Tips for not wearing out your welcome

[surreality]

@Groth ...again, you are dead wrong. Just... completely and totally wrong.

"Join the fucking club!' --> NOT MOCKERY. It is an expression of 'everyone has that problem right now'. WHICH IS ALSO NOT MOCKERY OH MY ACTUAL GODS WHAT THE FUCK.

BEING DENIED EMOTIONAL SUPPORT OR EMPATHY IS NOT MOCKERY. BEING DISMISSED AS THE QUOTE DESCRIBES IS NOT MOCKERY OR ABUSE OF ANY KIND.

Again, Sunny gets it. I have zero clue where you're coming up with this mockery shit. I have even less of a clue where you're coming up with this:

@Groth said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

people on this forum keep inventing excuses to not care about people on the spectrum

There are not special rules for me because of my depression, anxiety, social anxiety, ADD, PSTD-inducing life trauma(*), or isolation. I don't get a different set of rules to go by that make allowances for those things. You seem to be arguing that we should have a special set of rules for folks on the spectrum, allowing them to do things no one else is permitted to do, and not being reprimanded for things anyone else would be. That would be the special exception here, not 'everyone has to follow the rules and if they can't, they can't be here'.

I don't get to have an anxiety day and go on a hate-filled screed on a public channel. I don't get to have a panic attack and verbally rip the head off of someone -- even if something that person did IC or OOC is what triggered a PTSD flashback and the panic attack.

I am still absolutely responsible for all of those behaviors and I don't get a pass on them, even if they are not within my direct control.

• Some games DO have some trauma triggers they allow people to opt out of, such as rape policies. That isn't 'about me' any more than it's also about 'oh god not this again' from plenty of people who have not gone through that. Plenty of other traumas don't get a pass.

[mietze]

I think you might be surprised to find out how many people on the forum are on the spectrum, or have a close relationship with someone that does.

It still does not mean that folks will not be shown the door for inappropriate behavior.

You can have empathy for someone's struggle or having been there yourself, and still show them the door when their behavior gets to the point it is detrimental to others on your game or more than you can handle.

As I have said it isn't fair. But it also is not kind to tell people that they should expect accommodations from places that are extremely unlikely to give them.

Is there any reason why you do not organized a game that can accommodate behavioral issues to give those that cannot or will not learn to moderate them, perhaps with more concrete and published boundaries, a mu they can play on that where behavior won't be a stumbling block? Seems like you are passionate about the subject, have ideas on how others should do this, and seem willing to tolerate a lot of behavior others wouldn't. Why don't you step up? Maybe if you showed others it could be done and how, people might be willing to try your strategies once they see it in action and working.

Because it is also the case that many people do try, but have limited success, especially when the behaviors involved are lashing out, or extreme emotional distress or neediness coupled with angry lashing out when someone puts down a boundary.

[Roz]

what in the world--

[surreality]

@Roz ...my thoughts exactly.

[Sunny]

I don't have enough spoons for me right now. Every day. I don't even have enough for me, let alone my family, my friends, or my job.

'Strangers in online spaces' don't get any of them right now. There are moments I feel bad about that, but the world we're living in right now is REALLY hard.

[Groth]

@Sunny said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

Not having the skills or ability or capacity to deal with something isn't the same as not caring about another human being.
"Join the club" is not mocking; it's a frustrated expression of 'yes I am feeling that way, too'.

What I'm trying to get across is that you're not feeling the same thing. While there exist a shared cause in isolation, it's a very different kind of situation.

Whatever frustration or suffering you may feel over not being able to do the things you're used to doing or meeting the people you're used to meeting. They're not the things someone like me feels because I wasn't doing those things or meeting those people in the first place.

For someone like me the struggle is more fundamental, it's things like 'How do I connect to another human being at any level?'. 'How do I maintain a relationship of any kind?'. It's hard for me to empathize with a lot of the frustrations expressed in relation to social distancing because they involve feelings and experiences I have not been capable of having. It doesn't make them any less real but I think it's clear it's a very different kind of experience, not in the sense that one of them is more severe then the other but rather in the sense that the problems and frustrations are different and can't be directly compared.

[Sunny]

@Groth

You're missing the part where it doesn't matter if the suffering is the same thing or different. It's not a competition. The fact is, what people are dealing with makes them less capable of dealing with this (or anything) right now.

ETA: It literally does not matter if the sensation is pain in the foot or pain in the hand. It is pain. That is what people are trying to explain. "Join the club" is the cry of a man with a broken foot to the man yelling about his broken hand. Which break is more severe? That matters to a doctor. It does not matter to the social circle involved.

[Cupcake]

I understand your situation, I really do. There's a point in the particular cocktail of mental health problems where you even think you're objectively viewing your behavior and you're not, and you literally do not understand why you get the kinds of responses from others that you do. It's been happening to me for literally decades.

Then I stopped choosing to be frustrated, and started asking myself why this was happening. I went (and still go to therapy), I do my best to recognize bad patterns, and I know that I will fuck up without meaning to, and understand that I need to acknowledge it when it happens, make amends, and forgive myself when it does. I'm still working on it, I'll always be working on it.

And it's not all universal. In the past year I got page-banned by someone completely out of the blue, without any reason given - and when I tried to figure it out on my own, I wasn't correct, though I still took responsibility for a choice I realized was wrong, and as someone with anxiety, having people freeze you out without knowing why is the worst thing. Funnily enough, the issue was less about me and more about them in the end - I had triggered them in a way I literally had no idea about. But the situation left a bad taste and I couldn't continue on the game because of it.

That said? If staff did their due diligence, they at least took the time to tell you why they made the decision to ban you. They may even have tried to correct your actions prior to banning you and giving you some form of heads up/warning to course correct. And yeah, some staff are just assholes, but that is not often the case, especially now in the later years of mushing for most of us.

The best advice I can give you is to bear in mind that while mushing can be helpful, it doesn't replace therapy or psychiatric care. If you are behaving in a manner that leaves you feeling less in control (and negative experiences can certainly make that spiral hard), best to step away for a while, and talk to someone, preferably an expert, about why things occur for you the way they do. Take responsibility for your choices, acknowledge what leads you down such a path, and make the effort to improve.

[saosmash]

@groth You have no idea what someone else is feeling; you don't know their trauma or their disorders. You can only interact with them according to your own capacity. Your assumptions here about the suffering of others are frustrating because many, many people on this forum struggle with various kinds of disorder.

Empathy does not require commonality of experience - it is empathy. I can respect, even understand, the feelings and emotions of someone different from me without experiencing them. Many people have great capacity for empathy and imagination. When I can't, I can recognize the limits of my own perceptions and still recognize the validity of their emotions and feelings.

I can empathize with another person whose struggle is wildly different from my own. That empathy does not require that I twist myself into a pretzel trying to subordinate my needs to theirs.

It's not anyone's job but my own to manage my mental health. And in my experience, people attempting to use MU** as their therapeutic outlet - it's as unhealthy for them as for everyone around them. It not only isn't fair to the rest of the game, it doesn't work.

[Sunny]

My issues don't trump the safety of the other people on any given game. Period.

[Groth]

All I'm asking you is to stop making light of a disability and inventing justifications for making light of a disability. It's really not that high of a bar.

[Sunny]

@Groth

Nobody is making light of a disability.

ETA: Expressing shared frustration, even if you don't feel like somebody has a right to that feeling, is not making light of something.

[Groth]

@mietze said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

I think you might be surprised to find out how many people on the forum are on the spectrum, or have a close relationship with someone that does.

It still does not mean that folks will not be shown the door for inappropriate behavior.

You can have empathy for someone's struggle or having been there yourself, and still show them the door when their behavior gets to the point it is detrimental to others on your game or more than you can handle.

As I have said it isn't fair. But it also is not kind to tell people that they should expect accommodations from places that are extremely unlikely to give them.

Is there any reason why you do not organized a game that can accommodate behavioral issues to give those that cannot or will not learn to moderate them, perhaps with more concrete and published boundaries, a mu they can play on that where behavior won't be a stumbling block? Seems like you are passionate about the subject, have ideas on how others should do this, and seem willing to tolerate a lot of behavior others wouldn't. Why don't you step up? Maybe if you showed others it could be done and how, people might be willing to try your strategies once they see it in action and working.

Because it is also the case that many people do try, but have limited success, especially when the behaviors involved are lashing out, or extreme emotional distress or neediness coupled with angry lashing out when someone puts down a boundary.

It's not about tolerating more behaviors. No matter how deep your understanding and patience of whatever issues someone may have, you can't run a functional game if people can't behave within a certain standard and quite frankly there's nothing about being on the spectrum that makes it particularly hard to follow reasonably clear rules. My problem isn't with people being shown the door if they're unable to behave, my problem is with the flimsy justifications I keep seeing for treating them badly before and after they're shown the door.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Tinuviel said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

@A-B said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

These things are basically my entire social life.

Seriously, don't do that. These things are social, sure, but they cannot replace actual spaces designed specifically for social interaction. They're not that. Make friends, sure, but don't devote your entire life to these things. They are temporary, and your time on them might be even more so.

Just chipping in to say that for some disabled or chronically ill people, at least, that's not really a choice that exists. Not pertaining directly to the situation here which I know nothing about -- just noting that to some of us, online communities are our social interaction. That's definitely not a healthy or desirable situation, but it is how it is.

It still doesn't mean that other players or staff are anyone's unpaid volunteer therapists, though.

[Please Delete]

This post is deleted!

[Groth]

@RDC said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

@Groth I feel like it would really benefit you to stop, take like half a day, come back tonight or tomorrow to re-read this series of replies, and then gauge whether it benefits you or not to keep replying to this series of comments.

It doesn't benefit me but I have this very faint hope that MSB may one day become ever so slightly less shitty to people who struggle with understanding social cues instead of reveling in it like it's some kind of virtue.

[Please Delete]

This post is deleted!

[A. B.]

Shite, shite, shite. I did not mean to start this.

[Groth]

@A-B said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

Shite, shite, shite. I did not mean to start this.

Picking fights over tangential points of principle is what I do, don't worry about it.

[mietze]

@Groth it also can be a real shitty way to treat people, too.