Racism CBT pie chart

 

Racism Pie Chart

 

bad slices: systemic, privilege from history, appropriation and betrayal, personal discrimination and ignorance

good slices: education and appreciation, service and giving, friendship and justice, mutual suffering

 

other: OCD

Well everyone, this post is a little out of the ordinary, but I want to share something that really helped me have a more reasonable picture of my own guilt and innocence in regards to racism and the accusations that are mixed in our culture.  I am very affected by it and have had to face the issue a lot while navigating life in New York City during social work school, volunteering, and living in my neighborhood where I am a minority but still part of a powerful majority in the surrounding culture of United States, at least so far. Racism can be as simple as not discriminating, or it can be as complicated as a whole economy and history.  

 

 Anyway, it has driven me crazy as I constantly either mentally defend myself, change allegiances in my mind, manage mental illness symptoms, and try to avoid hurting people.  

 

So I just wanted to share a tool that helped me not keep blaming myself for all the world’s problems in an irrational way. 

 

This is adapted from CBT pie chart ideas that help people avoid “all or nothing” logical mistakes and “black and white thinking.”  I think some people have had to think literally about black and white for all their lives and they want for other people to also have to deal with the racial suffering.  So in a way I will gladly take my share of it, but in another way, I think I have to literally draw the line and say okay, I am not going to throw my life away because of guilt and I am going to try to find some sanity in my life and social participation.

 

So I made a racism pie chart for myself, to see where I am bad or good, and to try to get at least a snapshot of a view that is more complex than just thinking I am bad or good, which usually makes me feel pretty bad.  

 

The yellow dots are just on the sections where it is positive things that can help people.  For this chart, you can see that I am probably just over the majority line in terms of being better at helping than hurting, though the OCD slice could sometimes be a problem instead of a good sign of caring about how my thoughts affect other people. 

 

I don’t think this chart is exactly representative of me but it is a sample of how people could assess themselves and see that really, racism probably is a major problem that needs to be personally fought against as much as possible every day, but also is part of a complex life where goodness is bound to prevail.

 

I just want to say, too, that is chart is not exactly accurate for me and just an idea that I am sharing for other people who might have some more extreme slices in either direction as the ones I have mentioned in this chart.

 

One other thing to notice about it is to think about which things are the things I have control over. I have a lot of control over thoughts and judgment but not total control. I have a lot of control over what I read and media but not total control. I do not have much control over history but I have some say in what I do with my benefits from it. I have some control of system participation but some is kind of forced compared to how some of the good slices would shrink if I refused to participate by going to jail or killing myself.

 

I think the slice I did for resentments and ignorance is actually a bigger percentage than what I have in real life but I think this ends up being kind of the defining slice where people really need to try to overcome that side of themselves while working hard to expand some of the other positive slices.

A funny way to make OCD problems worse

Well hi everyone, today I was going to post an e-book on my e-book site but decided to wait.  And for a while I did not know what to do, and I started eating some fortune cookies that I ordered from Wal-Mart during the quarantine, and found that it was kind of a funny thing to do during a spell of OCD.  The first fortune I read said “bide your time and success will be soon” or something like that.  Which, if I applied it to my decision process about posting the book or not, it really could be interpreted either way. It also adds another mental health challenge that would have to do with religion problems, where I would have to figure out the sane way to think about how fortune cookies probably aren’t necessarily a message from God, and probably not automatically the opposite of a message from God either.  And thankfully my OCD was not that bad so I didn’t really have trouble deciding whether it was okay to eat fortune cookies in the first place like is that linked to a wrong kind of magical thinking.  Anyway that is kind of funny.  And I texted two different friends to ask their opinion of the book cover and then had to think about well what if I had not texted them.  But now I feel total peace about waiting to publish the book later. I think I waited past the original planned day for the other two in this set, too, so that makes me feel more certain. Well have a nice day everyone.

Distorted Realities

Well everyone, here is another topic that I could just start rambling about when there really could be a nice article about it.  But I will still just say the simple thing which is about CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The idea is that people have “cognitive distortions” where negative things in their mind have become exaggerated and there are illogical thoughts that cause bad emotions.  And if people are restored to the more reasonable truth about things, then some of their pain would go away. It is a famous therapy from being so effective and it is interesting to read about during times of relative sanity. But I just want to say that I think sometimes the distortions in question are actually created in reality, and people’s catastrophic overgeneralizations, such as “nothing I do is good enough,” or things like jumping to a conclusion where you think that things can’t possibly go right, have actually been established for real in peoples’ lives.  So when they make those complaints, there might be some truth to it because of other people’s bad treatment.  And because of one of the actual bad cognitive habits of self-blame, the interpretation of people’s thoughts as automatically being wrong becomes another layer of fallacy where the patient is taking the blame for things that other people have had more to do with than anyone realizes.  I think that CBT can still help for people with trauma or stress, because basically these distortions have become learned, so the beliefs themselves can be untangled to bring relief.  However, if this component where the truth of the problems does not get understood, then to me the CBT itself becomes both another set of distortions, and another unreasonable aspect of reality that pressures people’s mental strength into cracking. Do you guys see what I mean? I am saying that every single one of those illogical habits from the CBT lists are absurdities that can take place in real life. And to assume that a mentally ill person has simply misperceived their reality to the point of insanity might actually be a misperception that itself would be seen as the most damaging distortion, other than the truly outrageously preposterously warped and twisted circumstances that cause people to break in permanent ways.

The Irony of Lacking Accommodations

Something I have experienced that is very common and defining for a lot of people with mental illness is the phenomenon of mostly doing what I am supposed to while a lot of sane people near me don’t do what they are supposed to and rely on everyone assuming that I am the one being bad because I have mental illness. Many of my friends are heroically and conspicuously not guilty of that offense, but that common problem should not be underestimated as an extreme source of additional damage to already suffering people. The fact is that when people’s brains have various problems, ranging from slight quirks and imbalances to severe damage, it creates a challenge to keep previous standards, and especially to match the ways other people are used to living and expect everyone to conform to. So, we appear to be habitually in error but are often spending a hundred times the effort of most people to do our responsibilities and help others. Meanwhile, people with a fraction of our challenges flail around without even an inkling that there might be a worthy mission or even basic decency to dedicate their own rich life to. These kinds of mistakes can be grown out of and unlearned, and people with disabilities themselves are often the most likely people to see through external trappings of social norms and superficial tickets to acceptance. However, the true blindness to right and wrong remains a problem that will eventually be reckoned with on a scale of eternal exposure and significance. 

It simply is the definition of injustice to spend years accommodating other people’s ignorance and selfishness while they refuse to accommodate my disability that is already reduced 80 percent by my own symptom management. And then that I would show up to church as a depressed person and be viewed automatically as morally inferior while already putting up with an irony that cruel in my daily life is an embarrassment too unspeakable and shameful to represent a whole culture. And yet it may never be lived down.

Think about that for a second in terms of accommodation that supposedly is required by law.  In a way, it is probably measurable, whether people know it or not.  And if the reality is that people who have it pretty easy can’t adjust their lives and treatment of others to offer a mere 5-10 percent of patience, but people like me are literally adapting to life with severe constant impairment that requires an 80 percent change in how we would prefer to behave, or even more than a hundred percent and exponential if you consider accumulative effects of things like attendance, staying alive while suicidal, and working at all when the pay is a third of what we should be making, then the question falls back to the healthy people who might be not only refusing a minimal amount of effort to include all people, but might actually be doing worse than that and spending close to a hundred percent of their whole life not caring at all about their impact on any part of the whole world.  That can be seen as a spiritual problem to be pitied above and injury or illness, but I think in the long run, it is more likely to show itself as a moral problem that goes tolerated far too much and with a cost that exceeds any basic consideration that the whole sum of disabled people have ever begged for in a state of rejection and torture.