Badabinski

Badabinski , 22 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

Having a frank and vulnerable discussion of your trauma with someone you have emotional intimacy and trust with is incredibly important and can help the healing process. I'd highly encourage people to do that.

However, I think the term "trauma dumping" often refers to the practice of sharing your trauma with people who you don't have a close relationship with, or with people who you haven't interacted with long enough to generate trust.

I am a former trauma dumper, and I dumped my trauma all over a person who I should not have. That person turned out to be a very untrustworthy person. Their knowledge of my wounds allowed them to do some incredibly harmful things to me over the course of an eleven months relationship. I managed to escape, but it was a bad move, and I learned to become more careful about who I shared that information with.

Plus, there is always more to you than your trauma. It certainly doesn't feel that way when you're really stuck in it. Hell, me saying that may have just made some people very, very angry. I got really angry when my therapist said that to me, because it felt like she was minimizing what I went through.

I came to understand that she meant I was an adult with passions and a whole life, and that adult is what I should share with people. By letting my adult self live in the present, I became more able to take care of my trauma using the inner child metaphor. My wounded inner child is precious and deserves care, and I share that with people who will appreciate that. The adult that I am also deserves to live and see the world, and deserves to be recognized by friends and family. Trauma dumping inverts that.

People stop getting to see the awesome person you grew into because humans are wired to pay attention to wounded children, be they physical or metaphorical. Some people will be tender, some will be dismissive, and a few people will take advantage.

So yeah, please share your trauma when it makes sense to, with people you love and trust. If there's a mutual understanding, then any sadness they feel will likely be offset by the warm knowledge that they've helped you make it through another day and maybe heal a bit more. That's what is shown in this meme. Let your adult self live your life the rest of the time, and use that adult to give the kid the care they needed but didn't get.

(Wow, now that I'm rereading this post, I feel a strong sense of irony. Like, it's not a trauma dump, but also nobody asked for me to write a fucking essay about a meme lol)

Badabinski , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

Yep, sharing your trauma should be an exercise in trust and intimacy. People should not share their trauma with others just to provoke a specific emotional reaction. I also have some second-hand experience with what you mention. One of my SO's parents is a hideously narcissistic person who would trauma dump all over my SO to invalidate any feelings or concerns my SO might have. That, combined with gaslighting and other forms of emotional abuse and neglect, plus some physical and sexual abuse set my SO up with a fuckton of trauma to process. They also had a hard time with hearing of other people's traumas, although for them it was in more specific circumstances, rather than generally.

I like to think that most people trauma dumping are victims who aren't creating another iteration of the victim/abuser cycle (I base that off of nothing but my own hopes, I have no numbers), but there are definitely people who have weaponized it. I'm sorry to hear that you went through that :/ hopefully you're free from those toxic people. After my SO's parent kicked my SO out (a horrible night, but one of the best nights of their life in retrospect), my SO moved in with me, did a whole lot of EMDR therapy, and has managed to heal from the damage caused by their parent. Hopefully you can find a treatment, process, or mindstate to help you, since it sounds like you still have some wounds from what was done to you.

Badabinski , 1 month ago

I just kinda vaguely name them after what they do and how big they are:

smol: my tiny little 2 bay Synology NAS that I'm no longer using
medium: my R620 with 4x 18TB drives that is my current NAS (medium, because it's larger than my previous NAS). Is also a k3s worker and provides NFS PVCs.
big: my old full-tower gaming rig that's a k3s worker and runs my Home Assistant VM
molecule: my current mini-ITX gaming rig and primary computer, also serves as the k3s master node and runs a lot of my home automation stuff. I think I picked molecule because it's REALLY tiny (it's in a Dan Cases A4v4.1, I think?) and it has a bunch of small stuff running on it (containers and pods)
monolith: my old T440p laptop. It's a large, black, featureless slab that doesn't do much
slab: my new Framework 13 laptop. I just kinda looked at it and said, "that's a nice slab of metal"

All of the above running Linux. I tinkered with Ubuntu for the NAS (because I heard Ubuntu was good at ZFS), but I still absolutely hate Ubuntu, so it's all Arch Linux.

Badabinski , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

As others have said, the inner child is an incredibly useful metaphor for trauma/therapy. The way your brain reacts to trauma is to basically create a bookmark of you at that time. If you manage to live through the trauma, then clearly, the emotions you felt and the actions you took worked perfectly!

Well, that was probably true in prehistory, but nowadays it's a big fucking stupid liability. Like, for example, say I'm doing my adult job at $company and my coworker Todd Fuckwit (esq.) says something shitty about suicide that reminds my brain of an old bookmark. All of the sudden, my emotional state is transported back to when Young Badabinski saw the results of a parental suicide attempt and thought it was entirely their fault and Badabinski deserved it (Important note, this is not regular PTSD with vivid hallucinations/flashbacks, this is more about emotions). Now I'm freaking out in the meeting room and abruptly leave because I feel like a 12 year old who has just had their world ended, and escaping us what I did back then.

The way you heal this is to try to create a connection with that bookmark of yourself and then give yourself what you needed back then. Over many therapy sessions, I was able to help young Badabinski realize that none of that was their fault, that they didn't deserve to see that, and that they should have had the warm and loving care of both of their parents. And you know what? It really fucking worked.

For more chronic cases (like a lot of emotional neglect), your inner child is just kinda... There? Like, the bookmark part of the metaphor breaks down a bit. Your inner child represents the tender emotions that were left unhandled and childhood needs that were left unmet. A lot of my therapy nowadays is helping my inner child feel less deprived and more loved on a day-to-day basis, because if I don't take care of myself enough in the ways I need, then my brain will pull up the chronic inner child and I'll be miserable for days/weeks/months. In contrast, the parts of my life where I've permanently changed my day-to-day behavior feel so much more fulfilling and wonderful. It's not just about avoiding the negatives, you end up focusing more on achieving the positive.

I personally like describing it as a metaphor. I was a bit of an angry skeptic when I was younger (due to the aforementioned parent moving to a bunch of new-age crystal healing shit after their recovery and then trying to push it on me when I absolutely did not believe in the validity of those methods), so I didn't like how metaphysical and "touchy-feely" an inner child felt. I'm no longer skeptical of this idea am a much more emotionally liberated person. I often think of my inner child as if it were an active presence in my mind (it feels more effective to do so for me). It took a lot of time time for me to reach that place. I believe that explaining it as a metaphor will get through to people who would otherwise spurn the concept. Metaphor or not, I still want to help the little human that is past me, and I'd love to be able to drink a potion that would let me talk to that twelve year old.

Badabinski , 1 month ago

For Linux applications that respect XDG? Sure. There are plenty that don't because they either predate that specification, or they just don't care. Linux filesystems are generally much faster at executing reads on many small files, meaning fast search tools like ripgrep and fd make it so I don't really have to care. They'll run through my whole $HOME in 5 seconds flat. There's also stuff like locate, although I don't like maintaining an index. SSDs are so damn fast that I can just rg --hidden --glob '*.toml' 'the_setting_i_want_to_change' ~/ whenever I want.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

I hate righty-tighty lefty-loosy. Depending on whether you're looking at the top or bottom of the screw, you can see movement to the right or the left. I hate whoever came up with it, and I wish I had been taught the right hand method. It works exactly the same as the electromagnetic right hand rule:
an example of the right hand rule as it relates to a screw thread

Basically, you take your right hand, stick your thumb out, and curl your fingers like you're grabbing a broom handle. Point your thumb in the direction you want the screw to move to. Want to screw something in? Point your thumb towards the thing. Want to unscrew? Point your thumb away from the object the screw is currently in. Then, just look at the way your fingers are pointing! If it helps, squeeze your fingers into a fist and see which way they move. Alternatively, bend your wrist in, and observe which way your fingers are moving. Works every time.

It sounds complicated, but there are plenty of people who are unable to intuitively differentiate from right and left the way they can differentiate up and down. I am one of those people. Thanks to this method, I've been able to develop the muscle memory/intuition to know which way to turn a screw.

It's important to note that this only works for screws that are "right hand threaded." If the screw is only getting tighter when you're using this method, then it's likely reverse threaded, or left hand threaded. If that's the case, just use your left hand instead of your right hand.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

The only thing that comes to me is that someone who was really into tuning/spiffing up Japanese cars was involved in the community early on. I've always found it weird, and I'd honestly kinda prefer to just use "theme" or "spiff" or one of the many other words that the Godfucked curse of the Earth that is the English language provides for the purpose.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

Yeah, that's why I wish the community would just use a different term. I'm not a fan of where it came from (Asian people bad asian motorcycle bad), and the arguments where one person says "I've been saying it for years," versus "bro it's been fucking racist for years," have gone past the point of a beaten and dead horse and into the realm of a fine mist of blood, fat, muscle, and viscera. Like, I just don't understand why people are attached to it, it's such a weird hill to die on. If it's a matter of having a term that people outside of the community wouldn't immediately understand, then I'm sure a different word could be found.

Edit: christ, I was not familiar with its usage in the 1930s. What a mess... Also, really loving the section on its Korean war usage, that's just great. Thanks for the link, it reaffirms my desire for the community to just use a different goddamned word.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

I think my initial read of your comment was wrong (I thought you were saying that the term was fine, which didn't hold up on my second read where I was paying attention), so I want to clarify by saying what I think you mean. You're making the point that I should be saying that the statement is racist and that they should consider whether or not they want to use it, not that they are being racist by using it in ignorance.

Is that right? Because if so, that's a fair point. More flies with honey than vinegar and all that. I'm normally better about giving people a chance to consider rather than just dictate my beliefs, but I'm sleep deprived and cranky and I think it's making me act in ways that aren't aligned with my usual values.

Edit: and it's a sign that I need to get off of the Internet for now, since I'm being waaaay more negative than I want to be.