when you medicalize your suffering into "there's something wrong with my brain" you conceptualize the appropriate type of response as "i should fix my brain," which lends itself to medicalized responses like pharmaceuticals, all the way up to extreme shit like lobotomies
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a more trauma-informed perspective might be something like "i was hurt very badly and i adopted extreme strategies for relating to myself and others to deal with that hurt that feel too risky to let go of" (relevant to the OP) which has a totally different vibe to it
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among other things it offers a *meaningful reason* that your "brain" is being "bad": it's trying to protect you from a form of harm you experienced in the past. that's a very different story from "idk i guess my brain chemicals are just wrong because of bad luck???"
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it also suggests a completely different question to ask for how to improve things: the question, stated poetically, is something more like "how do i let go of the past?"
worlds different from "how do i fix my brain?"
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back to the original meme; i've been focusing on the brain side but the cute thing side is important too (anyone recognize it?). it's adorable, and it's crying, and it's saying "please," and all of this matters
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in the meme the cute thing is explicitly being positioned as being not the brain (!) and implicitly being positioned as "really me"; this is also a theme in some meme comics, that the "real me" is cute and soft and squishy, an inner child kind of character
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furthermore the cute thing's request in this meme in particular is to "be vulnerable with the people i love" (🥺)
i read into this that the cute thing is 1) not the brain and 2) "really me" b/c it's functioning as a symbol for the heart, the part of us that loves
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so, the cute thing part of the meme expresses something true and important, i think. i do wish the brain part were different, and the best way i can describe the difference is to point to a comic with very different symbolism
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very sadly it is 6 images so i can't fit it into one tweet. i found this on facebook, the original artist is apparently @carrececeile on insta
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it still strikes me every time: "brains are made to keep us alive" implies, very clearly, that "we" are not our "brains"
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My doctor and I were discussing my anxiety and she said "Brains are made to keep us alive. They're not made to keep us happy." And I can't stop thinking about that.
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annals of "my brain" research
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ADHD brains and dopamine is some weird stuff.
I do something that needs to get done and my brain goes “Should’ve done it sooner, you asshat.”
I save the world in a video game and my brain is like “finally, feels good to be actually useful, doesn’t it?”
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Yeah I these points all make sense, but the framework I've personally used has always been between my subconscious vs. conscious brain (instincts vs. reason).