So let me tell you about Nate, angry mess and accidental protector.

Nate did not have a very fun childhood! His family had very specific ideas about what a man should be, and Nate only measured up in all the wrong ways. He was explosively angry, which would be fine if he just had a little more control over it; instead, he kept directing it in the wrong direction, usually in defense of people his family did not understand his wanting to defend, and getting in trouble and pissing off family. He liked art. He liked to cook. (He liked to sing, which would have been acceptable on its own if his other hobbies were okay.) He was the runt of the family, and even if he won half the scraps he got in, he still managed to do it wrong, somehow.

Realizing he was bisexual and that his family would probably quite literally try to beat it out of him if he ever came out just seemed like the inevitable cherry on top by the time it happened, really.

So he's already in a shitty place, feeling like he's never good enough and dealing with rage issues, when he finally goes off to college and gets the hell away from home. Things might have eventually, slowly, started to look up for him after that if he had a little longer before he met Katherine.

Nate was 19; Kat was a few years older, and a thief. She genuinely liked Nate, which is probably worse than if she'd been purposefully fucking with him, and he was head over heels for her. It wasn't that long into the relationship that she ended up needing help, and Nate didn't even need to be asked before he volunteered.

Somewhere along the way he ended up... kind of permanently helping her out, and usually by taking care of anything with the potential to get violent. Turns out, not only could he win a whole lot of scraps with his fist, but he was damn good with a gun, too. It's probably the first time anyone ever encouraged him with something he felt like he was good for. This is totally healthy for him in every possible way, it said, lying through its teeth.

Eventually Kat ends it. Nate drinks himself into a stupor at a friend's bar while Billy, whose known Kat a lot longer and been quietly encouraging both of them to end it whenver he can because he can see she is fucking this kid up, tries to see him through it. The bar is... kind of a criminal hot spot, because Billy's mom was in that. 'line of work', for lack of a better term, and sometimes these things just happen.

("Dear, do you know anything about crime at all?" you might say dubiously at this point. "Shhh, it's fiction, and the original version of this involved supernatural shit so it didn't need to be realistic," I reply, which is a long-winded way of saying no.)

Anyway, long story short (too late), guess who eventually makes his living out of killing people for hire while his only friend despairs in the background?

Yeah, Nate's a healthy boy. By the time Kat leaves him, he's somewhere in his early twenties, extremely self-loathing, depressed and definitely not admitting it, and basically a little ball of spiky armor to everyone but the very, very small number who manage to break through it and become His People. The depression and self-loathing just keep getting worse cause he's unwilling to do anything about it and shutting the world out, and he's pretty much passively suicidal, which works for him cause his job has a pretty high likelihood of killing him if he just waits!

Most of Nate's verses start around early-mid twenties, because if something doesn't happen to him, he's not gonna make it to thirty.

In his original world, he broke his leg on a job, rented a room while recouping, and ended up tripping and falling into a D/s thing with his roommate, who had his own host of abuse. That character was my ex's, which is why it's no longer really Nate's main story, but it really illustrates the thing that would be necessary for any other world: he does much, much better when he finds someone he feels needs him. He'll start to take care of himself and try to stay alive in order to make sure someone's there to take care of them. It's really the only thing that makes him do it, after a certain point. (Billy, his bar-owner only friend, can try, and it'll help to a point, but... Billy doesn't need him. They love each other in their own weird way, but it doesn't spark that same reaction.)

And honestly? He's pretty good for people once he decides they're his. He takes care of them. He's also... a little bit possessive, but it tends to come out in the form of "must keep them safe" more than anything else, so it could be worse. He actively tries not to be a walking open wound and lash out at people when he's trying to take care of them. He's more patient than he thinks with them. He's sweet.

He does not think of himself as any of these things, even as he's actively caretaking and protecting people. As far as Nate's concerned, he's an asshole and a pretty terrible person, and he only does this if he feels like encouraging someone to leave will lead to them getting in a worse situation. Otherwise, if he found himself attaching to someone who wasn't in a place where they had nothing, he'd probably try to detach himself because he's going to fuck them up.

He's also smarter than he gives himself credit for in a lot of ways -- he's quick on his feet, he understands things pretty well, he's good at reading people. But he's not, I guess, clever is the best word I can think of to illustrate it, and he gets easily frustrated and flustered when he feels like he's around people who are smarter than him and are lording it over him or rubbing it in. (That second part is key: being smart is fine, whatever, it's the using it to put him down that fucks him up. Part of this comes from family, but part of this is very squarely Kat's fault. She had a very "you're cute, let me do the thinking" attitude towards him that rubbed him the wrong way and he loved her too much to ever say anything, and now anything that comes remotely close to it sends him shutting down.)

There are also a handful of verses where magic/supernatural shit is going on around him! That's a lot of fun, because he's almost always the only mundane person getting dragged into the shenanigans, and it's terrible entertaining. :D

I do not have art because I do not art, but I do PB, because that's just the way I started doing things, blame LJ around the time I started making OCs regularly. XD So Nate is kind of this, but scrawnier. (Bonus link to his PB singing Creep because it cracks me up.)

#by grace and grit #i rambled. a lot. i'm sorry? XD #i have another of these but i've been doing this on and off all day #and between dog and body i am exhausted #so i will poke that tomorrow #feel free to send more I have Too Many OCs XD #also feel free to send questions about my angry baby; I enjoy talking about him #i have his PB singing songs that give me Genuine Nate Feelings as well but i rambled enough as is #god I need to get this boy another sub or partner or. whatever. because first of all i miss his dynamics.#and second. he needs it.#that and therapy but he won't touch that with a ten foot pole #i don't know i just miss doing things with him he's a Favorite #i need to put him and billy in a story but i can never quite put my finger on what to do with them

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star-anise · 3 years

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Thank you for your reply. My ask was kind of all over the place. (I've done some dbt before with a previous therapist and it helped! But that therapist was not a good fit I'm at a new one now tho).

Random thing, you mentioned bpd I heard in my abnormal psychology class that a lot of therapists won't treat someone diagnosed with bpd??? It was the teacher who is a grad student studying to be a therapist who said it. And like. I don't understand. They sound like a very in need population who was often abused and there's a whole huge book of treatment resources written by someone with bpd. I've heard they're "hard to treat" and talked about like they're hopeless. but like why be a mental health professional if you don't like mentally ill/different people?

This is also the same professor who insisted trauma is only the few things listed under dsm ptsd definition as traumatic events.. like she said parents getting divorced isn't a traumatic event because you aren't physically in danger... that class really scared me about the mental health field because of all the awful people in it aspiring to be therapists including the teacher.

Sorry for all the asks I love the work you do on this blog

Ahahaha, what IS it about undergrad abnormal psych professors? Mine said he wouldn't touch clinical practice with a ten-foot pole, and told a story about how once a student told him she had schizophrenia, and he knew that she was lying because obviously nobody with schizophrenia could actually manage to attend university.

(It's seriously untrue. I've had both friends and clients with psychotic disorders who succeeded in university. He was being an ableist bastard. Like, I know psych students can tend to over-identify with a disorder they're studying without actually having it, but that doesn't mean no psych student is ever entirely correct about their deal.)

Okay so, BPD. The thing about BPD is that it requires a special skillset that does not come standard in most clinical training. If a therapist who doesn't have that skillset tries to treat someone with BPD, the therapy will not be very effective and the process will be very frustrating for both them and their client. To be very frank, it's just as true that ordinary therapists are bad at treating BPD and don't like feeling stupid, as it is that people with BPD are hard to treat.

(And training to deal with people with BPD clinically is often not included in grad school education. DBT training is expensive and they won't accept you unless you have an adequate clinical placement.)

Also, part of dealing with BPD in particular is... people with BPD often have trouble seeing authority figures with anything more nuanced than "adoration and compliance" or "fear and loathing". As a therapist, you're signing up as an authority figure. Part of the work means letting your client express all their feelings about you, and helping them work to something more nuanced and sustainable, like, "I am furious and enraged that I'm in pain and I wish my therapist could take that pain away, but I realize that's not within her power. I have to admit that she's not being an evil villain here, so I can feel my resentment but let it go."

Which can be stressful to deal with, as a therapist. You have to live with a lot of hurt and anger and rage headed your way, and keep your perspective. Be empathetic without getting carried away in those emotions. You have to be able to face that pain and say, "I can't take that away. I can only help you learn to bear it."

Basically everyone I know in grad school had a nervous breakdown somewhere along the line because we go to therapist school because we're smart and capable and feel good about helping people, so when we encounter a person we can't help, or are put in situations where we have to stop helping, we tend to have existential crises and end up sobbing in the student lounge about What Am I Even Good For Now. I was lucky because I had a version of that breakdown before I entered grad school, and my therapist warned me to get a new shrink when I moved for my Master's, "Because if you don't need one at the beginning, you'll definitely need one by the end." So I was more equipped to help classmates for whom this was a wholly new experience.

In my opinion, the healthy way to approach the problem of A Person You're Not Good At Helping is to practice humility, set reasonable boundaries, recognize the limits of your competence, and see where you can learn and grow. But many therapists and helping professionals use what I consider to be an unhealthy approach, labelling such clients as "defensive" and "resistant" and "hard to treat" and blaming them for the difficulty.

Which like, I get that "practicing humility" is like "doing exercise", sometimes you're tired and cranky and don't want to go for a run. Sometimes you just want to blame the other person for not accepting your magnanimous help.

Anyway, within the field of mental health psychotherapy, complex trauma is a unique sub-speciality that many therapists don't want to touch at all. I had many classmates say, "Woof, you're into complex trauma? You must be so tough, I could never." 🙄

(Technically I have the ethical obligation to represent my profession in the best possible light to encourage public confidence in the field of psychotherapy. But I think it's not undermining the profession to admit what everyone already knows, which is that some therapists are oblivious assholes who do bad work. I've seen it, I've met them, I want them to piss off forever. Jordan Peterson is a blight to our names and Phil McGraw can go choke.)

So people who are on your wavelength about BPD and trauma and What Therapists Are For are out there. They're just a little rarer than the usual run of therapists. For what it's worth, I've found they cluster more in areas like complex trauma, DBT, Narrative Therapy, and the Hearing Voices Movement. Next year (knock on wood) I'l be going to a conference on the treatment of complex trauma with a friend, and this sounds weird given that it's a weekend all about child maltreatment, but I expect it to be a blast, because I'll get to be among My People, talking about the work that fills our souls.

I really wish that as an undergrad, I'd spent more time hanging out with Social Work students, and going to conferences and trainings. Those are where I met some of the coolest people I really clicked with. And in grad school, I had the extreme pleasure of meeting other people who were a lot like me. Those friendships were especially rewarding because as skilled helpers, we ended up playing a game of Needs Chicken, where each tries hide their own needs and caretake for the other, which finally ended up in a standoff where we had to agree to put down our caretaking skills and just be honest about what we wanted, even if that felt new and scary and raw.

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#therapisting #advice about therapisting #borderline personality disorder #ableism tw #long post

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lasnevadaslaborunion · 2 years

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hiiii ^_^ tee en tee duo vs + for the ask game mayhaps?

Vs: Ha. Aha. HAHAHAHAHA. Contrary to what many believe, this would actually be a close one. But I think c!Quackity would eventually come out on top. This guy acts all professional and composed, but the minute there's an actual threat, he goes straight for the sensitive bits. c!Wilbur spent a good chunk of time before death writing poetry and refusing to carry any self-defense gear. And keep in mind, they both know each other's old tricks. They won't want to underestimate each other. But c!Quackity has had ample opportunity to perfect his, uh, techniques and develop a few new ones, while c!Wilbur was stuck wasting away on a train platform. Also, all the scariest people I've ever met were short folks who could demolish somebody a head taller.

+ Hmmm.

Disclaimer: I am a c!Karlnapity endgame believer and I probably always will be.

That being said, I think romantic tnt duo has a lot of potential! Their dynamic is really complex and it's changed a lot over time. Overall, I read them as two people who have had some genuine respect, camaraderie, and - yes, I'm thinking about their affair in Pogtopia - more tender feelings in the past, but at the same time, they've been pitted against each other at almost every turn by their own mistakes. They each want to prove something to the other, and this has the potential to either push them to greater heights or send them both spiraling (*cough cough* kismesi- *gunshots*).

But I also think there's a tendency in fanon to... lean too far to one extreme or the other. Either to make them too overtly hostile (their interactions in recent memory have consisted mostly of gritted-teeth barbed politeness, subtle needling, aggressive proxy wars, or sincere attempts to reach out - notice that c!Quackity was never violent towards c!Wilbur until his subordinate was directly threatened, and c!Wilbur has never been inclined toward physical fights at all - which is what made Ho16 so impactful!) or woobify one or both of them into oblivion too quickly, when in fact a core issue they each face on some level is aversion to that kind of vulnerability. I like their interactions in canon and I enjoy a romantic reading in theory, but in practice I find that I'm very picky about their portrayal.

So, in a nutshell: are they healthy? No. Are they interesting? Yes. Should they touch a serious relationship with a ten-foot pole before getting some serious therapy? Oh, hell naw. Do I want to see more of them anyway? Please for the love of god, sign me right up.

#dsmp #asks #ask game #c!quackity #c!wilbur #tnt duo

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