I’ve Experienced Two Bereavements In A Very Short Period Of Time. My (undiagnosed) Autism Is Making

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yoshitoshi ABe’s an omnipresence in the wired || 安倍吉俊の『an omnipresence in the wired』

list of cognitive distortions

Cognitive distortions are biased and negative thinking patterns not based on fact or reality. They impact how we see ourselves/others and are usually associated with depression, anxiety, or trauma. (Note: this list was given to me by my therapist and is not my original writing.)

All-or-nothing thinking — You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

Overgeneralization — You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

Mental filter — You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

Disqualifying the positive — You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

Jumping to conclusions — You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. A) Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. B) Fortune telling: You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization — You exaggerate the importance of things (such as a goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or other people’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”

Emotional reasoning — You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are. “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”

Should statements — You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn’t, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequences are guilt. When you direct “should” statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

Labeling and mislabeling — This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to them. Mislabeling involved describing an event with language that is emotionally loaded.

Personalization — You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Telling me that being upset by my intrusive thoughts is proof I'm a good person did jackshit to help me, ngl. In fact, all it did was make me feel like I HAD to go down a spiral of horror and self-hatred any time I had those thoughts in order to prove those thoughts didn't make me a monster. I still feel like that.

But the most helpful advice I got about them was genuinely just to treat them gently. Laugh. Roll my eyes. Go "not my brain acting up again 🙄" or "Bro, I do no want to do that, shut up 😩".

Like...Telling people their suffering is proof they're good people isn't really helpful, in the long run. Or at all, for plenty of us. We need to be working WITH our brains, instead of constantly fighting against them. I have this tiny section in my journal, where when I was feeling okay, I wrote myself a note on intrusive thoughts and hallucinations and there's a line I keep in mind:

"Having thoughts-it's like an ocean; shit washes up sometimes. And then, if you let it, it gets washed away."

You have to let it wash away. You can't pick up every piece of crap that washes up and study it, keep it in your little backroom, trying to determine why it's here and what its purpose is. Babe, you're not a marine biologist. Sometimes bullshit is just bullshit and you've gotta train yourself to recognize that. You don't have to be disgusted every time you run across it. You can just keep moving.

I never know when to look away

what it’s like to learn that you’re autistic as an adult.

“im a seed

and i’ve been sowed on to sand.

my whole life i’m raised as a crop seed, like my friends and family. so that’s what i believe i am.

but i can see them growing, and im still just a seed.

i just don’t fit in.

i wonder whats was wrong with me.

i start to think maybe i’m a bad seed, not meant to be successful.

When i turned 18 i was pulled into the ocean by the tide.

i’m panicking because i know i can’t survive out here alone. no one prepared me for this.

i get to the bottom of the ocean.

i realize this is reality. there’s nothing i can do about it. this is just adulthood.

i start to sprout.

the only way this is possible is if im actually a sea plant. but there’s no way. my parents would have told me.

but i never was a crop seed.

i’ve always been sea weed.

i start to grow.

and i realize there was never anything wrong with me.

so now i know who i am, and i can live the rest of my life. happily, a sea weed.”