was someone telling me that failures aren't moral failings, they're data. But until you think of them like that, you're more likely to black-hole the data because it's a negative response instead of cataloging it to iterate on.
the second most profound one came when I realized that physical activity (including frantic dancing) burns off adrenaline and if possible should be done proactively when Dealing With Adrenaline Driven Things like a ptsd response, if you want to have it be as short as possible.
(Curling up means the adrenaline is burned only by your like, processing it through the flashback/episode/etc and prolongs it compared to, well, fighting or flighting. But since you can't just fight or flight in modern society, people sit on it instead and it gets unknowingly prolonged, because no one teaches this)
the other one was when I accidentally reimplimented parts of buddhism from first principles (because I didn't have exposure to the concepts) and then sorta just stepped out of having PTSD episodes because my brain had somehow realized that this many years on it was essentially self-harm (in my particular manifestation. because the actual risk it was protecting from was no longer there ever.) to keep having the response instead of it just being like, a thing.
I do not recommend this as a course of action without my specific context, because that framing can be reallllly bad if you aren't careful. but maybe its worth talking about at least glancingly here.
or put in less brutal terms, after fifteen years of having a knife fight in a phonebooth with my brain I learned enough about it that I won that fight. because the way you win a knife fight is to not bring a knife. no drawn knife wins a knife fight.
(this is also how I feel about cycles of abuse being perpetuated by people reacting 'proportionally' to things that hurt/annoy them, or worse, escallating.)
