It's important to remember progress with mental health isn't linear. Being able to hug someone in one circumstance doesn't mean Hannelore can hug everyone without issue from now on, or she should or will be okay with a certain circumstance based on previous moments. She's come very far but unfortunately mental illness is very messy and complicated.
This is absolutely congruent with my personal experience of OCD and the respective healing process.
For what it's worth, the Tilly arc has achieved its (probably) intended outcome: Hanners' hug zone is no longer null. I find it a tiny bit pushed, myself, with the goodbye, though. The "fluids" hug was more than enough, given Hanners' SEVERE personal space restrictions so far.
Agreed. The first time, hey, ok, extreme emotional situations can make us do things we normally wouldn't or couldn't do. But this second one? ehhhh...seems like a way to force an emotional response from the readers and to ingratiate a certain someone with the rest of us.
The implicit assumption behind this conclusion is
not at all congruent with my personal experience with OCD, or the respective healing process.
And it's
profoundly at odds with the explicit advice given to me by experienced mental-health professionals when I expressed a similarly ill-conceived notion of what recovery from OCD has to look like - more specifically: Temporary periods of stagnation-, or even regression after making progress are so common that my therapists sternly warned me against the misconception, and being upset about my real mind's failure to conform with some ill-conceived prejudice informed largely by my impatience "to be done with that shit, already".
If you've experienced OCD yourself, and your experience differs from mine - being different doesn't take away from
either of our experiences. Raising one to the level of universal truth very much would.
TL;DR - In my personal experience, the
firm expectation that having made progress
once or twice implies that the progress must be permanent henceforth is not only about as 'rational' as trying to have a discussion with your PC's BSOD - the notion behind it can be
actually harmful to the afflicted. OCD is a
dysfunction, not a
function - it has neither a purpose, nor does it have to follow rules to achieve one, in fact, it never followed any rules to begin with. OCD doesn't 'do' rules, or logic. The nearest approximation it does are 'tropes' - and those are merely the broad generalizations about topical similarities of intrusive thoughts that many afflicted experience.
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Topic: WCDT Strips 3646-3650 (1st - 5th January 2018) (Read 57926 times)