warpedellipsis: violent-darts: ... - A Scientist's Thesis

Sunday, June 18, 2017

violent-darts:
jumpingjacktrash:
undastra:
hashtagdion:
My emotions are valid*
*valid does not mean healthy, or good, or to be privileged above common sense and kindness
A distinction for anyone who is young and hasn’t figured this out yet:
You are allowed to have whatever emotions you want. No one can control your emotions. Emotions are healthy responses to things.
You are not allowed to have behaviors that are harmful just because you have certain emotions. Your behaviors are what you can control, and they are far easier to control than your emotions.
You can be jealous about someone or their talents until you turn green, but it is harmful to yourself and to that person if you try to sabotage them because of it. You can be so angry you can literally feel your temperature rise, but this does not give you permission to rage at others.
Your emotions are valid. They are always valid. You are a person of value. However, you behaviors are not always justified just because of those emotions. You may not be able to control you emotions, but you can certainly control your behaviors.
and this one, i beg you to learn before you become right-wing fundamentalists: just because something gives you revulsion feelings does not mean it’s morally wrong.
you may be sex-repulsed; that doesn’t mean sex is dirty and bad. maybe you were bullied by teenage girls; that doesn’t mean teenage girls are a force of evil. perhaps a villain in a work of fiction reminds you of someone who abused you; that doesn’t mean people who enjoy that character or that fiction are abusive. your feelings about those things are absolutely valid, and it’s not right for people to tell you you shouldn’t feel that way. but it’s also not right for you to act out against others based on those feelings.
that instinct to generalize served our species well when we were hunter-gatherers living in small bands in a hostile wilderness. you nibble a delicious-looking berry, you throw up, you know that berry is BAD and you make the yuck face whenever you see it so the other hominids know it’s a bad one. but in the modern world, in the information age, there are so many complex things you might encounter, you’re going to have badfeels about a lot of things that aren’t actually across-the-board bad.
you need to not be ruled by your hominid yuckberry instinct. that’s where bigotry comes from.
Thiiiiis.
Well…things are even more finely distinct than that. if you think sex is dirty and bad, that’s fine, you just can’t project that onto other people and judge them by your feelings. If you want to go so far as to not be around any sort of sex stuff, that’s fine, but you don’t get to say people who do are morally corrupt.
You can avoid people who like that character who reminds you of an abuser. But you can’t call those people abusive or sic the purity police on them.
Etc.
Sometimes it’s good to work on feelings like that though, because they restrict your life and can poison you against people for no positive reason. Feelings are fine if they don’t hurt anyone else, but they can still hurt you.