Tuesday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion | Clarissa's Blog
As for the horrific tendency of people to revel in their psychiatric diagnoses, I do believe this to be an extremely bad cultural trend. Now that I understand the lay of the land as it is for the majority in the industrialised English speaking world, I also understand why it was so difficult for me to find the means to solve my own problems, that is from the position of someone who had the opposite condition to most people brought up in the West. They are inclined to speak their minds to all. I was suffering from shame so deep it swallowed all my emotions and I couldn’t access them anymore. That was actually my state, and whenever I tried to speak, people accused me of being arrogant. I was suffering from profound repression. All I got from people was that I must be a female stereotype (a very Western one!) because I was trying to articulate something I could not actually articulate. When one’s emotions are buried deep, it is amazing how little it is really possibly to articulate. And then these Western types kept saying, “Oh, no, you are drawing attention to yourself,” as if I already had a typical Western character and was being flamboyant. And I’ve had random fly-by-night shooters label me with a lot of typical Western characteristics, due to the general prevalance of psychiatric terms in the contemporary culture. Severe emotional repression is the exact opposite to the highly integrated and/or emotionally charged character that most Western females are labeled with, which they also probably correspond to more or less. This attitude of flamboyant self-diagnosis that many contemporary people go in for really makes mental health into a very superficial cultural discourse, and does nothing to get to the bottom of the systemic pathologies that are engendered and reinforced by imposing gender stereotypes. To be deemed feminine and loquacious and emotionally volatile when my problem was an excessive tendency to impose control over myself has not been helpful. My level of emotional control always was and still is very high. It became pathologically high, though, when I was taking out my aggression on myself, rather than integrating it with the rest of my being.
As for the horrific tendency of people to revel in their psychiatric diagnoses, I do believe this to be an extremely bad cultural trend. Now that I understand the lay of the land as it is for the majority in the industrialised English speaking world, I also understand why it was so difficult for me to find the means to solve my own problems, that is from the position of someone who had the opposite condition to most people brought up in the West. They are inclined to speak their minds to all. I was suffering from shame so deep it swallowed all my emotions and I couldn’t access them anymore. That was actually my state, and whenever I tried to speak, people accused me of being arrogant. I was suffering from profound repression. All I got from people was that I must be a female stereotype (a very Western one!) because I was trying to articulate something I could not actually articulate. When one’s emotions are buried deep, it is amazing how little it is really possibly to articulate. And then these Western types kept saying, “Oh, no, you are drawing attention to yourself,” as if I already had a typical Western character and was being flamboyant. And I’ve had random fly-by-night shooters label me with a lot of typical Western characteristics, due to the general prevalance of psychiatric terms in the contemporary culture. Severe emotional repression is the exact opposite to the highly integrated and/or emotionally charged character that most Western females are labeled with, which they also probably correspond to more or less. This attitude of flamboyant self-diagnosis that many contemporary people go in for really makes mental health into a very superficial cultural discourse, and does nothing to get to the bottom of the systemic pathologies that are engendered and reinforced by imposing gender stereotypes. To be deemed feminine and loquacious and emotionally volatile when my problem was an excessive tendency to impose control over myself has not been helpful. My level of emotional control always was and still is very high. It became pathologically high, though, when I was taking out my aggression on myself, rather than integrating it with the rest of my being.
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