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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2021-05-06 11:36 pm

Notes for "A Crazy and Drunk Life"

These are the notes for "A Crazy and Drunk Life."


"In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly."
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

"The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.
If you care about something enough, it's going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad."
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

This map shows the Blackfeet Reservation.


Natural Grocers
Natural Foods Grocers-Specialty FoodsVitamins & Food Supplements
2395 Us Highway 93 N
Kalispell, MT 59901
From Business: Natural Grocers is a specialty retailer featuring organic and natural groceries, body care and dietary supplements. We offer affordable prices and free nutrition education.

Natural Food Store in Kalispell, MT
Natural Grocers Kalispell offers the high quality produce, nutrition education, dietary vitamins and supplements, and body care products you want and need. For more than 50 years, Natural Grocers has committed itself to offering the best products at affordable prices as your dedicated community store. Visit us on the corner of Highway 93 and Reserve Drive just 10 minutes away from Downtown Kalispell for fresh, natural groceries you’ll love. For the very best, trust Natural Grocers.
Areas Served
Kalispell, Evergreen, Batavia, Creston, Somers, Whitefish
Departments Offered
100% Organic Produce, Body Care, Books, Bulk Foods, Dairy Products, Dietary Supplements, Frozen Products, Grab & Go, Grocery, Household Products, Organic Pet Products, Meat & Seafood

See the exterior of Natural Grocers. The interior includes a produce section, supplements, and juices among other things. Produce includes apples, live lettuce, pea shoots, winter mix salad with herbs, wheatgrass, and potted mint.

Nuttah is a little over a year old, and still crawling. She can already name several people.

Peer counseling allows people to get advice from someone who has a similar background and/or has faced the same challenges. Warshirt and Many Tongues are both Native American and both veterans, so they can relate to each other better than outsiders. Here is a peer counseling handbook.

Fucking up is just part of life. It happens for a lot of reasons. Know how to handle your fuckups, including in relationships. Accept that other people will fuck up too, because everyone makes mistakes.

Behavior is communication. Typically adults learn to use words for communication, but not everyone learns good communication skills growing up. Trauma further impairs communication. Here is a detailed handbook on problem behavior, its causes and messages, and how to improve it. This is harder to address in adults than in children, but easier if everyone agrees that a given activity is undesirable and should be changed. After thinking about what went wrong, both Warshirt and Spotted Deer would prefer to make some changes.

A key aspect of nonviolent communication is that everyone has needs, and troublesome behavior often occurs while trying to meet those needs. Feelings relate to whether needs are fulfilled or unfulfilled, and can complicate communication, especially if people don't understand their own emotions well. Conflict transformation is another variation of conflict resolution that involves rethinking what has gone wrong and how to fix it, with an eye toward meeting people's needs without violence. Various types of training are available in nonviolent communication. Since Warshirt and Spotted Deer haven't put much mindful thought into considering their needs, they're mostly just reacting and grabbing at the nearest possible solution, which often causes problems. Thinking more about what they need and how to get it safely would help.

There are plenty of brochures about domestic abuse, but they don't cover everything. Here are general, dating violence, and male victim brochures. This page explains different types of abuse. Just as not all unkindness is bullying, it's not all domestic violence either; abuse requires a pattern. One bad incident can lead to more, or it can lead to acknowledging the problem and fixing it.

I found very little aimed at helping people recognize and stop their own violent behavior, and what bits I found were bad. So there's almost nothing for the person who realizes they're being too rough and wants to stop. Notice that there's a huge difference between people who recognize a problem and want to solve it vs. people who won't admit it and think their behavior is fine. Warshirt and Spotted Deer are both unhappy with what just happened, and they don't want that to set the tone for their relationship. Happily, T-America offers a wider selection of materials and something like "How Rough Is Too Rough?" "Could You Be Hurting Someone?" or "When You Are the Abuser" are common inclusions in a set.

There's a very prevalent claim that mutual abuse cannot happen, and that abuse can only occur when one person has power over another. The problem with this is that it happens quite often -- almost every time when two people with crummy backgrounds, unresolved trauma, bad psychological health, and/or poor relationship skills get together. Those people are attracted to each other because they seek familiar situations and because they tend to live in the same places. Getting together does not magically give one person good relationship skills. So broken people together will tend to mistreat each other. Hurt people hurt people. They will make mistakes that healthier people with better relationships skills would not make, or at least make less often. However, they're not doomed to disaster. There are also many reasons why a damaged couple can form a stable relationship. It all depends on whether they realize it when they step on each other, and whether they are willing to work on improving their relationship skills. A relationship skills inventory may help.

Another gap in local-Earth resources is that everything clusters in two areas: dumping a relationship the moment something bad happens, or escaping from a relationship that has become horrifically abusive. They acknowledge that abusive relationships don't start out that way, but that's about it. Nobody seems to talk about the fact that figuring out how to have a functional relationship is hard, especially if you had few or no good examples growing up, or what to do if you lose your shit and then realize that isn't what you want happening in a relationship. It is essential to fix small problems before they become big problems. In this case, Warshirt needs to think about how to prevent fear and anger from turning into physical reactions, Spotted Deer needs to think about healthy boundaries, and both of them would benefit from better communication skills. It's a mess, but it's still a fixable mess at this stage.

Boundaries are necessary for good relationships. Understand the difference between healthy and unhealthy boundaries. Abuse survivors often have an impaired sense of boundaries and thus may need help managing healthy ones. It's important to understand boundaries, know when your boundaries are being violated, and realize that people may not know when they're doing that. One of the more useful tools I've found is this flow chart about analyzing a kink scene gone wrong. While the details don't match this case, it does talk about whether the incident was an accident and how people responded after the fact. These are the kind of questions to ask in a relationship between two damaged people who are trying to get on with life. Many Tongues walks Warshirt through the process of identifying that, while the incident sucked all around, it wasn't a deliberate attack on anyone's part.

There are ways to take care of a drunk person and prevent a hangover.

Passing out in public makes people vulnerable to things like drunk drawing and drunk tattoos. Warshirt is touchy about this due to bad experiences in the past.

Betrayal is a violation of expectations or agreements. It tends to have serious, long-term effects. Warshirt feels betrayed because Spotted Deer did things to him without asking first. Spotted Deer feels betrayed by him smacking her. Understand how to deal with being betrayed and make up for betraying someone.

Trust has multiple aspects and stages. Healthy touch helps it grow. Both Warshirt and Spotted Deer have previously made good progress with trusting each other, but they also have some trust issues from past trauma. There are ways to learn how to trust again. Know how to recognize a trustworthy person, become trustworthy yourself, build trust with other people, and rebuild damaged trust.

Informed consent applies to all contexts, but is most often discussed in regard to medical care and human studies. In this case, the tangled relationship makes consent iffy for Warshirt and Spotted Deer. Everyone just has to do the best they can in that situation, which doesn't turn out very well. Here's a discussion about the spectrum of consent. Advance directives let people specify how to handle specific health issues or situations. A WRAP workbook is good for all kinds of variable situations, and can be adapted to "what to do if Warshirt comes home drunk."

Cultural programs for substance abuse can help with reservation problems. The Red Road is an example from Terramagne-America that Warshirt tried, but all it taught him was that -- at that time -- he wasn't ready to give up drinking.

Negative emotions such as guilt and/or shame are essential to mental health. Guilt prods people to respect social standards. Shame demands that people live up to their own standards. Right now, Warshirt is still furious with Spotted Deer for doing things to him while he was drunk, but he also feels bad about losing his temper, which is a downright miserable combination. Understand how to get over guilt and release shame. You can break the cycle of self-judgement and stop beating yourself up.

Apologies need several parts to be effective. Things will inevitably go wrong between people, and you need to understand how to repair your relationships. Here is an example from the kink community. Follow the steps to earn back broken trust. A significant offense requires a concrete apology, not just idle words.

Forgiveness is distinct from related topics and can be challenging to understand. There are ways to forgive even the unforgivable; understand how to forgive your enemies. However, to reach peace you also need to forgive yourself, so follow the steps for that too.

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