How do people manage to not let outrageous things impact your cognitive energy too much, or bother you too much.
Often reading something outrageous is so much cognitive exertion it can make me crash due to the emotional response.
By outrageous, I mean in general psychosocial interpretations of ME/CFS that cause so much suffering, what is happening in the US right now, things like that?
I want to be at a stage where stuff like that is “water off a duck’s back”, ie. I’m able to keep an emotional response to a minimum, without having to personally avoid it because I don’t want to be oblivious to all the suffering and ways we’ve been wronged.
I’m finding this an impossible balance to keep.
I thought after a while I’d get used to it, but it’s been two years of basically near constantly reading about Psychbehaviouralists inducing great suffering on pwME and it still outrages me.
it's maybe different for me because that's what nearly everyone I meet is polluted by, so there is some sense of validation of at least knowing it is their delusion and where it has come from. I had years of not knowing why I was being treated the way I was by most around me and what was wrong with them, so there has been some relief in seeing that it isn't an accident and they were just being taught/programmed in it.
And I've had this young, so only been treated with respect when I've bargained with the devil to hide it and 'act normal' and even to do so am required to bigot myself (to not give it away) by being self-deprecating to things that were disability rather than personal flaw - and the pressure requiring me to do that and give up most rights have been extreme and without pause. ie none of this is really a shock, it just explains people to me.
I get some relief of seeing it as hopefully one day these people writing their own bigotries down (which means they can be dissected and unpicked in a way it is hard when you are talking to someone and they are undermining you or saying something inappropriate, to get under the skin of where that came from) means that history will maybe look back, hold up a mirror, and rename psychosomatic literature as a relic in how bigots deluded themselves for a good historical lesson of how people came up with excuses to justify what I don't think is much different to a nasty combo of misogyny and disablism underneath it. ie I sort of see it as propaganda and focus on the job of picking apart the sophism, methods and where it doesn't add up.
I also remember when I was doing my degree about how for the science of psychology they noted there were certain areas that weren't
really psychology but got included under the term in order that they were analysed. The line said by one of the module leaders was 'there are some areas of psychology that are hounded out by science proving against them, and then every few decades they just regroup and come back again and the job has to be done again'. So I know how their 'notions/beliefs' and standard of work have been seen as a joke subject/laughed/marvelled at before and assume one day it will revolve back there.
So I guess I've always been a bit sanguine to it and think of it as an issue about/problem with them rather than us. I also find it being written down at least gives us a roadmap to unpick what some might have as deep held 'isms' but don't really explain or even ask themselves the 'why' on.
ie I guess that because of my background it is because I'm actually not realising it is different to others when I look at it because I'm actually studying 'them' [the writers] and seeing it as a straightforward psychology methodology and/or marketing task. I forget that I'm supposedly the object. What I do get frustrated by is why others do the emperors new clothes on these things because looking at most of them they are so blatantly poor the only conclusion for these people making such a good living from them is others choosing not to look (and it isn't even too closely).
SO I almost see it as my job to where I can spend to few minutes to open it and write the one-liner pointing out the switch-and-bait/normally obvious flaw. I guess just as so many people will write a review for an item that didn't cost them much and they won't buy again but feel it is the right thing to do for all sorts of reasons.
I also have learned that most of their papers if they are at least up to the level they've tried to put in some sort of research under the propaganda lines (some just seem to be manifestos of ideas without any actual experiment) that it doesn't tend to take me more than a 5min scan of the common areas where the significant 'major faults' are likely to be in order to write them off.
A recent example was when I finally found the link that led me to the full paper (normally the bit that takes longer than finding the faults once there) I realised the claims in the abstract were based on interviews with just 3 people who had done the actual intervention and follow-up. Going straight (particularly on retrospectives) to the chart in the method/results where you see the drop-out process tends to be revealing of how they Krypton-factored a survival of the fittest process to filter out those illest then claim the reason the end group was 'more well' was their treatment. Or they just straight off take the results that they actually got then misrepresent them in the abstract.
SO it makes me realise how happy/chosen dumb most who are reading them are that they aren't taking 2mins to just notice particularly that last one by looking at the results section itself.
And I guess it gives me some comfort to know that those who I'm surrounded by are just choosing to either be swindled or really don't know what they are doing at all and susceptible to words they don't check the authenticity of ie I'm superior to them either in intelligence and/or morals,
so yes I read it looking down on/to look down on (and tut at) these people who write it and read it with belief and definitely on those who reference it. Or because those people think they are so busy they can't so I'm hoping that I make it easy/more possible for them, particularly if they are having to stand up to bosses who are just parroting one-liners that no longer add up.
