> It instantly put me into 10 year old me scared of interacting with my father due to his unpredictable nature. Trying to work out if a sound I made would set him off on an angry rampage. Trying to work out if i was safe or not, him being completely unavailable on an emotional level.... just me not existing to him, I just crumbled.

thats exactly how i feel when im around my shizophrenic dad, its like dancing around eggshells with him, evry motion, or action, anything i say could trigger him
the worst part is that it doesnt trigger him immediatly but with a delay, sometimes weeks or even months
so i totaly get where you are comming from, experiencing this as a child must have been a horrible experience and im sorry you had to deal with that
sending all the hugs i can to you

im sorry you have to experience that too

maybe stop blaming someone else for your intensely annoying actions? babystar is in a REAL boat with an triggerable father who doesnt explain why hes angry. you get spanked and thats legit, she had to deal with extreme rage.

the last email i got from my dad was that he asked me if he ate something when he was at my place 2 months prior beause apparently i was luring him into the kitchen under pretense to ask him if he knows where to fill water into the heater and then when he returned home he had 3 hours missing time and a small "entry wound" that could stem from a micro arrow with poison, if he ate something then it would explain why he was missing time and how he didnt notice the micro arrow

but you are right, probably my own fault that he is like that

The world isn't a suffering contest you know ? At least it doesn't have to be.
Journals like this are usually meant to enable interactions, between people, or even exchanges.
Not to get rude or degrading comments, or in fact determine who suffered most, there is content for that too which isn't wrong since there it is usually fantasy or role play for people with another mindset, who are ready to deal with it, for the sake of existing together in a civilized manner please don't try to purposefully hurt other people when you can clearly see or at least have doubts that they are not role playing.
Thanks.

I can tell you've never had to deal with a paranoid schizophrenic, it's terrifying.

That is a pretty powerful and heavy topic to go over. I just hope it doesn't overwhelm. Do your utmost.

Wow that seems like a hell of an exercise really fucking intense

Star, first of all I want you to know I'm very proud of you for facing these uncomfortable feelings and letting yourself be present for them. Its never easy to face this kind of trauma and you did so, so well. Second, I want you to know its okay to feel the way you're feeling right now about all this. Also, your partner didn't mean they hated YOU personally, they were saying that to the abusive parental figure you played for them in that moment. The best thing you can do is leave all those feelings there as much as possible, as your trauma doesn't define who you are or the path your life takes.

This sounds like an excellent step in the right direction for you. And again, I am so, so proud of you.

Yeah at no point did i think my partner was saying it to me as a person but was saying it to the projected Mother I was being at the time. I think if I had thought he was saying it direct to me I probably wouldnt have felt as strongly about it, but knowing he was saying it to that mother figure was really powerful for me, and yeah it was proper exhausting but I'm also really glad for that exercise.

Wow... that's one heck of an RP. I can see why it was so emotionally heavy. It does sound like you've learned something about yourself though. Hopefully you'll be able to put that to good use. Thanks for sharing!

It sounds to me like your study partner is an asshole who needs to get HIS head around what he's doing in this class.

You did nothing wrong. Don't blame yourself for his immaturity.

Every time you share a story from Therapy class it sounds like everyone is always fuckin' with you.

Maybe I just don't trust mental health people because they're always trying to read your mind and size you up and all that, but I just want to tell this guy to go eat a dick.

They tell you to do an exercise. You go the obvious route and play the role of an authority figure who doesn't want to have her authority challenged. Makes sense. Sounds like a pretty typical scenario and your partner has something to work off of, so he can do his part of the roleplay (he gets to play this part). You're both participating in the role play and everything is fine because you're able to follow basic instructions, and you're not always looking for some way to "turn the game on its head" to get a reaction out of people (you're not a manipulative asshole).

Then he goes and pulls this mind game on you, where you're supposed to participate in an exercise but he's literally ignoring you with a notebook over his face like a complete tool. So now what are you supposed to do for the next five minutes? Just sit there and try to roleplay as a teenager who is trying to communicate with their neglectful dad through a locked door? So you just sit there like, "Hey dad. Hey dad. Hey dad. Hey dad. Dad... Wtf dad... Are you dead in there?"

Seems typical. They put you in a weird scenario and then act like you must have a screw loose because you acted weird. Of course you acted strange if your dad/spouse/partner is literally ignoring you for seemingly no reason. What are you supposed to do? Just be like, "Fine, if you're ignoring me then I'm going to go play on my cellphone" and then you both sit there silently for 5 min? Perfect roleplay. Very therapeutic. We've figured out that you get confused and scared when someone is acting like they just had a brain hemorrhage and are non-responsive. Like, no shit. If your husband locks himself in his room and goes silent for seemingly no reason, I'd expect you to be pounding on the door like a mad woman, not saying "fuck this" and going to watch the telly. RIght?

All I'm saying is, I think there's no way you could have done this roleplay "correctly". Either you get emotional and yell to get some response (the way a real teenager would). Or you just go quiet and you both ignore each other for 5 min. Either way, you're going to be made to feel like you did something wrong. "Why did you get so emotional when you were ignored for only 5 min?" versus "Why did you spend the whole time scrolling on your phone and not even trying?"

I guess all I'm saying is that you're valid. Your emotions and thoughts are valid. Maybe your personality was shaped by your experiences with your parents that may not have been great, but you feel the way you feel and there's a reason for that and it's rooted in some kind of logic that makes sense to you. Don't let a bunch of wannabe eggheads fuck with your head and make you feel like you're sick and broken. You shouldn't have to stop and second guess every emotion/thought you have as though they are symptoms of some latent mental illness. If you're angry or upset at someone, it's not always because you're wrong. Maybe they're the asshole.

You have a decent social circle. People like you, so you must be doing something right. It's just the people in your class who needle you and make you feel like a weirdo all the time (when he's the weirdo for holding a notebook over his face, which is some dumb crap he read in a book, or more likely a youtube video).

Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to offer an alternative (possibly unwanted) viewpoint that some of the people in your class are probably assholes. Some therapists are great. Some are hacks. By the law of probability, some portion of your classmates will go on to be very garbage therapists (and were probably bullies in highschool). I'm just sharing some of my narcissism with you.

In much the same way I modelled my mother when I had to be the parent, he modelled his father when he was the parent. What he did to me was basically how he experienced his father when he was a child. It just so happened that his dad and my dad had...shall we say...similar qualities.

.My response when I was playing mother was to be proper bitchy. He kept asking what it was that he had done wrong and my response to him... "you know what you've done, if you don't then you need to have a long hard look at yourself" and then the phrase " I can't even look at you right now I am so angry" both those phrases I found super harsh and could have easily triggered a trauma response from him too, (i actually broke roleplay and checked to make sure he was okay after those particular bits) so I certainly wasn't an angel in this exercise. I was just being really wooly and uncommunicative as mother as that's how I often experienced mine, she was confusing and full of inconsistencies and never gave a straight answer.

But that was the whole point of the exercise, to see how we dealt with those transferences. I genuinely found it useful even if it was reliving trauma and exhausted me

I guess I may have jumped to the conclusion that you were supposed to be roleplaying a parent who is having a conflict with their teenager. Therefore, you coming out of the gate as being an angry mom makes sense.

In my opinion (which was entirely based on my own assumptions), it sounds like your lack of communication in the mom role is derived from the fact that you only had 5 min to concoct an imaginary scenario and then try to play it out. So you begin at a logic starting point. I.E. You're angry with your teenager for something. They ask, "What did I do wrong?" Well, you don't know, because you haven't thought of that yet, because this is a contrived scenario that you're making up as you went along. Your lazy butt partner could have filled in that blank and said, "Sorry, I was out with my friends and forgot to call. You always assume I'm out drinking ciders in the park, but we were really just playing Mario Baseball in his basement and I lost track of time." Instead, he expects you to explain why a hypothetical mother is angry at her hypothetical teen over some nonexistent disciplinary problem. So you go the obvious route (since there's only 5 min to do this RP) and answer vaguely because there really aren't any details in this made-up scenario and partner-boy isn't helping to come up with a realistic dialogue (in this scenario, he should assume he "did" something to instigate the argument and try to improvise a little, but instead he just says "I didn't do nuthin', why you mad bro?").

So maybe I'm more mad at his lousy improv skills than anything else. He crapped on your roleplay as the mom because he can't play ball (does he even know how to RP, he's probably not even a furry, what a loser). Then he crapped on your roleplay as the daughter by not participating at all. So he gets to "play therapist" while you try to roleplay. And since he's "playing therapist" and you're actually trying, you end up in a situation where you're "exposed" and he's just sitting there with a notebook on his face (like the smug notebook-sniffer he is).

This all comes from my own mentality that you're good, and everyone else is bad. I put you on a pedestal because you seem like a genuinely good person who also happens to have a kooky diaper fetish (which makes you better than pleb normie fucks). Therefore, anything that makes you cry is bad. Ergo, your classmate, and by extension, the entire mental health industry, is wrong, and you're right.

In my woefully unqualified opinion, your brain is too next-level to be analyzed by normie human standards. These vanillas are going to bring you down to their level of blandness (the default state of humans who have been properly molded into "healthy" individuals).

Though, I guess I feel bad for this guy if his dad really just hid behind notebooks all the time. Maybe you should make him cry about it sometime, then you'll be even.

I don't know why you assume it was a mind-game. Gem said she roleplayed as her mom and immediately got into an aggressive argument with her partner. In her own words, she said she treated the guy awfully until he said he hated her. It's possible that since they just did "aggressive parent fighting", he chose to go in the opposite direction and try to play out a neglectful parent to contrast it. Or maybe, like Gem, he was roleplaying that way his father treated him, and didn't know the effect it would have on her.

As for what they learned, I think they learned a lot actually. It's very likely that at some point Gem will have a non-responsive client, and now she knows that it causes a particularly strong response in her.

It's easy to talk about it in words, but had Gem never done this roleplay experiment, she wouldn't even know that this was something lurking in the back of her mind. Better to find it out in a controlled environment where you're still learning than for it to show up in middle of a session with a client where you're supposed to be helping them.

You raise many good points.

But I assume everything is a mind game. What else would you call ignoring someone for five minutes to see how they react?

Maybe it's my logical brain, but we have an assignment to roleplay for 5 min. My partner gives me nothing to work with for 5 min. In the real world, when your classmate ignores you, you just ignore them back, but that's not going to get us anywhere in this supposed roleplay exercise. So you're forced to interact with a brick wall for 5 min, then we sit in a circle and analyze why you reacted the way you did to the brick wall you were asked to interact with. Like.... "I dunno, because this entire contrived scenario where I'm held captive and asked to talk to a brick wall for five minutes makes no sense in the first place".

Basically, I got annoyed vicariously through Star. Probably because it brought up memories of classmates who spent all day fuckin' around and not helping me with the assignment at hand. I could have kept my mouth shut, but then people wouldn't have the pleasure of reading my incredible insights.

And also, I don't trust mental health professionals (or in this case, random wankers in a classroom) because they're not qualified to tinker with my incredibly powerful brain. That's like letting an apprentice mechanic try to repair a choo-choo train. They're just going to climb up in there, fuck it all up, and shrug (then cash my check).

I had a dad that would literally do this. You'd have to just stand there repeating his name for minutes at a time until he decided to actually acknowledge you. If you had something that you actually needed him to respond to, you couldn't just blurt it out, because he was tuning you out completely. You actually just had to keep going "Dad... Dad... Dad... Dad, I need to deal with this... Dad..." over and over and over and over. Sometimes it would be a big "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?" when he got sick of it, but a lot of time he'd turn as if you didn't just spend 5 whole minutes and be like "what?" as if you had only JUST asked him for the first time. You're kind of proving "the point" of this experiment right here. The fact that you can't seem to understand this situation is exactly why this is a really good roleplay to practice. You think he's playing mind-games, or not "doing it right", when he did exactly what the assignment was: "act like your parent". It's one thing to be told that this kind of thing happens. It's a whole different thing to actually experience it, and how you think you'd react isn't always right.

You have assumptions about how a parent "should" act, but they don't always conform to the way you think is right.

Sorry for being rude before. You’re just trying to have a conversation and I’m clowning around.

I feel that... I had a very neglectful and abusive mother, due to her narcissistic behavior. From a more... traditional family dynamic, it was like she was both the abusive angry father and the mean big sister at the same time. She would physically hit me, gaslight me, and emotionally abuse me by attacking my pain points - reminded me of guilt and past failures. And when she wasn't interacting with me... she was just... off doing her own thing. Never showing me love or affection. It was basically both sides of this interaction here... and kinda flashing back on it, but feel like it might be good to get it out here.

TL;DW I'm glad you found out about this. i hope you can learn more about this so you can heal.

I'm sorry

My dad is like that always blaming me for being sick getting mad he misses work because he had to take me to the hospital... sometimes he can be a lot

I'm not the kind of person to go and be social I stick to who I know

Hang more around adults as a result of countless hospital stays

I was born with short gut so I was always in there mentally dim witted as a result

That sort of thing happened to me a lot growing up. I won't bother you with my sob stories, but I will say I know how you feel and I'm so saddened by your story. I'm scared just thinking about being in your position, behaving the way my father did towards someone and how they would react towards me of I said some of the things he said to me growing up. I hope you can recover soon, Sammy.

Dang. Sounds like a powerful, but very emotional exercise there.

wow that sounds like a very good course work to help you understand yourself and things we do. I would love to learn how to do this. it sounds very insightful

When they say that working on yourself is hard, I think this is the type of things they mean. Figuring out why are all these things happening and that they are there in the first place is no walk in the park.

Me and my therapist are working out trauma, of all the things they look at i was exprcting trauma to be the lowest since i dont have a past filled with abuse or overly negative things ( exept my exe that instilled a fear of abandonment that one is obvious), my parents and even extended family always where there for me. Despite all that trauma is the highest of the scores when i take that test. Ive alyways had trouble asking anyone for help its like i feel like i would be a bother or that i dont deserve it. My therapist says that trauma can come from the most seemingly benine things. But what when they are not benine? I cant imagine how hard it is then.
My heart goes to all of those who struggles with mental health. Do not give up like i almost did a few years ago, its hard to see it now but you are worth it.

*sends hugs*

Yup that's basically what his dad did to him as a kid so that's why he roleplayed that way

Good on you for having productive takeaways from your experience. And being brave enough to do that exercise in the first place; I would have had trouble being that vulnerable with someone in one of my courses.

ohhh that exercise sounds really tough
im not even sure if i could act like my dad without getting too upset i hurt the other person, he picks apart at insecurities and extremely sensitive things it would be so difficult

Yeah when I was playing my mum I was being a proper bitch and internally it was freaking me out cause it really felt rough so I kept checking with my partner to make sure he was OK.
I'm sorry you had difficult parents too. I'm glad I didn't play my dad cause I think with how triggers I became I probably would have screwed my partner over

I don't have much to say in this comment but thought i should tell you that you're not alone in this ♡

That sucks to have such a rough childhood, anyways, long time fan here. Love The Shine And Pacified Perfection!

I'm so sorry. My mom was like this too. I learned quickly that saying sorry was almost a guaranteed beating.

I don't know you, but those parts where Star realizes being a baby wouldn't be so bad if it means her family loved her and didn't abuse her because she's too little, that hit me like a truck.

So I'd just stand still and let her berate me rather then talk or try to apologize.
The rest of the time, she was depressed, didn't buy groceries and didn't hug or look at me for YEARS.

I went to therapy and journal everyday now, as well as taking medication, but nothing felt better than being told she'd passed.
No more 40 texts or 30 calls, or her waiting for me after work.
My family tried to blame me because I went no-contact, but the truth was my mom would go off her meds and stop taking her insulin on purpose.
She loved the attention of going to the hospital and everyone catering to her, until it caught up with her.

Having said that, I still struggle to even cry or react appropriately to my trauma. Your art has helped me process so many memories and this class sounds incredible. What course is it called?