Low Function! Pea Brain! No Good! Full of Sh*t!
This involves certain dynamics observed in both the blogs and vlogs in the Deaf Cyberspace. But the concepts also apply to everybody in real life, both hearing and deaf communities.
Name calling, insults and put downs are considered emotionally abusive, designed to make the person feels bad about oneself. Low Functioning, Pea Brain, Stupid, and No Good are some of the terms.
Emotions make us human. Emotions are our physical barometers, enabling us to measure our emotional welfare. Just like physical pain alerting us that something is physically wrong with our body, negative emotions also raise our awareness that something is amiss. Pain and negative emotions are our protectors, reminding us to pay attention to the triggers for these negative sensations and either fixing the negative triggers or removing ourselves away from these triggers. Ignoring or suppressing our emotions will impair us in the long run, rendering us dysfunctional. If we are in pain physically, would the doctor tell us to ignore our warning system? Of course not! The doctors will be working with us, trying to determine the origin of the physical pain and alleviate the pain. The analogy is the same with emotions. In order to be healthy as a whole person, we need to monitor our physical and emotional well-being.
Constructive and healthy dialogues include no personal insults, put downs, and name calling. Anytime people start insulting, the natural responses from other people would be anger, hurt, defense, and/or attack. Please tell me how these terms are considered healthy? If anyone tells you that, that person is bullsh*tting you. One can carry a healthy discussions without using any derogatory terms aimed at other people.
Experiencing negative emotions is normal. Feelings are feelings, no right or wrong. They arise as natural processes of our physical reactions to the environment and people. More important is how we, as responsible mature adults, express our emotions. Insults, name calling, and put downs of other people directly are not acceptable releases of our emotions.
You can address to the topic rather than the person. If the person behaves in inappropriate ways that make you feel degraded, you can assert yourself by informing the person their language and behavior aren’t acceptable, ignore that person completely, and/or disengage yourself from the conversation by walking away.
People engaging in emotional abusive behavior will attempt to minimize and deny their own behavior, blaming the victims for not being ‘strong enough’ or ‘not smart enough’. Wise people don’t buy into their talk. One isn’t weak if one refuses to tolerate verbal assaults. It indicates one is taking good care of oneself and staying strong.
It’s up to us to take good care of ourselves and protect ourselves from negative triggers, including abusive language. We need to learn how to listen to our bodies and emotions, encouraging them to work together in a well-balanced unity for maximal functioning. You know eating junk food will cause a decline in health status, so you minimize it by maintaining a nutritious diet. We can maintain healthy emotional status by avoiding negative verbal attitudes and associating more with people who accept and respect us, even in disagreements.
Like other forms of violence in relationships, emotional abuse is based on power and control.
From a site covering emotional abuse:This Is A War – ABUSE
“degrading - insulting, ridiculing, name calling, imitating and infantilizing; behaviour which diminishes the identity, dignity and self-worth of the person. Examples: yelling, swearing, publicly humiliating or labelling a person as stupid;
rejecting - refusing to acknowledge a person’s presence, value or worth; communicating to a person that she or he is useless or inferior; devaluing her/his thoughts and feelings.
Repeated verbal abuse such as blaming, ridiculing, insulting, swearing, yelling and humiliation has long-term negative effects on a woman’s self-esteem and contributes to feelings of uselessness, worthlessness and self-blame.
Emotional abuse can have serious physical and psychological consequences for women, including severe depression, anxiety, persistent headaches, back and limb problems, and stomach problems.
Many women in physically abusive relationships feel that the emotional abuse is more severely debilitating than the physical abuse in the relationship. ”
If you are confused and want to talk to someone, contact an advocate at DeafHope, a domestic violence center of the Deaf. hotline@deaf-hope.org. The staff and volunteers are fluent in ASL and the contacts are kept strictly confidential. By the way, I’ve talked with them few times over the years for advocacy purposes and they are great people. Also there is the national hotline number, 1 800 787 3224 tty that one can use if one still has a tty.
Incidentally Deaf Hope is engaging in a fundraising effort lasting three months. The worsening of the economy has dried up the usual sources of funding. Please help DeafHope continue with its education on domestic violence and advocacy of the Deaf survivors of domestic violence and/or sexual violence by donating five dollars or more. Click on the link for more information about the donation. You will be helping the Deaf Community.
Please discuss this constructively with no bashing. Thank you
Happy New Year!
E mail contact: Mishkazena@aol.com
This involves certain dynamics observed in both the blogs and vlogs in the Deaf Cyberspace. But the concepts also apply to everybody in real life, both hearing and deaf communities.
Name calling, insults and put downs are considered emotionally abusive, designed to make the person feels bad about oneself. Low Functioning, Pea Brain, Stupid, and No Good are some of the terms.
Emotions make us human. Emotions are our physical barometers, enabling us to measure our emotional welfare. Just like physical pain alerting us that something is physically wrong with our body, negative emotions also raise our awareness that something is amiss. Pain and negative emotions are our protectors, reminding us to pay attention to the triggers for these negative sensations and either fixing the negative triggers or removing ourselves away from these triggers. Ignoring or suppressing our emotions will impair us in the long run, rendering us dysfunctional. If we are in pain physically, would the doctor tell us to ignore our warning system? Of course not! The doctors will be working with us, trying to determine the origin of the physical pain and alleviate the pain. The analogy is the same with emotions. In order to be healthy as a whole person, we need to monitor our physical and emotional well-being.
Constructive and healthy dialogues include no personal insults, put downs, and name calling. Anytime people start insulting, the natural responses from other people would be anger, hurt, defense, and/or attack. Please tell me how these terms are considered healthy? If anyone tells you that, that person is bullsh*tting you. One can carry a healthy discussions without using any derogatory terms aimed at other people.
Experiencing negative emotions is normal. Feelings are feelings, no right or wrong. They arise as natural processes of our physical reactions to the environment and people. More important is how we, as responsible mature adults, express our emotions. Insults, name calling, and put downs of other people directly are not acceptable releases of our emotions.
You can address to the topic rather than the person. If the person behaves in inappropriate ways that make you feel degraded, you can assert yourself by informing the person their language and behavior aren’t acceptable, ignore that person completely, and/or disengage yourself from the conversation by walking away.
People engaging in emotional abusive behavior will attempt to minimize and deny their own behavior, blaming the victims for not being ‘strong enough’ or ‘not smart enough’. Wise people don’t buy into their talk. One isn’t weak if one refuses to tolerate verbal assaults. It indicates one is taking good care of oneself and staying strong.
It’s up to us to take good care of ourselves and protect ourselves from negative triggers, including abusive language. We need to learn how to listen to our bodies and emotions, encouraging them to work together in a well-balanced unity for maximal functioning. You know eating junk food will cause a decline in health status, so you minimize it by maintaining a nutritious diet. We can maintain healthy emotional status by avoiding negative verbal attitudes and associating more with people who accept and respect us, even in disagreements.
Like other forms of violence in relationships, emotional abuse is based on power and control.
From a site covering emotional abuse:This Is A War – ABUSE
“degrading - insulting, ridiculing, name calling, imitating and infantilizing; behaviour which diminishes the identity, dignity and self-worth of the person. Examples: yelling, swearing, publicly humiliating or labelling a person as stupid;
rejecting - refusing to acknowledge a person’s presence, value or worth; communicating to a person that she or he is useless or inferior; devaluing her/his thoughts and feelings.
Repeated verbal abuse such as blaming, ridiculing, insulting, swearing, yelling and humiliation has long-term negative effects on a woman’s self-esteem and contributes to feelings of uselessness, worthlessness and self-blame.
Emotional abuse can have serious physical and psychological consequences for women, including severe depression, anxiety, persistent headaches, back and limb problems, and stomach problems.
Many women in physically abusive relationships feel that the emotional abuse is more severely debilitating than the physical abuse in the relationship. ”
If you are confused and want to talk to someone, contact an advocate at DeafHope, a domestic violence center of the Deaf. hotline@deaf-hope.org. The staff and volunteers are fluent in ASL and the contacts are kept strictly confidential. By the way, I’ve talked with them few times over the years for advocacy purposes and they are great people. Also there is the national hotline number, 1 800 787 3224 tty that one can use if one still has a tty.
Incidentally Deaf Hope is engaging in a fundraising effort lasting three months. The worsening of the economy has dried up the usual sources of funding. Please help DeafHope continue with its education on domestic violence and advocacy of the Deaf survivors of domestic violence and/or sexual violence by donating five dollars or more. Click on the link for more information about the donation. You will be helping the Deaf Community.
Please discuss this constructively with no bashing. Thank you
Happy New Year!
E mail contact: Mishkazena@aol.com
December 31st, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Yeah. Well, I don’t know what to say. I have been called names since I went on DeafRead, by some people who wanted to “put me in place”. It was confusing and upsetting, yes. Then I realize that it is NOT my problem… I just happen to touch some people’s buttons in wrong way without knowing it, so they react… and unfortunately, dwell on it.
I do notice that name-calling goes on in the hearing sites also (especially on the newspaper sites… ouch.)
December 31st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
A real good blog. Helps clarifying what kind of damages (emotionally especially) the name-calling could do to people. Thanks for pointing it out to us.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:01 pm
If a person does like a person who insulted once or twice or more(becoming cyberbullying)…Can a commentator handle the emotions when she/he knows vlogger’s meanings to do that to those commentators? Then don’t go there!
IF SHE/HE KNEW VLOGGER COULD DO THIS THEN DON’T OPEN VLOG AT ALL OR DON’T LEAVE A COMMENT!!!!
Go somewhere that can handle the issues.
If a commentator wants to leave a comment with good argument then she/he won’t get any degrade feelings from vlogger or commentators.
I understand what you are trying to say to save thousands commentators. That’s great.
few vloggers have valid points.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Happy New Year, Karen
Yes, it exists in the unmoderated hearing forums, too. For that reason, many people chose to attend moderated forums where they can have intelligent discussions.
However, it’s somewhat different because in the Deaf Cyberspace, we know each other, so it is more personal than in the hearing forums where people generally don’t know each other at all. Some people are being told they need to learn to accept the verbal abuses. Yikes. Bad idea!
December 31st, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Happy New Year, Hedy. You are right. The smart tactic is to ignore the blogs and vlogs where insults fly thick. Sometimes it’s not possible, though, because some of the commenters can be verbally abusive. Do Do?
December 31st, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Not only that, but sometimes the issues they raise *have* to be addressed. So you would need to address the issue they’re raising, *plus* their verbal abuse.
It’s a tough issue.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Deaf Pundit raised an excellent point. What if the blogger/vlogger is sharing wrong information that one feels will hurt other people? Is it worthwhile subjecting yourself to abusive barrage while sharing the right information or another perspective you feel other people need to see?
December 31st, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Good topic about being insulted with their blogger/vlogger need to change their words in their other blogger/vlogger.
Admitted I did insulted few time. which I was not realized it is bad insult with a big harsher comment. I had to away from computer for a while.
Everyone who is blogger/vlogger need to boundries from other people who wrote with their no respect and along with their perpective of diffrent issues.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:28 pm
One needs to be clear about what one stands for, and if the truth will harm more than help, use one’s best judgment about that.
It is rarely necessary to attack a person, but beneficial to correct a wrong statement or idea.
What we need to fight immediately are the misconceptions held by policymakers and decisionmakers about us, not the decisions made by parents.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Dianrez… your comment is very logic and valid (for some reason, I have always looked at you as a “Spock” of DeafRead ;o) ) The problem is that we have feelings so we act out on them
/
December 31st, 2008 at 3:55 pm
[...] Mishka Zena » Blog Archive » Low Function! Pea Brain! No Good … [...]
December 31st, 2008 at 4:00 pm
All of us have had different experiences in life. When people are respectful of each other while expressing their differences, they can share their experiences without feeling threatened. This leads to better understanding.
December 31st, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Great blog, MZ!
Just a while ago, I was tempted to leave my comment to blast them and tell them how I felt but decided against it. However it’s a good tool to yell at the webcam without publishing it and unplug your cam and move on. *sigh* The emotional comments wouldn’t get them anywhere except feeling hurt in the long run.
One thing I really do feel bad for others who posted their vlogs and felt being ignored due to low number of viewers while the viewers rush to most drama vlogs. They felt most huge let down and thought they’re not doing their good jobs at vlogs which is NOT true.
Obviously the drama lovers don’t know how to focus on the particular topics without bashing each other. Yet, they continue bashing without thinking twice about how the people on other end feel. *sigh*
Misha
January 1st, 2009 at 8:29 am
Having just used the term ‘deaf stupids’ erm…… it is a matter of context, but they are saying deaf have no ability to ‘read between lines’ and you have to be totally literal in what you say. One wonders if deaf could face that either…. Deaf should look on blogs and vblogs as learning curves to understand the many aspects of the English language, grammar, and terminology. Knowledge is power really, you don’t want to go through life misunderstanding everything…. Are their ASL variations on this, or is it purely descriptive/objective and nothing else ?
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:12 am
This blog really correlates with what Deborah King writes in her newest book, “Truth Hurts.” Emotional abuse causes hurt to the person being attacked and eventually if not treated, to physical illness. Crazy how it all correlates together!
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Yea — The damage is done in the Deaf Cyperspace. It is a wake up call for me. I can see that too obviously over there. It is pretty scary for many of us. I cherish my reputation and I want to have a good productive life of my own in the Deaf Community. It is okay to agree or disagree but Insulting, Name callings, and Putting downs is not the answer. It will not work that way. The unpleasant vloggers are blinded about themselves who they really are. Their nasty words have affected many viewers’ feelings and can ruin their reputation a big time. It hurts. Words hurt too. I thank you for this. It is a wake up call for me.