Kitty Hyatt

Morning Thoughts

Posted on January 2, 2022 by Kitty Hyatt

Has anyone noticed that some people’s version of you need to heal is coded as

– “I want you to be different bc I am uncomfortable, so you apparently need to heal.”
– “I cannot actually identify that there are quite a few emotions.”
-“I can’t process that other’s emotions are not my own, and their expression has nothing to do with me.”

After my weekly looks in out my groups and spaces would like to doubt after.

-In many but not all cases, we associate emotional control with colonized or unhealthy ways of coping. Erasing an ancestral part if you for others is not ok.

-Shutting down or muting your emotions come from similar roots as a lot of emotional dysregulation issues associated with toxic masculinity. Using improper to YOU methods of processing and experiencing emotions causes you and, subsequently, those around you harm.

-In the US, we have an assimilative social structure. However, being comfortable with others’ behavior doesn’t mean controlling them. It means creating boundaries and agreements.

-Isolating people does not heal them. Boundaries help people. We know through the examples of studies of human behavior and social systems that we learn through interaction. We know that collectively we have an emotional dysregulation problem because we have so many stimuli and have boundary issues.

Healing happens differently for people, which is why it is individual and your responsibility. It is not individual because we do it alone without community. But recovery can quickly turn into the subsequent trauma if you are doing things not in tune with what needs to be healed and yourself but instead based on what others have expressed they feel you need to heal from.

When you tell people to heal, is it because you are bothered by their behavior?

Are you advising them based on what makes you comfortable, and then when they don’t do what you said, they are not doing work?

Are you being accurate? Accuracy is about understanding perspectives and listening to learn what the problem is. If you aren’t listening, you may not be accurate.

Verbose Redactions

How we process information.

Posted on December 7, 2021December 7, 2021 by Kitty Hyatt

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of people say things to me like:

“sometimes, we just need to keep things in our head.”
“why do you care about what others think about you so so much.”
“why do you complain so much.”

Et cetera. Whatever.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about this because I self-analyze my behaviors fairly often just to see what’s going on with me. It’s valuable to me to check in with myself about if the person I present is the person I am, and if I present differently than I am, why?

Very often, I find these assessments others make about me incorrect. Especially the synopsis that I care deeply about what others think of me in a way that affects my personhood. If this were actually true, I would be a very different person.

I am a person who exists in this world full of others. Being mindful of that is not the same as being concerned about what others think. (Note, anxiety disorders can definitely make it seem like your views are centered on how others feel about you. For some forms of anxiety, that is true, but not in the way most people assume. Anxiety is part of our bodies’ natural responses to keep us safe. When we have an anxiety disorder, there is something that makes our defensive responses activate at the wrong times, too long, or too often. And we can learn to manage this, but an anxiety disorder requires a different type of brain retraining than simply having low self-esteem, but this is another more extensive discussion )

I wondered if that’s just a personal failing of mine; that I’m not willing to see flaws in my character just because I disagree with them until a few weeks ago when I made a post about how incredulous I am about how some people view my posts as negative or complaining. Someone said that they see me as processing things. So I’ve sat with that for a minute, and then the fact that people internally and externally process hit me.

Light bulb moment.

I realized that for a large number of my experiences, around the time that I graduated from my undergrad that I couldn’t internally process those things because I didn’t/ don’t have the ability to understand those concepts and experiences from an internal perspective. I need more information, [potential] context, and sometimes support.

It wasn’t even an unconscious choice that I made necessarily. The unconscious choice I made was to accept that “confused kitty is confused” is an accurate statement about myself and not a sure random blurb. For most of my life, I internally processed out of necessity, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I realized that I do not naturally process internally. I processed information the way I was taught to, but no one taught me how to use this method properly or why that is what was expected. In short, it’s expected because it makes people comfortable, not because it is the right or only way to process information.

Upon reflection, I’ve learned that at a certain point, I became unable to interact outside my default of externally processing for many situations simply because something is missing; if I attempt to process internally, the perspective is skewed, or the misunderstanding increases. We won’t even discuss the conflicting issues with OCD as well. If I don’t understand something or a situation, internally processing just because I was told to do so helps no one. Again, we are cable of both internal and external processing.

I realized that due to how I experience the world (what I now know is me being autistic and experiencing socializing through that lens) that there are just some things I don’t get, but when people hold the expectation that I, or even intentionally put roadblocks in communication by prioritizing that the situation MUST be internally processed, they do a few things whether consciously or unconsciously:

Block my communication and hinder connection.
Engage in both direct and indirect isolation.
Disrupt my ability to discussion make.
Reestablish the idea that there is only one way of think and expression.
Engage in able-ism and reinforce stigmas.
Continue to remove us from communal interactions, further, and learning to have and express boundaries as whole people while seeing another person as a whole person who is not a copy of us.

So, in summary, I both internally and externally process, but for me to interact in social environments, I cannot stay in my head because my head does not understand the world the same way.

Externally processing allows me to understand perspectives that I may not fully comprehend through reading a book or watching a situation occur. As a neurodivergent person, it is common to misinterpret or miscommunicate and need a little extra support to interact in the situation based on the reality instead of just what I think the situation is due to my understanding. But also, for people to be effective in communicating and actually helping people do that, they also have to listen to what the person is saying and not just their perception of why a person may be externally processing.

So my question is, why do we interpret what a person says to be complaining if they are not complaining. Now I have asked this question on my social media before, and it’s been made clear that complaining is often based on an individual’s personal experience and how they use language. That makes a lot of sense to me, but it also seems incomplete. If we are talking about something that bothers us or confounds us, is it automatically a complaining? What is the difference between having a complaint that is an observation and being a complainer?

If you assume that a person externally processing is about them needing to people please or be validated for others, then does that mean that as a whole, humans only ever care about what someone else thinks about them rather than having the ability to say this is how I feel about myself even though I recognize that I am one person out of all of the people that live on this planet.

Also, who has decided what is appropriate and inappropriate to share?

I definitely think that when it comes to privacy, respect, and information sharing that there may be conversations that people have about how information is presented and discussed when you externally process. It is an interesting concept.

Generally, I have these discussions within my intimate relationships, which is why when I externally process about anything related to a person, they generally understand the conversation that I’m having have approved of that conversation that I’m having or have decided that they don’t care about the outcome of that conversation.

Let's Talk About Poly

Valuing commitment does not me tolerating bs…

Posted on December 4, 2021December 4, 2021 by Kitty Hyatt

A person told me they don’t like me as a polyamory advocate because I tell people to leave their partners because I am SoPo, immature, and don’t value commitment.

I find that entire statement to be hilarious because I actually don’t promote this because I personally do not get into relationships unless I have the intention of those relationships to be lifelong relationships.

I do not causally date and I heavily believe in commitments as a solo polyamorous person ( as many SoPos do and want y’all to be clear with us why you think we don’t have commitments). I value my autonomy and negotiate relationships based on this.

I don’t need to negotiate a romantic or queerplatonic relationship with you if I don’t have the intention of doing everything in my power for us to maintain a healthy lasting relationship.

When I go into relationships, I go into it with the intention that we communicate and that we will maintain this lifelong or a long-term relationship as long as maintaining this is not harmful to us.

And when I say maintaining that relationship. I mean that we are evaluating the problems that we are having and why we are having those problems which means maybe we have to go to therapy because we can’t see eye to eye, etc, etc. Ya know.

So why would I ever advocate for people to break up?

I can definitely understand that many ways of relationship-ing do not align with the autonomy and self-advocating that I teach, so that can sound like I want you to break up just because it is hard.

The point is that I advocate that if you’re not able to do the work it may take to recenter your relationship back to health, that it is OK for you to leave.

I advocate that no one is required to stay in a relationship that they do not feel is a good fit for them, period.

I advocate that people should look at their relationships periodically to make sure it’s where they want their relationship to be and that it is healthy, fulfilling, and allowing for their own personal growth and if it’s not to address that. And for some people that means leave. For some, that means loving harder.

To be clear if I see a bunch of red flags and abuse, I’m gonna tell a person that my recommendation would be for them to remove themselves from an unsafe situation.

Removal from an unsafe situation may end the relationship permanently or it may cause individuals to start reevaluating things and seek to become healthier.

My advocacy cannot be to just leave relationships because you find them temporarily unfulfilling because I understand that the nature of humans is that we are not going to be constantly enthralled with the people in our lives at all times.
They will not always be a source of happiness and enjoyment.
Sometimes we are going to “hate” them and dislike them because we may have to make choices that we don’t necessarily want to because we have decided that the person is going to be a part of our lives.

Did you know that it is completely valid and okay to decide that what you negotiate in your relationship at one point no longer works for you?… But it’s not necessarily ok just for you to say well this doesn’t work for me so I’m not gonna act on that anymore without having a conversation with your partner. Sometimes it is sometimes it’s not.

Relationships are about communication, often resource sharing, and partnerships. I recently explained to a tiny child who decided I need to be his big sister, that love is love and relationships are not always simply love. Relationships require interaction. Love is a state of being.

None of that means that you can’t be autonomous and when people start saying that relationships that require them to communicate effectively with their partners ruin their autonomy I also challenge them to consider what they think autonomy, freedom, and control in relationships mean to them.

When you recognize that someone telling you not to do something to them doesn’t necessarily mean you did something wrong, but simply that they are whole a person with preferences about how they are interacted with, your communication skills and emotional literacy skills are improving.

Just so you know.

Love, light, and butterflies,
Kitty.

Quote• Posted on November 27, 2021 by Kitty Hyatt

Kitty Whispers

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Kitty Hyatt

Hi friends,

Not caring about how your actions impact others is an ethical issue.

That does not mean that you do not get to live the life that you want to live. It doesn’t even mean you are a bad person honestly.

That simply means that if you are adamantly putting out that you don’t care how other people are affected as long as you get to do what you want to do, then you’re not being ethical.

If you live your best life while causing harm to others and you don’t care, you have an ethical issue happening.

You can or can not choose to sit with yourself and figure out how to manage that ethical issue. That is up to you.

When people have conversations about ethics, they are having discussions about conscious decision making, understanding your relationships with others, and comprehending how we interact as social beings.

Note:

I’d also like to note that while typing this out, the Grammarly editor tried to change this to a synonymous term of moral.

The problem is that ethics and morals are not simply synonyms just because they deal with the same concept.

This is where a lot of people get mixed with these terms. And what I’m about to give you is a very crude explanation of the differences. I invite you to actually take some time to do a little self-study about the differences so that when people are talking about them, you aren’t trying to apply them in the incorrect way that might actually cause harm to yourself.

While these terms address the same concept, they also address the way in which that concept is interacted with.

Ethics is social and society based. Moral is individual and based on your personal perspectives.

Moral can also be applied to large groups such as religious groups, but those groups are only groups because of the concepts in which they apply. They rely on multiple people’s personal perspectives centering around a similar theology/ideology that isn’t necessarily relevant for all people.

Morals don’t even actually address harm reduction in a social group. That is what ethics do.

Also, address the fact that laws are part of the same conceptual ideology as ethics and morals, and they also do not necessarily address harm reduction. Justice activists and people who work with the law (enforcement and advocates) can give you first-hand experience of how their job is not about harm reduction rather than upholding a decision made into law even if it has negative impacts.

Ethics is the only term in this grouping of similar words that actually addresses the individual and social impact of harm reduction.