ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This story is a sequel to "Love Is for Children," "Eggshells," "Dolls and Guys," "Turnabout Is Fair Play," and "Touching Moments," "Splash," and "Coming Around."

Fandom: The Avengers
Characters: Phil Coulson, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanova, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Hulk, Steve Rogers, Betty Ross, JARVIS.
Medium: Fiction
Warnings: Inferences of past child abuse. Current environment is safe.
Summary: Doombots crash a beautiful spring day in the park. The Avengers clean up the mess. This includes Natasha's rather confused longing for something she never had: a birthday party.
Notes: Asexual character (Clint). Aromantic character (Natasha). Asexual relationship. Teamwork. Canon-typical violence. Friendship. Confusion. Hulk is a genius too. Fluff. Making up for lost time. Birthday. Cultural traditions. Games. Gifts. Cake. The cake is never a lie! Tickling. Trust issues. Safety and security. Non-sexual touching and intimacy. Personal growth. Family of choice.

Begin with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.  Skip to Part 8Part 9, Part 10, Part 11Part 12Part 13Part 14Part 15Part 16Part 17Part 18.


"Birthday Girl" Part 6

Phil sat back in his chair and willed his heart to stop hammering against his ribs. He knew how the fight ended. Natasha was upset but uninjured. Steve lay a few feet away on the couch, wounded but recovering at his usual speed. Phil had seen much worse. Even so, it was never easy to watch a scene like that and grasp just how much damage it had done to the team.

Then the Starkpad went dark. Do you concur? (Yes) (No) JARVIS asked. He knew them all well, by now, as well as an artificial intelligence could manage with pervasive awareness of their histories and their steadily improving present. Yet he still asked for confirmation, especially in emotional matters, because his own nature was so different from theirs. He never stopped studying them, never stopped learning, so that he could support them better in the future.

(Yes) Phil replied. He marveled again at how accurate an observation JARVIS could make -- even down to intuiting when to speak aloud and when to send a discreet silent message through the nearest piece of hardware. There are human butlers serving in manors who have less domestic finesse, Phil thought. It made him proud to count JARVIS among his friends.

On the couch, Steve reached for another pillow. He paused, groaning, and wrapped an arm around his healing ribs. The pillow lay just out of reach. Steve gathered himself to try again.

Without a word, Natasha got up and lifted the pillow onto the couch. She tried to tuck it into place for Steve, but didn't find quite the right spot. She had first aid training but no real knack for looking after people.

Steve just smiled and adjusted the pillow a bit. Then he lay back with a sigh. Natasha dipped her head in acknowledgement. Her slim hand ghosted along his shoulder before she returned to her former seat.

Natasha must blame herself for Steve's injuries, Phil realized. Even in the dark room, he took care to keep his worry off his face, lest she misread it as pity. A moment's hesitation out of identification with or concern for someone, and needing a little assistance from a teammate, is nothing to be ashamed of. God, Natasha, you're not a machine.

She had tried to be, though -- tried to recapture the frigid indifference of her time before SHIELD in the belief that it made her a better fighter. It didn't. It undercut her teamwork in ways that Phil still hadn't managed to explain to her fully. A machine would have ignored the civilians in favor of destroying the enemy as efficiently as possible, nevermind the collateral damage. She had, after all, been trained to think of other people as targets or distractions, a habit of depersonalization that proved difficult to break.

Well, this is going to take a while to patch up, Phil concluded.

The screen lit again, discreet white letters saying, Phil, your chili is hot.

Phil put down the Starkpad. He slipped into the kitchen and filled a tray with bowls and spoons and boxes of crackers. He latched the lid on the crockpot and carried everything into the common room, fragrant steam trailing along. The Avengers descended on the feast like a horde of locusts.

* * *

Notes:

Blame causes problems whether directed at self or others. Self-blame undermines the ability to assess yourself accurately. It is particularly common after trauma. Some people consider self-blame a kind of internalized emotional abuse. There are ways to acknowledge and overcome self-blame. The art of self-forgiveness involves setting aside blame and examining things in a more compassionate perspective. There are tips on how to forgive yourself.

Identification with others involves assimilating common traits. Sympathy and empathy are feelings related to the emotions or experiences of other people, providing a positive basis of interaction. Without these factors, people can be indifferent to the harm they do to others. These relate to emotional intelligence, which impacts teamwork (or the lack thereof).

Collateral damage is harm done to other people or things besides the intended target. Some people feel that this concept makes it easier for the military to escape public criticism for carelessness. "There was collateral damage" sounds less ominous than "We hit the ammunition factory and also the hospital standing next to it."

Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder is a variation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, based not on a single major impact but on long-term exposure to harsh conditions. It's the cumulative stress that does damage; like a turbo button, the body's fight-or-flight reflex is meant to be pushed once and released, not pushed and held down. This site about PDSD/PTSD from bullying has a brilliant contrast between mental illness and mental injury, and I'm delighted to see somebody other than me making that distinction. Contrast Natasha with the other Avengers and you can see how the methodical nature of her torment and the length of her captivity created a different pattern of reaction than what appears in the others. As some of you have pointed out, she reads more like a prisoner of war than an abuse survivor.

Depersonalization or demonization is a process of self-delusion, making other people seem less than human. This is a typical practice in war, to make soldiers more willing to kill without hesitation. It's a type of othering. A key drawback is that it also erodes the individual's sense of self, which is also called depersonalization. Often accompanying this is derealization, when the individual feels that the world is distant or dreamlike and nothing matters. This can lead to depersonalization disorder. In regard to the Red Room, this was a feature and not a bug -- torture aims at breaking down the sense of self so that the victim is more easily controlled. Childhood trauma can lead to depersonalization disorder. In particular, look at the scale there and see how the Avengers fall toward the top half for emotional abuse, with Natasha capping out at emotional torture for being forced to harm others. It is possible to cultivate a strong sense of self and to learn sensitivity for other people's feelings.


[To be continued in Part 7 ...]

(no subject)

Date: 2013-04-28 10:32 am (UTC)
gingicat: deep purple lilacs, some buds, some open (Default)
From: [personal profile] gingicat
Continuing to read along. These chapters feel short :)

(no subject)

Date: 2013-04-28 05:40 pm (UTC)
pinkhairedharry: (Default)
From: [personal profile] pinkhairedharry
Jarvis is wonderful.

Re: Thank you!

Date: 2013-08-07 08:05 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
*JARVIS is a superhero in his own right, because it's easy to forget but he's up there running Iron Man along with Tony. Neither of them could do it alone.*

True... But I hadn't thought of it that way...

Wow!

Date: 2013-04-28 05:53 pm (UTC)
ext_1575623: (Default)
From: [identity profile] draggon_flye.livejournal.com
Your research is incredible. I think sometimes I enjoy it as much as the story. That being said, poor Natasha is trying hard, but she is utterly clueless. She honestly doesn't have the information or experience to know what to do.

FYI, I'm watching Iron Man today, learning Tony's backstory.

(no subject)

Date: 2013-04-28 06:30 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Still loving the story. The balance between plot and fluff is wonderful, and I love the way you write the characters. And JARVIS is so lovely!
-A

(no subject)

Date: 2013-04-28 08:44 pm (UTC)
siliconshaman: black cat against the moon (Default)
From: [personal profile] siliconshaman
Sorry I didn't reply to you asking for info on PDSD, I was kinda busy that day and ended up spacing it until just now, inevitable result of low-grade sleep deprivation. [we have a cat who's obsessed with going out and will bang on the bedroom door as soon as the sun rises.]

OTOH, you seem to have found one of the better sites and one that I bookmarked.

(no subject)

Date: 2013-05-08 12:34 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
This anon wants to say thank yo a lot for your stories, and also extra thanks for saying "current environment is safe" because OMG why do people not usually think it's important to say that?? If the tags say "child abuse" but don't say specifically that it's people remembering past experiences I won't read it just in case. And I like that you put all the links after and I can read stuff - you know a lot. I like your stories.

(no subject)

Date: 2013-07-20 05:02 am (UTC)
heartsinger: (Default)
From: [personal profile] heartsinger
Can you explain why distinguishing between mental illness and mental energy is important?

Re: Well...

Date: 2013-07-20 11:26 pm (UTC)
sparklyeevee: (Default)
From: [personal profile] sparklyeevee
Hello, I'm a friend of Heartsinger. It was with my encouragement that she contacted you last night, concerning your somewhat alarming positions on the difference between "mental injury and mental illness", and the categorisation of PTSD as the former, and, as far as I can tell, all other mental health conditions as the latter. I have some concerns about this perspective as expressed both in your response last night and more problematically in the article you used as a source. Some more specific questions, as well as my own counterarguments to much of what was said both in your email and in the article, follow.

On what basis, given the relative newness of psychiatry and the even more extreme newness of decent neuroscience are you comfortable with the assertion that most other mental disorders are permanent? Postpartum depression, postpartum OCD, and postpartum psychosis often aren't. Some although by no means all people with major depression are actually able to go off medication after a couple of years. Anorexia nervosa appears to actually derive mostly from a biological response to starvation that some people are wired for, and if you can get them to eat normally for long enough, goes away without medication or therapy. (I assume you already know medications don't work in most cases, the less popularly known fact is that the "underlying cause" model of therapy doesn't help either, and sometimes makes things worse. Cognitive behavioural therapy can sometimes make a difference, but only if they are also getting adequate nutrition, and getting them adequate nutrition can help even if they aren't also in therapy).

How confident are you in the validity of the article you cited? Personally I think it focused a lot on how Normal (and therefore Not Mentally Ill) someone with PTSD was. I can understand how this might be helpful to someone with PTSD, but the argument struck me as fundamentally ableist and is only reassuring because of the internalised ableist beliefs that most people already carry around. Wouldn't it be more helpful to say "PTSD is curable, let's see what else might be curable!" Rather than "We don't know how to cure most mental illness, and we do know how to cure PTSD, therefore PTSD is not a mental illness, because the fact that we don't know how to cure them right this minute means other mental thingies are not curable?" Distinguishing PTSD from everything else, when mental illness is so stigmatised, may help people with PTSD, but it hurts everyone else with a mental health problem (including those who have both PTSD and another thing), because it serves to exacerbate the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with someone mentally ill, and (in this particular article) to reinforce many damaging and untrue stereotypes. If you want to protect people with PTSD from the stigma of mental illness, maybe focus on changing the culture so there's less of a stigma, rather than saying "we're not like those other people"?

It makes the implicit argument that being sectioned is not stressful, traumatic, or dehumanising for people who are mentally ill, which is of course ridiculous. Moreover it says things like that people with mental illness tend to be unaware that they have a problem (demonstrably untrue), and that people with mental illness are unconcerned with the needs of others and with how their condition affects others, which is also untrue and more than that a pretty horrible thing to say. Same with the idea that mentally ill people tend to be self assured and not have self-esteem problems. These kind of statements may describe the 20ish percent of schizophrenics who are for some reason unaware that they are schizophrenic, and some people with personality disorders (which, by the way, are generally considered to be of exogenous origin, and treatable, if they are treatable at all, with therapy and not medication), but not to the vast majority of people with mental illnesses. To suggest otherwise is untrue, unkind, and will only serve to exacerbate the stigmatisation of mental illness.

You do treat injuries differently than illnesses, and so there is a valid distinction to be made there. But to say that one is a normal response to an abnormal situation, and the other means there is something wrong with you, is patently absurd. Strep throat is an illness. It's a normal response to the situation of Strep A having somehow colonised your pharynx. But you take a course of medication and then it goes away. Hepatitis C is an illness, and an equally normal response to being infected with the Hep C virus, but isn't curable, although it is manageable with medications, as most mental illnesses are currently thought to be. A broken wrist is an injury, and with appropriate treatment generally goes away completely. A knee or back injury though, even if treatment and physical therapy can relieve the acute symptoms, may cause a person problems for the rest of their life. It becomes chronic, but sometimes manageable with medication and lifestyle changes, but is still unquestionably an injury and not an illness. Then take the case of AIDS. Until very, very recently, it was incurable, but could be managed with greater or lesser degrees of success with medication, exactly like most mental illnesses. Now we've cured it in an infant and a couple of adults. Because medical science keeps getting better. There's a case to be made for differentiating between mental health problems of primarily exogenous and primarily endogenous origin, but only to the extent that it affects what the primary avenue of approach for treatment might be.

With all due respect,
SparklyEevee

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