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Hey, I don't know if someone has had this theory before, but let me just lay out my thoughts.
So the idea is this: The human world is super overwhelming. Society is built more for specific kinds of people than it is for others, and when you don't run on the same operating system as the majority, it can be a real pain to just live day to day. And so our brain finds a way to feel safe when everything that's "human" was weaponised against us. This is an extension of the whole "coping mechanism" theory/aspect - it looks at what actually makes it something that can be used to "cope".
Therianthropy can therefore be a grounding, subconscious conterbalance to the (for many of us, traumatising) pains of the human world. A world of conformity, masking, emotional neglect, erasure of anything soft and weird, bright lights, judgment, performance, social rules is balanced out by night time, raw nature, rain, instincts, animality, a lack of rules in regards to conformity. It's like a subconscious form of therapy.
This is how it felt for me, because of the environment I grew up in. A conformative rural world in which everything "different" was immediately suspect and wrong. I masked 24/7 and so my real self got erased more and more as time went on. The school hallways full of bright lights and rude boys, the political stickers in the bathrooms, teachers and parents who treated me like a defect... and so on and so on. Human faces and bodies became direct triggers for my subconscious telling it to engage fight or flight mode or be watched and punished. It's still the same - I can't feel anything at all when my brain registers "human". My nervous system flips into hypervigilance.
And what's the opposite of all this? What's something that has always bypassed this killswitch for all of my feelings? Therianthropy. In many ways, it's like the antithesis to the things that hurt me. And even though I see it originate as early as kindergarten for me and develop gradually over time from there (see this thread), meaning that this "counterbalance" thing wasn't some simple origin, I feel that this is important to explore because it's a major contributing factor to how it developed later on. The pull toward nonhuman, instinctual, night time stuff was made stronger by this - my brain was desperately trying to balance out the overwhelming hellscape that was conformative human life. I couldn't find safety in people. I couldn't feel love with anyone I was intimate with - if my brain noticed that there was a human next to me, it shut off my ability to feel anything. Instead, I found safety in night time, in Umbreon wallpapers, little old nostalgic forests, and so on. The human world took my childhood away, and my ability to just be. It made me into a creature that fears everything and masks no matter what. And animality made it so I didn't just rot away completely. It gave me back some of the peace, innocence, lack of judgment that I was denied before.
I see the same pattern in many other therians, especially those who are neurodivergent and traumatised. The more they were hurt by this "human technical world", the stronger the pull toward nature/their theriotype becomes. It can be as gentle as fantasy and escapism, or as intense as full on phantom/mental shifts, either way, it's strengthened by this same phenomenon. It's obviously not true for every therian, many have entirely different origins and experiences. But this feels like a major part of how therianthropy can develop, and explains why the vast majority of therians are also neurodivergent in other ways and/or traumatised.
Did you notice your therianthropy more during periods (even if year-long) of heavy masking / burnout? Does it also feel like a deliberate counterbalance to you or would you describe it all differently? I'd love to hear what you think, and whether or not you resonate with this!
-Ari
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less a bucket on a wild fire and more drops in a bucket. our best weapon is education, get people on the same page. i went round and round with myself on this for years. cygnus can tell you we have spent hours debating the finer points of definitions and their deeper meanings and while not always agreeing i feel we can still derive a similar enpugh understanding to teach a unified idea which is far more important. each person we educate is another drop in that bucket and it may take a long time, perhaps longer than i even have, but eventually that bucket will over flow and people will understand. in the end, as someone who has proposed new terms myself, i have to ask what would this term actually contribute? a word to describe what we already have adequate language amd descriptions for? to combat a seemingly insurmountable wall of disinformation, spread and manufactured by those who fail to understand it or wantonly ignore it anyways? Perhaps something like this will have a place in the future but right now i don't see it. there is one important bit for your examples you liken this to, things like synesthesia, adhd, etc. have commonly understood and established definitions in the public zeitgeist before people sought to refine them. we are at a far more foundational level right now, the fight is for very heart and identity of therianthropy, not to describe and break down its sub parts so it can be discussed clinically. lets get the clinician talking about it (constructively) first.