Hey, I'm really sorry that you went through this. I lost a friend to suicide this past September and it's been an incredibly difficult thing to process. I’m very glad to hear that your friend survived. 

Feeling numb after a traumatic event or experience is a very common experience, and is perfectly normal. Emotional numbness is a common coping mechanism - sometimes our brains just go "woah, that’s way too much for me to process right now” and just don’t experience the full emotion right away. Processing the full pain of reality all the time is just too much, and self-soothing with distractions or daydreams or numbness is a normal way to cope. 

It can take weeks, months or even years for a trauma to fully “sink in” after for some people after they’ve experienced it, and that’s perfectly normal; people pretty commonly report feeling absolutely nothing at the funerals of close family members, only to be overwhelmed with grief months’ later. Others, like you, might feel the full weight of the pain right away, only to find that the pain lessons dramatically in the weeks and months afterwards. Experiencing trauma is not a linear process; there are often good days and bad days, or good weeks and bad weeks, and it’s perfectly normal for your feelings about an event to evolve and shift in the months and years after it happens.

It’s also very normal for traumatic events to become less painful and take up less space in our minds over time. That’s sort of the end goal of the grieving/processing journey; we go through pain and come out the other side having reached a place where we accept what happened and might still have lingering sadness or anger or grief, but are otherwise able to move on with our lives. You don’t actually want to be in a place where the pain is still completely fresh and you’re still constantly dwelling on an event months after it happened - that’s a sign of PTSD. I think the narrative about trauma has largely become something like “you should expect to still suffer side effects of all your trauma for the rest of your life”, but that’s not actually borne out by research - only 8% of people develop PTSD after experiencing a major traumatic event. Most people get past the trauma caused by one-time events (long-term abuse is a bit of a different story); they struggle in the immediate aftermath, and over time, they find themselves thinking about the event less and less, and being less distressed by it whenever they do. That doesn’t mean that they don’t care about the event or the people impacted by it - it’s just a normal part of moving on. 

If you ever experience the kind of emotional numbness where you no longer care about your life or get enjoyment out of things, that’s something you should definitely talk to a professional about, but painful memories becoming a lot less painful over time is healthy, and a regular part of the coping process. 

Hope this answers your question! MM

Get away from this man. Block him, delete his number, and get him out of your life.

This man is grooming you.

No 23-year-old has any business romantically pursuing a 14-year-old. When someone his age goes after someone your age, what they’re most attracted to is your vulnerability, and the fact that it’s easy for them to manipulate you. That’s not a slight against you - all 14-year-olds are vulnerable, even if they are mature for their age and at the top of their class. You simply haven’t had the life experiences that a 23-year-old has. This guy knows that a woman his own age will tell him to go pound sand the first time he asks her to shoplift, so he has to go after high school students to get the amount of control he demands. 

No person who truly loves and cares about you will threaten your family to get you to obey them. Period. End of story. People who genuinely love and respect someone will never even fathom doing such a thing. Threatening you to try to force you to break the law and steal things for him is outright abuse. This guy is bad news, and he’s only going to get more extreme as time goes on. You need to get far away from him. 

I really think you need to talk to a trusted adult, if you can, and tell them what has been going on. This guy is dangerous, and it sounds like the situation is well beyond what a 14-year-old should have to deal with on her own. Getting the adults in your life involved is probably the best way to keep yourself and your family safe, and get this guy to back off - this is something your parents or guardians need to be helping you deal with at this point. 

Stay safe.

MM

I mean, it sort of depends on what you mean by "valid".

Are many people good at recognizing for themselves that their brain works differently than the people around them, or that their brain is actively getting in the way of them completing daily tasks? Absolutely. Do people face systemic barriers that make self-diagnosis their only real option? Absolutely. For people who don't have access to a professional diagnosis, or who come from demographics that are frequently under-diagnosed (like women and girls of colour with ADHD) sometimes a self-diagnosis is all you've got. People who want to join online support groups or other disability communities should absolutely be allowed to do so on the basis of self-diagnosis.

Is self-diagnosis a substitute for a professional diagnosis? No, it's usually not.

The thing that most people are missing when they read a symptom list is context. Meeting the criteria for a diagnosis is more than just deciding that a particular symptom does or doesn’t apply to you - human traits and characteristics are on a spectrum, and things need to be at a certain level of severity before they cross over the threshold from “regular quirk” to “diagnosable symptom”. The point of diagnosis is to identify conditions that are having a measurable, serious, negative impact on your ability to function in your daily life, and not just to see which sets of characteristics sounds like you. 

Let’s take a look at some of the official symptoms of ADHD, for instance:

Many of the symptoms of ADHD will be relatable to a person who doesn’t actually meet criteria for a diagnosis, because these are very common traits in the general population. In our productivity-obsessed culture, many people are extraordinarily hard on themselves and don’t have a realistic sense of what a “normal” human attention span actually looks like - a lot of younger people especially are inclined to believe that something is wrong with them because they can’t force themselves to work non-stop while also maintaining a spotless home and strict workout regimen. In reality, most people procrastinate on tasks that are difficult or not interesting. Many people struggle with multitasking. Many people are somewhat disorganized and misplace their belongings from time to time. The vast majority of the population could skim the list of ADHD symptoms and find a few that they relate to at least some of the time. 

What actually makes a person meet the criteria for ADHD is the severity of these symptoms, the impacts they have, and whether they appear in all contexts of a person’s life. Non-professionals often don’t have a good sense of where that “quirk/symptom” cutoff lies. I have seen people self-diagnose with ADHD because their apartment is messy sometimes and they can’t work 8 straight hours without getting distracted - but that’s a pretty regular human experience.  A person who struggles to remember to water their plants and often ends up rushing to finish assignments at the last minute doesn’t necessarily have ADHD - those are pretty typical struggles that have a fairly manageable impact on the person’s life. People with ADHD generally face pretty severe disruptions to their lives because of their symptoms - they are likely to struggle with poor grades, regardless of their intelligence, and are disproportionately likely to fail out of school, be fired from jobs, get into traffic accidents, run into financial issues and struggle to maintain relationships as a direct result of their symptoms. 

Of course, for the most part, there isn’t a ton of harm in accidentally mis-diagnosing yourself. If self-diagnosis works for you and helps you connect to supportive people or just not be so hard on yourself, I think that’s great. The only caution I would give would be to avoid boxing yourself in too much. I’ve worked with folks who have self-diagnosed conditions they didn’t meet criteria for - things with symptom lists that are easy to relate to out-of-context, like ADHD or BPD - and then turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell yourself “I’m incapable of having healthy relationships because I have BPD”, that can turn into you putting less effort into your relationships because you believe they are already doomed, which leads your relationships to fail, confirming your belief that you are incapable of healthy relationships... and so on, and so on. 

It’s also very easy to accidentally self-diagnose the wrong condition. Do you have a hard time maintaining relationships, experience sudden mood swings and tend to fly off the handle easily when you’re frustrated? Many people might self-diagnose with BPD, but those symptoms can very easily be untreated ADHD. 

Long story short, if self-diagnosis is the option you have before you, go for it. Many people face systemic barriers to professional diagnosis, and sometimes trying to self-diagnose so you can find a community where you feel you belong is the best option you’ve got. But it’s important to remember the practical limitations of self-diagnosis - which may include being open to the possibility that you may have misdiagnosed yourself.  Hope this helps!

MM

Honestly, taking care of your own physical needs is a good start - many people in codependent situations struggle to make their physical needs a priority. If prioritizing your own need for food and sleep is something that you've struggled with in the past, working on that is a pretty healthy place to start.

As far as your emotional needs go, that's something you may need to figure out through some trial and error. Everyone's emotional needs are different - discovering what your needs are can be a bit of a process, especially when you were raised in a codependent situation where you were never encouraged to prioritize your own needs or develop your own identity outside of the family struggles.

But even though I can't tell you what your emotional needs are, I can certainly give you some suggestions for things that you can start thinking about, like:

Time to yourself. This is one of the most important emotional needs that most people have, and it's one of the hardest things to get in a codependent situation. Even very extroverted people need occasional down time by themselves to reflect, recharge, and just figure out who they are when they aren’t trying to meet the needs of other people. 

Creative expression. Everyone needs to express themselves. This can look different for different people - it could mean journaling, writing poetry or painting, or it could mean creating playlists of songs that are very meaningful to you. Figure out what helps you get your feelings out of your brain and into the world.

Dreams and goals. When you are codependent, you don’t typically have goals of your own - you have goals for your codependent relationships and the people you’re in them with, but your own goals and dreams are an afterthought. Figuring out what you want is a huge step in reclaiming yourself as an individual person - even if the only thing you can come up with right now is a list of what you don’t want, that’s a big step. 

Social needs. People need people. We all need people in our lives who make us feel loved and supported and give us a safe space to open up when we’re dealing with something difficult. The key is to form relationships that don’t have the same codependent tendencies as the old. Be intentional with your relationships - reflect on what codependency looks like for you, and seek relationships that don’t have those same patterns. 

Personal meaning and fulfillment. We all want to sit back at the end of our day or week and think “yes, I’m doing things that are worth doing”. For some people, this comes from their career. For others, it’s raising a family or pets. Some people find meaning in travel, or creative ventures, or time spent in nature. Codependency often means making your codependent relationships the centre of your world, but it’s time to look beyond those. Take some time to figure out what sorts of things give you personal satisfaction and make you feel like your time was well-spent - and then carve out space in your life for those things.

Best of luck to you! MM

Minor spoilers for “You” follow. Honestly, I like the show. I liked the books, too. It gets (in my opinion) a little bit corny and far-fetched as it goes on, but it’s an entertaining story with some very entertaining characters. I put it on in the background while I do dishes. It's not an accurate source of information on psychopathy, psychopathology or relationship dynamics, but it never claims to be - Joe's terrible behaviour isn't presented as something that people should aspire to or admire - he gets what he wants in the short term, but the whole point of the show is that the obsessive, monstrous things he does just keep catching up with him and making his life worse.

I've seen a lot of people wringing their hands over the fact that people relate to Joe and find him attractive. But honestly... I don't think it's particularly surprising, or something to be concerned about.

For starters, Penn Badgley (the actor who plays Joe) is a very attractive dude. He has a head of thick, dark curly hair and a bookish, Edwardian vibe that a lot of people are really into. It doesn't really matter what sort of character he's playing - so long as he looks like that while staring soulfully into the camera, he's going to end up with admirers. 

I think it’s also important to remember that the show is written from Joe's perspective - we're meant to sympathize with Joe on some level, even if he does terrible things. The show goes out of its way to show us that there’s a good side to Joe, even when he’s not mixed up in all the stalking and murdering stuff - every season has a subplot where Joe goes out of his way to protect a vulnerable child from danger, even as he does terrible things to other people. We are repeatedly reminded that he had a shitty childhood. He has a deep love and reverence for books. In the later seasons especially, we see over and over again that Joe wants to be a better person, but gosh darn it, he keeps getting dragged back into the serial killing stuff again. What’s a guy to do?

From a writer’s perspective, there is an art form to making people sympathize with characters who are bad people, and You is sort of a textbook example of it. Yes, Joe is undeniably a terrible person and a monster, and if he existed in real life, he’d be reviled. But Joe is a fictional character, and the audience knows that - watching a piece of fiction (especially one whose plot gets as... creative as the later seasons of You) requires audiences to suspend their disbelief and buy into the world the show has created. And there are careful lines that the show does not cross. Joe does not harm or abuse children. He does not physically torture people (save for one child abuser). Most of his violence takes place off-screen. The show (again, spoiler alert) even flips the script on Joe in the later seasons by pairing him with someone who is possibly even more of a psychopath than he is, showing him what it feels like to be stalked by a deranged admirer. He murders several men who abuse or take advantage of women. None of that makes him a better person, but it makes it easier for the audience to connect with him. 

Honestly, I think we’ve seen this “why do people like this psychopathic main character” thing play out before - anti-heroes have been big for the last couple of years. Dexter, Walter White, The Joker, Hannibal Lector, Deadpool, Jamie Lannister and Bojack Horsemen are all recent examples anti-heroes who were embraced by fans, sometimes to the surprise of their creators. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has become the longest-running live-action American sitcom, despite the entire premise of the show being the fact that all of the main characters are terrible, unlikeable people. Why is it so easy for people to overlook the murderous tendencies of beloved main characters? Hard to say. Maybe we’re just hired-wired to connect with the protagonists of stories, even if they make outrageous moral choices. Maybe this kind of exaggerated villainy gives us an opportunity for escapism, by letting us temporarily connect with a character who makes decisions we never could or would. Maybe, again, Penn Badgley is just very, very pretty. Maybe it’s all of the above. 

Either way, I’ll be watching the next season of You.

MM

Honestly, by making sure as few kids end up in it as possible.

Contrary to popular belief, physical abuse is not the most common reason that kids end up in foster care. Only 13% of kids taken into foster care are there because their parents physically abused them. The biggest reason that kids end up in foster care is actually neglect - neglect is the primary cause of 62% of foster care referrals.

When you look at those numbers, though, it's important to remember that "neglect" doesn't necessarily mean that parents withheld food and necessities from their children because they were careless or lazy or cruel - it often includes parents who desperately want to provide the necessities to their children, but can't afford to do so. Many jurisdictions don’t really make a distinction between kids whose parents purposely starved them and kids whose working parent left them home alone because she couldn’t afford daycare - that makes it hard to really know what we’re dealing with here. 

And you might be surprised to learn what child protective services considers to be "necessary" for children. In most parts of Canada, for instance, children over the age of 5 are not supposed to share a bedroom with opposite-sex siblings. Having six-year-old fraternal twins share a bedroom can be categorized as neglect; technically, the parent is failing to provide the children with adequate housing. But of course, the genders of your children don't influence how much money you get from your employer or from public assistance. In my area, a mother with a boy and a girl is required to rent a larger apartment for her family than a mother with two boys - but it's up to her to find the money to afford that. Partitioning one room or co-sleeping with the children is not allowed, and is also considered neglect. It might sound ridiculous, but I have worked with multiple families that have ended up on CPS radar because of this, even if family co-sleeping is the norm in their culture.

1 in 10 children in the US foster care system are there at least partially because their parents don’t have adequate housing. Keep in mind, there are 424,000 children in the US foster care system on an average day - that means that housing was a major factor for more than 42,000 of them. Before we can truly reform the system, we need to understand what it is, exactly, that we’ve created - and what we’ve created is an incredibly expensive, inefficient and culturally insensitive system that is stretched so thin by the task of “solving child poverty” that it can’t do what it was actually designed to do, which is protecting abused children. Instead of a child protective system, we have an intergenerational meat grinder that effectively turns traumatized children into traumatized adults who create more traumatized children to go back into the system. Around and around we go. 

The question of how to “fix” foster care could be a doctoral thesis, and it’s a far bigger problem than any one person can solve. But my few cents as someone who has worked with at-risk and homeless youth for nearly a decade now would be:

This is just barely skimming the surface of what needs to change - there is so much that’s wrong, and I’ve barely touched on how to fix it. But when it comes to foster care, I really believe that an ounce of prevention is worth 100lbs of cure.

MM

Boundaries, boundaries and more boundaries.

Unfortunately, you can't single-handedly create a positive and healthy relationship with someone if they aren't willing to meet you halfway. This can't be a one-way street. Whether she does or doesn’t have a diagnosis of something doesn’t matter - what matters is whether she’s willing to work with you on creating a healthy living environment for the both of you, and from the sounds of things, she’s not. You can try sitting your roommate down to explain the impact that her behaviour is having on you and work together to figure out some strategies to have a healthier relationship going forward, but if she's not willing to have that conversation and make meaningful efforts to change, then... that sort of limits your options here. At some point, if finding another living situation really isn’t an option right now, then keeping your distance from her becomes your best bet for keeping your mental health intact.

I don't know the details of your living situation with your roommate, but one of the most effective strategies for surviving a bad roommate situation is just to avoid being around them as much as possible. Find reasons to be out of your apartment, or in your room with the door closed. Know your roommate's schedule, and try to use the kitchen/common spaces when they aren't home or when they tend to be in their room. If you have friends or a partner you can stay overnight with sometimes, that might also be a good option to get a break from your roommate. It might sound a little bit simplistic, but the less time you spend around your roommate, the fewer opportunities they have to start conflict with you.

In addition to getting some physical distance from your roommate, try to get some emotional distance as well. Limit the type and amount of information that you share with her. Keep conversations basic and stick only to necessary topics - shared expenses, maintenance issues, etc. Steer the conversation away from personal topics if that sort of thing tends to fuel drama. If you’re having a lot of arguments around household chores, this might be a place where you have to pick your battles - just sucking it up and dealing with her dishes in the sink and hair in the shower might be less of a headache than having the same arguments about household responsibilities over and over again. 

Most importantly, start figuring out arrangements for housing that don’t involve living with this person. It’s much easier to tolerate bad situations in the short term when you have a plan to escape from them and can look forward to getting out. I don’t know the details of your situation, but even if you have a while to go before you can get out, start brainstorming - are there friends you could live with, a partner you might be ready to move in with at the end of your lease, apartments in the area you can afford on your own? Sometimes the only way to tolerate the present is to stay focused on the future. 

Best of luck to you! MM

Touch some grass, friend.

I really can't give accurate legal advice, as I am not a lawyer. The only way to know the exact laws in your area would be to find a lawyer who practices in the jurisdiction you live in.

I can tell you from a mental health practitioner standpoint that I am legally mandated to report any information that suggests a child under the age of 19 (the legal age of majority in my part of Canada) or a vulnerable adult (a senior with dementia, a person with profound developmental disabilities, etc) is being abused. This has to be actual harm to a real person, and not simply a "dark thought" that a client is having. If a client tells me "my dad beats my 12-year-old sister when he's drunk", I have to report that information. If a client tells me "I have obsessive thoughts about hurting children", I do not have a duty to report that information to child protection authorities - there's nothing for them to investigate, as I have no information about an actual child being harmed.

I also have a "duty to warn" (called a "Tarasoff warning" in the United States) - this means that if my client is making direct threats to commit physical violence against somebody or telling me that they have a plan to physically harm somebody, I have a duty to break confidentiality and make sure that that person is warned (generally by informing the local police, who would then deliver the warning). Again, though, this has to be a threat against a specific person. If a client tells me "I have obsessive thoughts about killing people", I do not have a duty to report that to anyone. If a client tells me "I have obsessive thoughts about killing my ex-girlfriend, Suzy Jones", I have a duty to make sure that Suzy Jones is warned.

Interestingly enough, I do not have any duty to report past crimes that a person confesses to me (unless there is some reason to suspect that a vulnerable child/adult is still in danger. A client could confess to me that they committed a murder and I would not have any duty to report that information; I would actually get into quite a bit of trouble if I did report it, as it would be considered a breach of confidentiality and professional ethics.

I have no duty to report paraphilias unless a client tells me that they have actually acted on the paraphilia and harmed a child or vulnerable person in the process. Even if a client confesses to having paraphilias that most people might consider very "dark" or "serious", like a sexual attraction to animals or murdering people, I have absolutely no duty to report that to authorities - again, I would actually get in a great deal of trouble if I did.

People confessing to extreme paraphilias, sexual fetishes, urges or obsessive thoughts is more common than you might think. Some people genuinely have these kinds of desires. Some people simply have a ton of anxiety that they might have these kinds of desires and convince themselves that they're bad people because of it. Either way, that isn't information that I have to report to anyone. I don't know if authorities would actually do anything with that information if I did report it (I suspect they would not) but you'd need to ask a lawyer from your jurisdiction to know for sure.

MM