Rhiannon Bacon > Recent Status Updates

Part of the reason you sometimes feel crazy is because you've likely been taught to seek balance. There's definitely a place for balance-seeking...But balance is not how a healthy nervous system operates. Rather than a static nervous system, a dynamic system is the goal. A dynamic system is capable of change and smoothly transitions between active and resting states.

Trauma is not an illness – it is an injury and it can heal.

When you start feeling sick...you stay hydrated and rest. You don't think, 'This is just who I am.'

The thinking of [the 1500s] also produced a belief that persists to this day—the belief that feeling stuck is due to laziness or lack of motivation. Somehow, despite centuries of progress, laziness continues to be the shaming and judgemental explanation for science-based behavior. Lazy is a moral judgement—not a biological reality.

He respected his cats more than people: they didn't respond to love, or to efforts at care; they simply demanded their due.

You can experience genuine joy only to the degree that you understand and accept all parts of yourself. Unaddressed grief, unresolved anger, relational conflict, and unhealthy habits can all contribute to feeling stuck. Decode your brain, develop boundary-setting strategies, and regain your ability to live an authentic life. When you understand the language of stuck, you can quickly find resources.

CBT is a mind-based solution that uses the power of thoughts to change feelings. Body-based therapies use the power of feelings to change thoughts. We need both.

If you never start doing things, you can numb out by fantasizing about "someday" doing things.

Depression is often a signal point TO a problem, not the problem itself. Both anxiety and depression are efforts by your brain to protect you from harm.

There are no negative emotions. There are uncomfortable and scary emotions, but even our most unpleasant emotions have an important function... Until you believe that getting unstuck will be worth the fear of facing your emotions, you'll continue to stay stuck.

Our brains are wired for survival, not happiness. Our nervous systems are trained to conserve as much energy as possible. Staying stuck is an efficient use of resources when the goal is survival. Staying stuck is problematic when the goal is productivity. Understanding the perks of staying stuck is the first step toward change.

Instead of judging your behavior, you need to get curious about it. Curiosity is fuel for the change process. When you can observe your behaviors with curiosity, it's easier to see their benefits. Understanding the function of a behavior is the key to changing it.

Don't feel like you have to deal with everything at once. If numbing out safely helps you make it through the day, enabling you to take care of your responsibilities, you're allowed to numb. We all need a numb-out session periodically.

Many initially balk at the notion that feeling like an anxious wreck is a sign of strength. But it takes a herculean amount of strength to tolerate the feeling of anxiety–and an even greater amount of courage to listen to the message of anxiety. [It's] more convenient than ever to run from the quiet inner voice of truth. It is not a sign of strength to be numb. It is not a sign of weakness to feel emotional pain.

We need to ask not what is wrong with anxiety but what is right about it... Anxiety does not need to be "fixed" – it needs to be understood.

Anxiety is not intended to hurt you but to help you if you're unsafe or veering away from authenticity. Limping after you twist your ankle isn't a disease – the pain is a signal that an injury needs attention. Instead of viewing anxiety as a disease, look at it as a signal; this is a more effective framework for getting unstuck.

Trying to "get rid of" anxiety is as counterproductive as trying to disable the check-engine light on your car

"If you feel guilty because 'other people have it worse,' remember – perspective is helpful, but comparison is not."

'...how attentive have we been to the types of black queerness that foreground an anti-normative posture in an effort to resist "queer" as a handy replacement for increasingly unwieldy umbrella acronyms?'

"Even in our modern age, when science and technology have ostensibly taken over from superstition and irrationality, people still continue to see the Little People – and the Little People are still dancing."

"Blackness unravels the teleology of man."

'The world,' he said, 'grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency.' — The Phantom Coach, Amelia B. Edwards

"Blackness unravels the teleology of man."

"This was a time when 'queer' was a term being mobilized and emerging in academic discourse. The term 'queer' troubled lesbian and gay studies, as it asked the field to account for more than nonnormative sexualities. Queer named compulsory heterosexuality, a result of nuanced interlocking of webs of power that relied on patriarchy and a rigid gender binary."

"I open with my own personal story about my experience as a black trans man in a lesbian space as a jumping off point to think more seriously about the ways in which trans--as identity, trope, analytic--might be a productive way to trouble the waters of black sexual and gendered relations. More specifically, I want to explore trans as a productive site of possibility..."

"Contemporary scholars tend to conflate identity with oppression and thus see the former as something that must be overcome, ultimately reproducing colorblind logics while making way for the triumphant progress narratives of liberalism. Ernesto Martinez critiques what he calls "antirealist" stances that understand racialized personhood as only and necessarily a form of subjection."

"Here I want to propose a Black/queer rhizomatic agencement as well as demonstrate a Black/queer rhizomatic way of seeing and saying. In nature, rhizomes arise from underground or underwater connections/roots/routes that are neither limited to one place nor destined to go in only one direction. The rhizomatic thus represents a queer temporality and sociality that is processual... Form rhizomes and not roots."

"John D'Emilio points out that the riots at the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, while holding mythic status as the turning point in the gay liberation movement, were barely noticed by most of the country and did not result in sweeping policy change. The 1990s, he argues, saw the symbolism of Stonewall manifest in material gains for queers in the areas of representation (print, TV, film), same-sex corporate benefits..."

My colleagues and I were 9 to 5 psychologists: we came to work every day and we did our psychology, just like you would do insurance or auto mechanics, and then at 5 we went home and were just as neurotic as we were before we went to work.

You know very little about how you are able to generate language. Yet you speak a language that has grammar and syntax. There's a group of people called transformational linguists who have figured out what those rules are. They haven't figured out anything to DO with that but transformational grammarians are unconcerned. They are not interested in the real world, and having lived in it I can sometimes understand why.