@funereal-disease asked some people on Facebook what kind of environment they needed from a safe space. I thought the responses were really interesting. It seems like you could break down needs from a safe space into a couple categories:
tone: “I need a space where I won’t be scolded for my anger”/”I need a space where people aren’t acting angrily”; “I need a space where you’re expected to communicate compassionately and patiently”/“I need a space where I won’t be punished for being bitter or impatient or unable to extend the benefit of the doubt”; “I need a space where jokes and flippancy are encouraged”/”I need a space where people take the things we’re discussing seriously”.
content: “I need a space where I don’t have to debate whether I deserve to exist”/”I need a space where I can try to explain and empathize with and inhabit the opinions of my political opponents, even where their beliefs are abhorrent and scary”; “I need a space where people like me are not discussed as scary violent abusers”; “I need a space where I can talk about my scary violent abusers”; “I need a space where my religious beliefs will be respected”/”I need a space where I can complain about the religious beliefs that harmed me without worrying about being respectful”.
social rules: “I need it to be easy to leave”; “I need it to be easy to change your mind”; “I need to know that if I make a mistake someone will talk to me in private instead of calling me out in public”; “I need transparency about moderation and what people get banned or excluded for”; “I need to know that if someone harasses me they will get excluded”.
In other words, needs about how to communicate, what to communicate, and how to handle transgressions.
I would be so delighted if instead of ‘this is a safe space’ posters on doors it became conventional to have signs that said “this is a safe space for emotional expression and venting” or “this is a space where harassment procedures have been refined a lot and work really well” or “this is a space where you can express hurtful and wrong ideas and expect people will try to argue with you but not shame you or attack you or exclude you, with an expectation of confidentiality, and with really emphatic moderation on the ‘not attacking people’ rule”.
I guess it’s a little too big to fit on a sign.
This is interesting! And these various dichotemies sum up a lot of what, I personally, run into as difficult with safe spaces, and interacting with people in SJ communities. Theres a lot of ‘seperated by a common language’ that goes on with some of these concepts and I think a lot of these safe space definition incompatibilities sum up a lot of them.
I’ve got a fair amount of thoughts about this. I think that all of these types of spaces are necessary and that explicitly defining what sort of space something is would be a super great thing.
Possibly-obvious corollary, but I feel like it needs to be made explicit:
If your sign says “This is a safe space” without further elaboration, then once people figure out in practice which of these conflicting needs you’re prioritizing and which you’re kicking to the curb, it’s inevitable that some of them will walk away having been told, “Your needs are not safe, you are not safe, and your idea of what safety entails is dangerous and harmful.”
If your sign says “This is a safe space for [group],” then the same thing will happen, except with the added sting of “You are a danger to the very group you’re a member of, and also you’re doing group membership wrong.”
If you’re asking, “Why can’t we make the entire community/school/world a safe space? You, person in charge of [space that exists for a completely different purpose], how dare you not declare this a safe space, how could you be so heartless?” This is why. This is how. One person’s safety is another person’s misery, repression, or even danger, because people’s needs conflict. Wanting to extend the safe space out to blanket the rest of the world inherently means going from telling people “your needs and way of existing are dangerous” to telling people “the dangerousness of your needs and existence means they’re wrong, and anyone who cares about what really matters should forbid them.”
Also:
When you don’t specify what “safe” means and who/what it’s for, people will try to figure it out. Some of them will come to different conclusions than you expected. Obviously this means false positives–people coming into the safe space thinking they’ll be allowed and supported for something you formed the safe space to get away from. But it also means false negatives–people assuming the thing they need will be rejected and labeled “unsafe,” when really you meant nothing of the sort.
The more aggressive you are about expanding the unspecified “safe space” and conflating “unsafe [for this space]” and “not okay,” the more people will hear that as “the way you are, the things you need, the thoughts you’re burning to express, are bad and dangerous and in a just world you’d either be brought into line or kicked out.” Whether your implicit idea of “unsafe” applies to them or not.
Please consider this next time someone reacts to the idea of blanket “safe spaces” with fear or hostility.
Oh, this clarifies some of my issues with the idea of “Tumblr as a Safe Space (for X)”. The way to create a safe space is define the exact kind of safety you’re creating and how, and then invite people who are both interested in that kind of safety and willing to follow the structure you’ve decided on. You can’t come into an existing space you have no authority over and arbitrarily decide it needs to be a specific kind of safe space, then get angry at anyone who doesn’t agree and toe the line.
Which isn’t to say you ever can’t criticise people for being unsafe. But the standards are different.
gifted student™ brains are about as functional as horses when you get right down to it
which sounds like a shit post but consider: horses? hypothetically MADE for running. look at this magnificent muscle beasts. look at those legs. they must be so good at running, right? wrong. horses are fragile as fuck. horses break their gotdamn legs so so easily, and if they break their legs you just have to fucking shoot them. if they run, the thing they are MADE FOR, too fast their lungs will start bleeding. I just googled horses to see if I was missing anything and apparently if they lie down for a day their organs start collapsing or something so they can’t rest from their One Horse Purpose even when they’re hurt. they’re made to do one thing but they can only do it under Very Specific Conditions and if a single thing changes they just die.
which, you know. gifted students™ get applauded for being naturally smart when we’re five or whatever and then develop a terrible inflated sense of self that makes us highly averse to anything we’re not naturally good at, because it challenges our fragile childbrain egos and if we wait too long we’ll develop mental fences around entire subjects and skillsets (mine are math and studying) because we think we’re Bad at them, when in reality we just need to practice but are frustrated by that because it’s harder than being ~naturally talented~ was. we get applauded for doing One Thing but the second we run into slightly different things that our brains don’t comprehend as readily? it’s a Bad Time. I still have so much anxiety over things I don’t feel Naturally Talented at that I’ve been sitting here writing this post for like 10 minutes rather than read the feedback on my religion paper. I got a 100% on it, but I’m still That Scared of anything other than straight heaps of praise because that’s what my childbrain was acclimated to. just send me to the glue factory already.
The thing about learning patterns really quickly is that it lets you learn good things and bad things equally fast. The brain does not discriminate. So I would actually hypothesize that gifted kids are especially prone to learning these maladaptive ideas just because we’re prone to like. Learning, in general. And it only takes a couple people to insist that “you’re smart, you should be able to get it” to internalize it very deeply and then rapidly reinforce that idea through our own propensity to connect and over-connect concepts (and there’s no shortage of unrealistic ideas for a kid to grab onto for reinforcement).
So it’s easy to quickly learn that all addition problems are the same basic problem (more or less okay). And learn that a B is equivalent to an F (not so good). And that being critiqued is similar to/part of getting that B. And that smart people should know things without being like. Taught them. (see also: common sense and why I hate the idea). And then we get the mindset stated above, where criticism = failure = direct attack on identity = glue factory probably.
have those people who are like “poor men under patriarchy!! never allowed to express their emotions!!! :(” ever been in the presence of a man who is frustrated or angry about something because in my experience they express their emotions far too much and scream or break things or kill people
Most of my clients are not unusually repressed. In fact, many of them express their feelings more than some nonabusive men. Rather than trapping everything inside, they actually tend to do the opposite: They have an exaggerated idea of how important their feelings are, and they talk about their feelings—and act them out—all the time, until their partners and children are exhausted from hearing about it all. An abuser’s emotions are as likely to be too big as too small. They can fill up the whole house. When he feels bad, he thinks that life should stop for everyone else in the family until someone fixes his discomfort. His partner’s life crises, the children’s sicknesses, meals, birthdays—nothing else matters as much as his feelings.
It is not his feelings the abuser is too distant from; it is his partner’s feelings and his children’s feelings. Those are the emotions that he knows so little about and that he needs to “get in touch with.” My job as an abuse counselor often involves steering the discussion away from how my clients feel and toward how they think (including their attitudes toward their partners’ feelings). My clients keep trying to drive the ball back into the court that is familiar and comfortable to them, where their inner world is the only thing that matters.
For decades, many therapists have been attempting to help abusive men change by guiding them in identifying and expressing feelings. Alas, this well-meaning but misguided approach actually feeds the abuser’s selfish focus on himself, which is an important force driving his abusiveness.
If you’re autistic and/or have ADHD like me, I recommend switching to ‘Simple English’ when reading lengthy and complex Wikipedia articles because it makes it so much easier to take in, comprehend, and understand
how to do:
On the sidebar on the left, there’s a list of languages listed in alphabetical order, so you have to scroll down a bit to find ‘Simple English’. But even if you can’t, you can just edit the URL from en.wikipedia.org to simple.wikipedia.org
Here’s an example of the difference between English wiki and Simple English wiki:
English:
Simple English:
[Image 1: A lengthy article about Japan in difficult words, with long paragraphs and no pictures.
Image 2: The article about Japan, only now the text has been compressed into a mere two paragraphs and there are pictures visible on the right (the Japanese flag), as well as a table of contents.]
Holy crap this is actually a life saver
This is important and wonderful. Knowledge should be available to everyone. Not just people with the right brainware or educational background.
autistic people using big words and “clinical” sounding language because they feel it to be the most effective means of communication is so often perceived by allistics as pretension. autistics are then made fun of for this use of language which can be incredibly damaging and often causes autistics to retreat further into themselves as any attempts they make to communicate with allistics cause them to be punished
so in general if you don’t like the way someone speaks (especially if you know for a fact that they’re autistic) maybe don’t make fun of them and instead do your best to understand and communicate with them in a way that’s beneficial to you both
me: let’s do something productive
brain: too stressed, can’t focus
me: ok, then let’s do something enjoyable first
brain: can’t do that either, feeling too guilty for not being productive
queerhomestuck 