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Hilary's avatar

I’ve started to get to a place in my life where I have a knee jerk anger response to anything that reads to me like asking individuals to solve systemic problems. Of course some individual choices in life truly matter, but it really seems so many of these things are just planted by the powers that be to make us all messes of anxiety and thereby distract us from the real, large scale issues that we face. Issues, of course, that can only be solved by political change and collective action.

A recent example that comes to mind was an article a week or two ago in the NYT from some researchers arguing that typical metered dose inhalers for asthma control are a contributor to climate change, and all asthmatics should switch to inhalation powders.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been dealing with a post-COVID asthma flare for weeks now, but I just about lost it. Perhaps metered dose inhalers are bad for the climate, I don’t know, but it’s hard for me to believe they are a more significant factor than the under regulated contributions of industry and big ag. So what purpose does it serve to make people who are just trying to be able to breathe feel guilty every time they use the medication that keeps them alive?? Just diet culture in another form. Aggggghhhhhh

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Elizabeth's avatar

I’m a therapist and much of what is named here - the rigidity, the perfectionism, the absolutes - line up with what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) calls “unhelpful thinking styles.” White supremacy enforces all these thinking styles and benefits from them; but they also show up because of trauma and mood disorder. Using a chart of CBT unhelpful thinking styles is a great way to start identifying them. In CBT, the step after identifying them is to notice how thinking that way makes us feel, engaging with the thought and questioning it, and trying to come up with a more realistic version (instead of “only native plants can be planted in my garden” CBT might have us shift to “I’d like to plant more native plants”). As a resource for anyone interested, here’s the unhelpful thinking styles chart I use with clients: https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/unhelpful-thinking-styles/

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