sespursongles:

A list of “blocks to listening” that I found in a book:

1. Mind reading (instead of listening you are busy trying to interpret what the other says, to figure out what they ‘really mean’ by focusing on implicit cues, facial expressions, tone of voice or phrasing rather than the actual content of their speech)
2. Rehearsing (instead of listening, you are busy preparing your answer while the other is speaking)
3. Filtering (you are listening to some things and not others, either in a passive-aggressive way—ignoring things you don’t want to hear—or in a paranoid way—overfocusing on an irritated word or minor criticism rather on than the rest of the speech which was more balanced)
4. Judging (you have stopped listening because of a negative judgment, written off the other person with a hasty label, or you only listen for the purpose of finding things to criticise, gather evidence that they are wrong)
5. Daydreaming (you are drifting apart in your own head, going off on mental tangents based on something the other said and losing track of what they are saying now)
6. Identifying (everything the other says reminds you of your own experience, and you translate their words back at them into something you have done, felt, suffered, etc.)
7. Advising (the other barely has time to finish telling you something before you jump in with advice; your need to fix things and provide solutions deafens you to your interlocutor’s simple need to be listened to)
8. Sparring (close to judging—you only listen for the purpose of debating, arguing, being right; and avoid any suggestions that you might be wrong by quibbling, accusing, filtering…)
9. Derailing (you change the subject or the tone (from serious to joking) when the conversations becomes too personal or threatening)
10. Placating (you are too quick to agree to avoid any possible conflict. You cut off the other person as soon as they start expressing dissatisfaction or criticism, with “Yes, you’re right, I know… I’m sorry, I’ll fix it…”)

394627486283962718494:

Me: about to take a sip of toxic coping mechanism juice

Mitski Miyawaki materializing out of thin air in my living room: put it down, honey

ipoetried:

listen to yourself and watch your language.
instead of saying “sorry for ranting”, say “thank you for listening to me”.
instead of saying “sorry that i am overemotional”, say “thank you for trying to understand something difficult”.
instead of saying “sorry if i am a burden”, say “thank you for the time and energy you invest in our friendship”.
good things will come when you realize you are not an apology.

didsomeonesaychampagne:

“I am in a good mood. I have washed my seashells to their pristine whiteness. I have started to dream profusely day and night. The blood is circulating again. I write in my head.”

— Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary; 1939-1947 (via mesogeios)

tworobocops:

there is no old self to get back to there’s a new u to create n nurture

tigris-euphrates:

tigris-euphrates:

You know how there are higher rates of autoimmune diseases is women…..and how they’ve been finding that physical and environmental stressors can trigger the beginning of an autoimmune disease….do we think that maybe psychological trauma can also trigger an autoimmune disease? It would make sense that it appears more in women if that is the case, because we experience more psychological trauma than men do and that stress might have a bigger toll on our bodies than we realize. I wanna see studies about this!!

I was looking into breast implant disease and some people are hypothesizing that implants and fillers can trigger an autoimmune response in the body…isn’t it so scary how plastic surgery is so common but we don’t really know what the long term consequences of it are??

sespursongles:

I periodically feel so fucking sad for women in history. I feel like birth control in countries where it is widely used has made women forget an aspect of male cruelty and sociopathy that is now less apparent (giving the illusion that men have improved when only women’s defences against men have)—the fact that for most of history men could live with a woman for decades and not care that they were slowly killing her with endless back-to-back pregnancies which not only resulted in early death more often than not, but also in a total smothering of the woman’s spirit and talents. I saw a quote by Anne Boyer the other day that called straight relationships for women “not only deadly, but deadening”—as I was reading Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, a biography of Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane, who was bright and loved reading and wrote some poetry, but had little time to make anything of her life in between her 12 pregnancies. Benjamin Franklin’s mother had 10 sons and 7 daughters. What could they possibly accomplish when their husbands kept impregnating them year after year after year throughout their entire adult life? 

Charlotte Brontë eschewed marriage longer than most (writing to Ellen Nussey that she wished they could just set up a little cottage and live together) but she finally married at 38, became pregnant, and died before her 39th birthday. If she had married younger would Jane Eyre exist? I was reading that biography of Charity & Sylvia last month and comparing their life together in their little cottage to the life of their married female relatives, which was honestly hell on earth. One of Charity’s sisters had 18 children. Charity’s mother had 10 living ones, and probably some additional stillbirths. She gave birth to her first child age 19, in 1758, then to a pair of twins in 1760, then another child in 1761, another in 1763, another in 1765, another in 1767, another in 1769, another in 1771, another in 1774, another in 1777. Charity was the last child and her mother had been sick with tuberculosis for months when she became pregnant with her, and she died soon after giving birth.

I wish people would call this murder—this woman was murdered by her husband, like countless other women who do not ‘count’ as victims of male violence because straight sex is natural, pregnancy is natural, childbirth is natural. But when after 20 years of nonstop pregnancies this woman had tuberculosis and suffered from severe respiratory distress, severe weight loss, fever and exhaustion, and her husband impregnated her again, her death was expected. He must have known; he just didn’t care. This woman’s sister—Charity’s aunt—remained a spinster and outlived all of her married sisters by several decades, living well into her eighties. (Ironically, male doctors in her century asserted that sex with men was necessary for women’s health. The biographer quoted from a popular home health guide which said that old maids incurred grievous physical harm from a lack of sex with men.) And this aunt had the time and liberty to develop her skill for embroidery to such an extent that two museums still preserve her embroidered bed drapes. She accomplished something, she nurtured her talent and self. Her name was also Charity, and I find it interesting that Charity’s mother named her last daughter, whose pregnancy & birth killed her, after her childless, unmarried sister.

When I see women reblog my post about Sophia Tolstoy’s misery with her 13 children, adding comments like “thank god marriage is no longer synonymous with this”, I wonder if they realise that men have not magically become any kinder or more concerned about their female partner’s health and fulfillment, it’s just that women now have access to better ways of protecting themselves from their male partner’s indifference to their health and fulfillment.

rejectingfemininity:

“We are not women who crawl. We are not women who kneel. And for this we will be branded radicals. Revolutionists. Women who are strong, and refuse to be degraded, and choose to protect themselves, are called monsters. That is the world’s crime, not ours.”

— Brona /Lily Frankenstein  (via oreilysamcro)