I wonder if that injury is identical to the one actual toedad had. That can’t be good to dream about something like that, even if it was someone you hate.
I think we can agree it was. In the pertinent comics (which ran from story arc (which ran April 24 and 25, 2020) we see Blaine threatening Toedad with a hammer, then a bloody hammer. Then, when Toedad comes back into the fight, Blaine comments that “your skull’s just that thick”.
So yeah – it would appear that Toedad was killed in the basement, by Blaine, with the hammer to the head.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Disagree. It was Colonel Mustard, in the study, with the candlestick!
Bear in mind that this is the start of a new book, so there’s a non-zero chance that somewhere in the future, at some bookshop or con, this will be someone’s THIRD DoA strip.
IKR! I wanna recommend the comic to others but I wasn’t happy with the idea of them starting on whatever that day’s comic is with no context (because they’d just be way less invested in the characters), and while some people might do what I did (read the entire thing over 3 days, for like 8 hours a day, when I had some time off) …most people ain’t doing that :’D
so I made a list of suggested jumping off points! ^_^ to future readers, if this is your third ever DoA strip, maybe try one of these starting places instead!
Book 1-1: Moving In Day. Just reading the whole dang thing 😀 Fair warning the art is simpler & less polished, and there’s quite a bit of casual ableism and fatphobia that is mostly gone by chapter 2. Also since Joyce is coming out of a very White Evangelical bubble, you might find her very cringe inducing at first – people do be like that when first stepping out of such a bubble, so trust me that she’ll get better with time but if ya can’t handle it then try one of the next suggestions.
Book 1-6: Yesterday was Thursday, specifically “Continue” (25/8/2011). Good cold open to quickly clue you in on who’s who, and ya get good context for the DeSantos, two ships and a significant story point
Book 2-6: Strange Beerfellows. The art has improved, and ya get context for two ships
Book 3-2: Guess Who’s Coming To Galasso’s. The art has improved, context for three ships, and it builds nicely into 3-4 which is a very significant chapter story-wise. 3-2 is also when hovertext starts getting added, and much of it is delightfully funny or provides more context and it all adds greatly to the comic 🙂
Book 5-1: When Somebody Loved Me, if you’re really short on time Boundaries (26/10/2014) is where the story shifts. I’d recommend the whole chapter as you get backstory, and context for three ships, but if ya low on time, Boundaries marks a point where the story shifts significantly for Joyce specifically.
Book 10-4: Is a Song Forever, very specifically “Transformative” (September 5th 2020). Starting here will mean you miss out on so much context for *major* story moments, ships & character growth. But I’d say this represents currently the latest place I think I can recommend you jumping in and still being able to get thoroughly invested, plus that specific comic (“Transformative”) has a very very nice group-shot, followed by some simply *gorgeous* art that represents a time-skip of a few months. You will however encounter spoilers for previous books in joining this late in the series.
After the kidnapping incident, we got two most traumatized colleagues from the entire gang: Ethan e, now, Dorothy. I understood Ethan’s pain, but my heart sank for her. She’s already doing therapy, right? How could she be the most devastated one?
Because it unfortunately might harm her politically. Like, look at how John Fetterman has been treated.
tunasammich
I’m old so I think of how Dukakis was treated for getting psychotherapy
Taellosse
The supersized part of that whole episode is it was MRS. Dukakis who’d been receiving treatment for depression, not even the Dukakis that was actually running for office.
Eagle Rock
You youth! I can remember Eagleton.
Wizard
I’ll see your Eagleton and raise you a Daniel Ellsberg. Not exactly the same since he wasn’t running for office and the info wasn’t actually used against him. Still, the Plumbers did break into his psychiatrist’s office to look for potentially compromising information.
Nothing about ableism is healthy. I assume by that you mean the dosage that’s baseline for white folks who’ve long known bigotry as exclusive to the domains of deliberate cruelty and interpersonal violence.
LiamKav
I assume that was a slightly sarcastic “healthy” as in “a large amount” rather than “the amount you should have to live a good life”.
think of “a healthy dose” in this context more as healthy for the “dose” than the recipient – as in Dorothy’s share of ableism is robust enough to remain viable under many conditions.
Suzi
“A healthy dose” is sometimes used tongue in cheek to mean “excessively large” – it’s not always in a negative context (for example, while needing comfort I will say I need a healthy dose of comfort) but can b, such as in this context.
I don’t know him very much, like he got lot of health issues. Is there chance of information leak? Or did I miss the real issue?
AY
He had a stroke, so that got a lot of people angry even after he was cleared. But then he suffered from depression and chose to pursue treatment, and that made a lot of people even MORE angry. For some reason. For some reason being able to ask for help is a weakness to some people.
Needfuldoer
Meanwhile, the turtle had a seizure live on TV, then brushed it off, and they think that’s just fine and dandy.
Furie
Seeing asking for help as a sign of weakness is the biggest sign of weakness I’ve ever seen. I’d hope those people get better but untreated wounds rarely do anything but fester.
Did she actually say that? Genuinely asking because I don’t remember. That’s really stupid though—you can just tell your therapist you don’t *want* medication, it’s not like suggestions that you go on X drug go on your “permanent record” or anything.
Doopyboop
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/03-joementum/inwithyou/ I think she’s less worried about the medication and more worried about a diagnosis following her. Like, “this just in, Dorothy who is running for president was once diagnosed with PTSD/depression, do we really want a woman in charge, let alone one with PTSD OR DEPRESSION?”
Doopyboop
though rereading this strip there is also concern about medicine too.
Indeed, Hillary Clinton slightly misremembered some incident with a helicopter, and got dragged endlessly for it.
Wizard
“Slightly misremembered”? She claimed she landed under sniper fire. She was actually met by… a little girl “armed” with a bouquet of flowers. Face it, she has all of her husband’s honesty and none of his charm.
Ptsd isn’t always treated with medications. While they can help, psychotherapy is normally the first type of treatment used. Also it wouldn’t be surprised for it to have reoccurances during moments of stress or pressure. In general, I think that any type of treatment would take time and could have setbacks. Therapy is normally training yourself in how to deal with your problems and fears, which means it doesn’t exactly eliminate them but reduces the impact that they have in your life (make you less scared of them, etc). I am not sure that any type of treatment fully gets rid of all ptsd symptoms, flashbacks, or memories. Dorothy has also been through more than one event that could have caused ptsd within a very short amount of time. I find a lot of people think that if they take medications, all their problems will go away, and I don’t think it works like that. Not that meds can’t make someone’s life extremely better, it just isn’t a guarantee and sometimes takes going through several medications until you find one that helps.
Laura
Doonesbury’s been pushing RTM (“Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories”) pretty hard as a type of “silver bullet” therapy for PTSD. (See, e.g., https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2023/08/13) I’ve heard similar praise for EMDR, but never experienced it myself.
RTM seems to be available only for veterans, from what I’ve seen.
Now if only there were a therapy or treatment available for TBI…
(suggestions welcome!)
Mano308gts
“Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.”
CJ
From what the people I know who offer EMDR say, it can be an effective means to recalibrate if you are stabilized enough to try.
Problem ist, PTSD comes with a load of epigenitic gene changes, so your body is physically wired to create more stress hormones and receptors for those, and getting the body to change the epigenetics again has no one-size-fits-all solution. Few things do. Especially where hormones are involved.
(There also seems to be a study that suggest that emergency contraception with estrogen after a sexual assault reduces the probability of getting PTSD, but as it’s only one study, don’t take it as gospel.)
milu
Readers added context they thought people might want to know:
the study in question was conducted by U-Cal neurobiology and behavior researchers Nicole Kirin Ferree et al. in the US in 2012 on a sample of 111 subjects. It was funded by a federal grant (the NIMH specifically).
The subjects were contacted through a law-enforcement-affiliated private company (“Forensic Nurse Specialists Inc”) providing support and collecting data on sexual assault victims in the Los Angeles and Orange counties of California. They were contacted 6 month after the assault. So, though this isn’t specified in the paper it appears that only victims who reported the assault to the police were considered.
Of the 187 selected subjects meeting the study’s critera (excluded were, among others, developmentally-disabled persons, victims of domestic violence, and people with irregular menstrual cycles) and having a valid phone number, 55 did not respond to multiple sollicitations and 21 declined, quit or were uncooperative. so that’s up to 40% of contacted individuals who for one or another reason did not comply with a study asking them for a short interview about their 6-months-old sexual assault, hormonal treatment history and PTSD-associated symptoms. i think the several filters that produced the final study sample are really interesting.
as a french person, i also find it fascinating that this study provides its sample’s ethnic breakdown but not its socio-professional breakdown. Presumably, the one is assumed to be a good enough proxy for the other? In France it’s the other way around. Racial profiling is considered unethical. but that’s a whole tangent
Weirdly the authors failed to specify that (or even whether) the sexual assault survivors they were interviewing were limited to those where a pregnancy risk from the assault existed. Maybe there’s a forensic or medical reason for that, like are first-responders instructed not to ask or wait for details and just offer emergency contraception regardless? that seems reasonable. But this aspect is not discussed.
Even more weirdly, the authors fail to discuss the possibility that the likelihood/severity of the person’s PTSD was reduced because one of the potential consequences of being raped (pregnancy) was eliminated. Instead, they frame their results purely in terms of the potential effects of the specific molecules (“exogenous hormone administration”, “endogenous sex hormone levels”) on the subjects. is that bizarre? no? just me?
The one interesting result afaict is less PTSD-associated symptoms for survivors who took an estrogen-based emergency contraceptive as opposed to the purely progesteron-based option. (There is no difference in their efficiency as contraceptives.)
the researchers cautiously advance this conclusion but mostly insist on the limitations of their study and call for further research. One point they mention that i found salient is that a lot of PTSD models are based on studies of war veterans, while sexual assault survivors are still understudied.
(now to cross my fingers that i didn’t mess up the HTML tags)
Laura
Wow! Thank you for this important insight, milu!
CJ
Wow. Thanks. The study was mentioned in the book I’m reading but I hadn’t got around to looking up the details.
From how it’s cited, the (I think German) author of the book was more on a rant about the implication that rape survivors are denied emergency contraceptives. She did say it was one small study and more research was required..
milu
“She did say it was one small study and more research was required..”
and to your credit you said as much too! i do find when i have the time that digging into the actual paper is revealing. at the very least, in such cases, wondering about the sample size, as well as the publishing process (i didn’t mention, it is peer-reviewed) should become automatic. 111 is not a lot, but it’s not the worst a study can get away with. the issue is unless you dig up the paper, or at least the abstract (which may itself be misleading in various ways) you can’t even begin to make an independent opinion on a study, especially around politically charged issues, because the pressure to publish a certain type of result can become intense and mainstream headlines start to matter.
“rape survivors are denied emergency contraceptives”
i did a double take on that because the study itself says the offer of emergency contraception post-sexual assault is “routine”. but that may only be true in some states/counties.
milu
…(and may obviously differ across countries)
Suzi
I did EDMR for some truama that happened to me. I was sobbing on my therapists couch but once it was over it was… gone. The feelings had evaporated. I felt physically lighter.
Still having to process and adjust behaviors that truama left me with, but as silly as EDMR seems to people who havent experienced it, it fucking works.
Because she has to work the hardest at pretending everything’s all right–for this future she thought she had a mission to achieve for the sake of everybody else.
Trauma hits everyone differently. My brother and I went through the same events in our childhood, but I ended up with PTSD and he didn’t. (Just explaining, not trying to be glib)
Probably because she won’t own what happened to them as a traumatic event for herself. Dorothy has suggested to Becky that she doesn’t feel like she has a right to “use” what happened as “her” story because everything was so much worse for other people (like Becky), and I imagine that extends to the trauma she feels over it too—she’s suppressing her feelings about witnessing someone die because she doesn’t feel like it’s “right” for her to be having these feelings when people who grew up with him, who knew him as “dad,” went through the same thing.
It’s an interesting arc, but I’m genuinely terrified that her rejection of Yale will stick because, dammit, she doesn’t deserve to lose out on the doors Yale would open for her.
I feel like the fact that this is the *second* time she’s seen someone violently assaulted or murdered in front of her- cue the door- is also making her trauma a lot worse, unbeknownst to her.
Jamie
I’m honestly surprised that there isn’t an irrational part of her that secretly hates Amber. Maybe we just haven’t seen an opportunity for it to come out.
Fay
She definitely seems to, at least subconsciously, link those assaults with Joyce in some way.
Jason
If so, possibly going back to the party and Joyce getting drugged. Iirc Dorothy internalised blame for that. Her and Joyce being together there was more connected to what happened than the other times violence occurred around Dorothy- she was literally the reason Joyce was there and I’m pretty sure she actually said she shouldn’t have left her alone?- so that’s my guess.
Yeah, I also don’t think Yale would be god for Dorothy. But I want her to see it as a choice *she* makes for *herself,* not because she needs to take care of everyone else.
292 thoughts on “Get me out”
Ana Chronistic
wow, that’s a graphic, uh, toe injury
Doctor_Who
Alternate strip title: Stubbed.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Toetally! Ross is even more toe-ish.
Kyrik Michalowski
I wonder if that injury is identical to the one actual toedad had. That can’t be good to dream about something like that, even if it was someone you hate.
Ryan
Trauma flashbacks. hooray
(;_;)
Bicycle Bill
I think we can agree it was. In the pertinent comics (which ran from story arc (which ran April 24 and 25, 2020) we see Blaine threatening Toedad with a hammer, then a bloody hammer. Then, when Toedad comes back into the fight, Blaine comments that “your skull’s just that thick”.
So yeah – it would appear that Toedad was killed in the basement, by Blaine, with the hammer to the head.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Disagree. It was Colonel Mustard, in the study, with the candlestick!
3oranges
Toe nail?
clif
Don’t worry. It’ll drop off by itself.
milu
when all you have a hammer, every Toe looks like a Toe nail
NGPZ
Bruh, that’s FUCKED.
Imagine if this was the first DoA strip you ever saw. O_O
“Did I tell you this was a sitcom? NO. It’s a fucking horror movie.”
NGPZ
For reals tho, Dorothy, you’re scarred for life, take a break, I’M BEGGING YOU!!! ??????
*plays “Rain” by The Seat Belts on Dotty’s phone*
Decidedly Orthogonal
Yeah, I’m in the middle of reading about all sides’ WWII atrocities. This is comparatively light. And still dark and heavy for all that. 🙁
Delmore Slim
Haha I was just telling my daughter about the invasion China over dinner
Blackdrazon
Bear in mind that this is the start of a new book, so there’s a non-zero chance that somewhere in the future, at some bookshop or con, this will be someone’s THIRD DoA strip.
DumbingOfAlice
IKR! I wanna recommend the comic to others but I wasn’t happy with the idea of them starting on whatever that day’s comic is with no context (because they’d just be way less invested in the characters), and while some people might do what I did (read the entire thing over 3 days, for like 8 hours a day, when I had some time off) …most people ain’t doing that :’D
so I made a list of suggested jumping off points! ^_^ to future readers, if this is your third ever DoA strip, maybe try one of these starting places instead!
Book 1-1: Moving In Day. Just reading the whole dang thing 😀 Fair warning the art is simpler & less polished, and there’s quite a bit of casual ableism and fatphobia that is mostly gone by chapter 2. Also since Joyce is coming out of a very White Evangelical bubble, you might find her very cringe inducing at first – people do be like that when first stepping out of such a bubble, so trust me that she’ll get better with time but if ya can’t handle it then try one of the next suggestions.
Book 1-6: Yesterday was Thursday, specifically “Continue” (25/8/2011). Good cold open to quickly clue you in on who’s who, and ya get good context for the DeSantos, two ships and a significant story point
Book 2-6: Strange Beerfellows. The art has improved, and ya get context for two ships
Book 3-2: Guess Who’s Coming To Galasso’s. The art has improved, context for three ships, and it builds nicely into 3-4 which is a very significant chapter story-wise. 3-2 is also when hovertext starts getting added, and much of it is delightfully funny or provides more context and it all adds greatly to the comic 🙂
Book 5-1: When Somebody Loved Me, if you’re really short on time Boundaries (26/10/2014) is where the story shifts. I’d recommend the whole chapter as you get backstory, and context for three ships, but if ya low on time, Boundaries marks a point where the story shifts significantly for Joyce specifically.
Book 10-4: Is a Song Forever, very specifically “Transformative” (September 5th 2020). Starting here will mean you miss out on so much context for *major* story moments, ships & character growth. But I’d say this represents currently the latest place I think I can recommend you jumping in and still being able to get thoroughly invested, plus that specific comic (“Transformative”) has a very very nice group-shot, followed by some simply *gorgeous* art that represents a time-skip of a few months. You will however encounter spoilers for previous books in joining this late in the series.
Angel
More awkward when becky wakes up and asks dorothy what’s wrong too
Like “yeah i kinda just saw your dad’s head split open in my dreams”
porthos9438
Yeah…so, about that sleep I needed tonight that I’m no longer going to get.
Amós Batista
After the kidnapping incident, we got two most traumatized colleagues from the entire gang: Ethan e, now, Dorothy. I understood Ethan’s pain, but my heart sank for her. She’s already doing therapy, right? How could she be the most devastated one?
AntJ
She’s deliberately hiding things from her therapist so she isn’t prescribed medication, which she thought would sabotage her political career
DailyBrad
Because it unfortunately might harm her politically. Like, look at how John Fetterman has been treated.
tunasammich
I’m old so I think of how Dukakis was treated for getting psychotherapy
Taellosse
The supersized part of that whole episode is it was MRS. Dukakis who’d been receiving treatment for depression, not even the Dukakis that was actually running for office.
Eagle Rock
You youth! I can remember Eagleton.
Wizard
I’ll see your Eagleton and raise you a Daniel Ellsberg. Not exactly the same since he wasn’t running for office and the info wasn’t actually used against him. Still, the Plumbers did break into his psychiatrist’s office to look for potentially compromising information.
Bryy
Also: Dorothy has a healthy dose of ableism.
NGPZ
Nothing about ableism is healthy. I assume by that you mean the dosage that’s baseline for white folks who’ve long known bigotry as exclusive to the domains of deliberate cruelty and interpersonal violence.
LiamKav
I assume that was a slightly sarcastic “healthy” as in “a large amount” rather than “the amount you should have to live a good life”.
elebenty
That’s my read.
Taellosse
think of “a healthy dose” in this context more as healthy for the “dose” than the recipient – as in Dorothy’s share of ableism is robust enough to remain viable under many conditions.
Suzi
“A healthy dose” is sometimes used tongue in cheek to mean “excessively large” – it’s not always in a negative context (for example, while needing comfort I will say I need a healthy dose of comfort) but can b, such as in this context.
Amós Batista
I don’t know him very much, like he got lot of health issues. Is there chance of information leak? Or did I miss the real issue?
AY
He had a stroke, so that got a lot of people angry even after he was cleared. But then he suffered from depression and chose to pursue treatment, and that made a lot of people even MORE angry. For some reason. For some reason being able to ask for help is a weakness to some people.
Needfuldoer
Meanwhile, the turtle had a seizure live on TV, then brushed it off, and they think that’s just fine and dandy.
Furie
Seeing asking for help as a sign of weakness is the biggest sign of weakness I’ve ever seen. I’d hope those people get better but untreated wounds rarely do anything but fester.
Ray Radlein
For us Olds, there is the directly on-point example of Thomas Eagleton
Regina phalange
Did she actually say that? Genuinely asking because I don’t remember. That’s really stupid though—you can just tell your therapist you don’t *want* medication, it’s not like suggestions that you go on X drug go on your “permanent record” or anything.
Doopyboop
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/03-joementum/inwithyou/ I think she’s less worried about the medication and more worried about a diagnosis following her. Like, “this just in, Dorothy who is running for president was once diagnosed with PTSD/depression, do we really want a woman in charge, let alone one with PTSD OR DEPRESSION?”
Doopyboop
though rereading this strip there is also concern about medicine too.
Vulcanodon
Indeed, Hillary Clinton slightly misremembered some incident with a helicopter, and got dragged endlessly for it.
Wizard
“Slightly misremembered”? She claimed she landed under sniper fire. She was actually met by… a little girl “armed” with a bouquet of flowers. Face it, she has all of her husband’s honesty and none of his charm.
Annamal
yes here:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/03-joementum/inwithyou/
I think she is also worried about the therapist herself…
Kimi
Ptsd isn’t always treated with medications. While they can help, psychotherapy is normally the first type of treatment used. Also it wouldn’t be surprised for it to have reoccurances during moments of stress or pressure. In general, I think that any type of treatment would take time and could have setbacks. Therapy is normally training yourself in how to deal with your problems and fears, which means it doesn’t exactly eliminate them but reduces the impact that they have in your life (make you less scared of them, etc). I am not sure that any type of treatment fully gets rid of all ptsd symptoms, flashbacks, or memories. Dorothy has also been through more than one event that could have caused ptsd within a very short amount of time. I find a lot of people think that if they take medications, all their problems will go away, and I don’t think it works like that. Not that meds can’t make someone’s life extremely better, it just isn’t a guarantee and sometimes takes going through several medications until you find one that helps.
Laura
Doonesbury’s been pushing RTM (“Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories”) pretty hard as a type of “silver bullet” therapy for PTSD. (See, e.g., https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2023/08/13) I’ve heard similar praise for EMDR, but never experienced it myself.
RTM seems to be available only for veterans, from what I’ve seen.
Now if only there were a therapy or treatment available for TBI…
(suggestions welcome!)
Mano308gts
“Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.”
CJ
From what the people I know who offer EMDR say, it can be an effective means to recalibrate if you are stabilized enough to try.
Problem ist, PTSD comes with a load of epigenitic gene changes, so your body is physically wired to create more stress hormones and receptors for those, and getting the body to change the epigenetics again has no one-size-fits-all solution. Few things do. Especially where hormones are involved.
(There also seems to be a study that suggest that emergency contraception with estrogen after a sexual assault reduces the probability of getting PTSD, but as it’s only one study, don’t take it as gospel.)
milu
Readers added context they thought people might want to know:
the study in question was conducted by U-Cal neurobiology and behavior researchers Nicole Kirin Ferree et al. in the US in 2012 on a sample of 111 subjects. It was funded by a federal grant (the NIMH specifically).
The subjects were contacted through a law-enforcement-affiliated private company (“Forensic Nurse Specialists Inc”) providing support and collecting data on sexual assault victims in the Los Angeles and Orange counties of California. They were contacted 6 month after the assault. So, though this isn’t specified in the paper it appears that only victims who reported the assault to the police were considered.
Of the 187 selected subjects meeting the study’s critera (excluded were, among others, developmentally-disabled persons, victims of domestic violence, and people with irregular menstrual cycles) and having a valid phone number, 55 did not respond to multiple sollicitations and 21 declined, quit or were uncooperative. so that’s up to 40% of contacted individuals who for one or another reason did not comply with a study asking them for a short interview about their 6-months-old sexual assault, hormonal treatment history and PTSD-associated symptoms. i think the several filters that produced the final study sample are really interesting.
as a french person, i also find it fascinating that this study provides its sample’s ethnic breakdown but not its socio-professional breakdown. Presumably, the one is assumed to be a good enough proxy for the other? In France it’s the other way around. Racial profiling is considered unethical. but that’s a whole tangent
Weirdly the authors failed to specify that (or even whether) the sexual assault survivors they were interviewing were limited to those where a pregnancy risk from the assault existed. Maybe there’s a forensic or medical reason for that, like are first-responders instructed not to ask or wait for details and just offer emergency contraception regardless? that seems reasonable. But this aspect is not discussed.
Even more weirdly, the authors fail to discuss the possibility that the likelihood/severity of the person’s PTSD was reduced because one of the potential consequences of being raped (pregnancy) was eliminated. Instead, they frame their results purely in terms of the potential effects of the specific molecules (“exogenous hormone administration”, “endogenous sex hormone levels”) on the subjects. is that bizarre? no? just me?
The one interesting result afaict is less PTSD-associated symptoms for survivors who took an estrogen-based emergency contraceptive as opposed to the purely progesteron-based option. (There is no difference in their efficiency as contraceptives.)
the researchers cautiously advance this conclusion but mostly insist on the limitations of their study and call for further research. One point they mention that i found salient is that a lot of PTSD models are based on studies of war veterans, while sexual assault survivors are still understudied.
(now to cross my fingers that i didn’t mess up the HTML tags)
Laura
Wow! Thank you for this important insight, milu!
CJ
Wow. Thanks. The study was mentioned in the book I’m reading but I hadn’t got around to looking up the details.
From how it’s cited, the (I think German) author of the book was more on a rant about the implication that rape survivors are denied emergency contraceptives. She did say it was one small study and more research was required..
milu
“She did say it was one small study and more research was required..”
and to your credit you said as much too! i do find when i have the time that digging into the actual paper is revealing. at the very least, in such cases, wondering about the sample size, as well as the publishing process (i didn’t mention, it is peer-reviewed) should become automatic. 111 is not a lot, but it’s not the worst a study can get away with. the issue is unless you dig up the paper, or at least the abstract (which may itself be misleading in various ways) you can’t even begin to make an independent opinion on a study, especially around politically charged issues, because the pressure to publish a certain type of result can become intense and mainstream headlines start to matter.
“rape survivors are denied emergency contraceptives”
i did a double take on that because the study itself says the offer of emergency contraception post-sexual assault is “routine”. but that may only be true in some states/counties.
milu
…(and may obviously differ across countries)
Suzi
I did EDMR for some truama that happened to me. I was sobbing on my therapists couch but once it was over it was… gone. The feelings had evaporated. I felt physically lighter.
Still having to process and adjust behaviors that truama left me with, but as silly as EDMR seems to people who havent experienced it, it fucking works.
Laura
Wow! Thank you, Suzi!
Laura
Intriguing!
Laura
Fascinating… thank you! Much to learn…
Stephen Bierce
Because she has to work the hardest at pretending everything’s all right–for this future she thought she had a mission to achieve for the sake of everybody else.
audkitten
Trauma hits everyone differently. My brother and I went through the same events in our childhood, but I ended up with PTSD and he didn’t. (Just explaining, not trying to be glib)
Jo_cubstar
Same with my sister and i
Jamie
Despite its status as basically an internet meme, therapy is not actually a magic bullet that fixes you overnight.
Vulcanodon
True that. I’m on a long-ass waiting list, and have no idea where to start when I finally do get there.
Wizard
And it’s not a one-size-fits-all deal. Many people have to try multiple therapists/methods before finding a combination that works for them.
Regina phalange
Probably because she won’t own what happened to them as a traumatic event for herself. Dorothy has suggested to Becky that she doesn’t feel like she has a right to “use” what happened as “her” story because everything was so much worse for other people (like Becky), and I imagine that extends to the trauma she feels over it too—she’s suppressing her feelings about witnessing someone die because she doesn’t feel like it’s “right” for her to be having these feelings when people who grew up with him, who knew him as “dad,” went through the same thing.
It’s an interesting arc, but I’m genuinely terrified that her rejection of Yale will stick because, dammit, she doesn’t deserve to lose out on the doors Yale would open for her.
not someone else
I feel like the fact that this is the *second* time she’s seen someone violently assaulted or murdered in front of her- cue the door- is also making her trauma a lot worse, unbeknownst to her.
Jamie
I’m honestly surprised that there isn’t an irrational part of her that secretly hates Amber. Maybe we just haven’t seen an opportunity for it to come out.
Fay
She definitely seems to, at least subconsciously, link those assaults with Joyce in some way.
Jason
If so, possibly going back to the party and Joyce getting drugged. Iirc Dorothy internalised blame for that. Her and Joyce being together there was more connected to what happened than the other times violence occurred around Dorothy- she was literally the reason Joyce was there and I’m pretty sure she actually said she shouldn’t have left her alone?- so that’s my guess.
MM
Whereas I genuinely believe Yale is a terrible idea for Dorothy, and will only exacerbate her need to do it all with little to no support, without having a safety net to offer her when it turns out that doesn’t work. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/12/09/yale-negotiates-settlement-in-mental-health-lawsuit/
Yumi
Yeah, I also don’t think Yale would be god for Dorothy. But I want her to see it as a choice *she* makes for *herself,* not because she needs to take care of everyone else.
Doopyboop
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/03-joementum/inwithyou/ She has been leaving things out of her therapy appointments.
DarkoNeko
NOoooooo
Blibdoolpoolp
I can’t help but feel like that was Ross’s actual expression and the kind of thing that got permanently burnt into Dorothy’s mind.
Taffy
That was my first thought
Throwatron
I just realized that of all the points of that storyline that were fucking crazy, I literally don’t remember exactly how and when Toedied.
Fay