Mini-Profile
Where did you grow up?
x
Where do you live now?
x
What is the highest level of education you have attained?
x
What subjects did/do you enjoy the most at school?
x
tjwoods has 7 Friends – Here are 7 of them
tjwoods's profile at Help.com
tjwoods
An Unknown Location
tjwoods's Top (5) Replies by other users' votes
- (2 votes) What’s with all the homework slackers?
Yes, lots of homework questions, more than usual. I’ve not yet bothered to break out my favorite snarky-reply-website, but I really think it needs some airtime.
http://www.letmegooglethatforyou.com/
- written 4 years, 4 months ago – voted for by lazy, Pae - (2 votes) *sigh* another typical problem..
Getting turned down isn’t humiliating. How can it be, when it happens to everyone except people who are so scared that they never take chances?
Talk to him. Ask him out. It is too hard to read minds, and working through friends is only good for creating drama. If he turns you down, forget about him and move on.
- written 4 years, 4 months ago – voted for by Jules22871, RisingHearts - (2 votes) OK, my problem is I cry WAY too easily.
Crying isn’t bad, but it isn’t fun either. My wife cries very easily, and has a hard time stopping. Because I have some background in biomedical neuroscience I have done some specific reading of papers on crying. Here’s what I have learned.
Crying is a response to stress. It can be flavored with any number of different emotions (fear, sadness, happiness, etc) but the essential trigger is stress. If you feel near to crying and something stressful happens you can be sure you will tip over into crying. My wife is afraid of crying and she used to become angry at herself when she cried. This naturally made her cry harder, because anger is stressful. As strong a person as she was, her natural instinct to tense up and force herself to stop crying was only making it worse, because it just strengthened the stress responses that were making her cry. Crying is like sliding in a car on a slick surface — trying to turn out of it right away just makes it worse, but if you turn with the slide you can regain control and stop the car.
Knowing this has helped my wife. She still cries easily (especially when she feels that someone is disapproving of her), but she recovers more easily because she has learned not to berate herself. I used to try to get her to stop crying by addressing the reason she started crying, but now I know that just holding her and giving her time to process her emotion works better. Once she feels calmer and safer, then we can talk about whatever is upsetting her.
The worst is when we beat ourselves up for not being good enough in some unrealistic way. My wife does that a lot. Anger can be hard to let go of, and self-anger is even harder. However, forgiveness and acceptance do the trick.
There are also some things you can do right away to feel better, if you don’t already. Avoid caffeine and energy drinks. Stimulants trigger the body’s stress response by increasing the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, the effect of which which is like getting a small shot of adrenaline. If you cry a lot, you don’t need any more norepinephrine floating around in you.
I say it a lot in different posts, but exercise is as close as you will ever find to a magic cure for intense worry and anxiety. You don’t have to be good at it, just find something that you can do to raise your heartrate for 45 minutes or so, and it will alleviate much of the stress that makes you cry and feel anxious. Running is simplest, but if there is something you enjoy more like dancing, yoga, or skiing, then that is even better.
I know this is a really long post, but I hear a lot of my wife’s experiences in what you said, and I hope that our experiences will benefit you.
- written 4 years, 5 months ago – voted for by Felicity, jclarke21 - (2 votes) Question.
Different people have different ideas about what it means to be an adult. As far as I am concerned, some people never stop behaving childishly. I think that when they take responsibility for their own actions and welfare, and recognize the impact of their actions on other people, they are behaving like adults. Just because a person can “take care of themselves” in the sense of earning enough to pay for rent and food (or cars, or jets, or whatever), it doesn’t mean that they are adult in any emotional, social, or intellectual sense.
- written 4 years, 6 months ago – voted for by Flipsyde, ¡ʎuɐɟɟıʇ - (1 vote) if theres anybody here that has been raped please help me.
Angelica, I am sorry to hear about what was done to you. This is not something that was your fault in any way. Many rape victims initially suffer feelings of shame and self-recrimination like what you have expressed, but you need to know that his actions were his responsibility alone, and he is the one who is to blame. You did not control him — he did what he did all on his own.
You have done all the right things. Talking to the police, posting here to find help, and deciding to see a counselor are all good steps. The important thing right now is to reach out to people who can love and value and support you. The people who suffer the most from rape are the people who keep it a secret, or who are too afraid to ask for help, because secrets isolate us from people who can help us. Although what was done to you is still fresh in your mind, and you still have the bruises, you have already taken the best and most important of all steps to start your healing.
It is normal to be in shock right now. That is the natural first step in processing what was done to you. As you are able to process the events, the next step is probably anger, and the important thing about dealing with anger is to make sure you have someone to talk to. You can talk to us here, and you can talk to a counselor of some kind, and you can talk to your friends and family. A counselor can also help you find other sources of support, such as local groups of people who have dealt with the same types of experiences. The key idea is that you do not want to let your anger be bottled up inside you — you need to be able to talk to work through the anger, because otherwise it can be even more painful.
Hang in there. Let us know how you are doing, and we will do our best to help you through this.
- written 4 years, 1 month ago – voted for by angelica_nelso