turning it upside down

Question: Why are bullies not diagnosed with 'antisocial personality disorder'?
Answer: Because bullying is the going m.o. of the culture at large.


Google search string: "neurotypicals are relatively insensitive"

What Google turned up:
neurodiversity.com (satire, people)

Advice for parents of a child newly diagnosed with 'normality'

The normal child will usually be heavily socially dependent and this can leave the child deeply vulnerable to 'peer pressure'. This can lead to such undesirable behaviours as loss of individuality, bullying and intolerance of others and 'pack mentality'.

Allism: An introduction to a little known condition:

2.3. sensory impairment
Most allistic people have moderate to profound impairment of the introspective senses. Many allistic people are unable to consciously examine their mental models of the world, and are unaware of their progress in learning new skills until they try them out. Many are only vaguely, or even only subconsciously, aware of their bodies' internal health, nutritional demands, biochemical state, and so on. Almost all allistic people are unable to tell the difference between real and psychosomatic physiological effects.

3.0. social ritual
An allistic person learns subconsciously that they is dependent on others for their emotional experience. Consequently, they tend to develop the habit of manipulating the form and content of social interactions in order to elicit from others expressions of emotion that they will find pleasing when incorporated into their mind. This phenomenon is manifested as ritual greetings and superficial enquiries concerning irrelevancies.

Allistic people often become distressed when such efforts fail by eliciting an unexpected and undesired response. Furthermore, for many sufferers, this emotion-seeking behaviour comes to dominate over normal social interaction, eventually interfering with practical needs Where allistic people have contact with each other, they tend to subconsciously cater to each other's need for pleasing emotional expressions. Each recognises the other's attempts to elicit pleasing responses, and gives the desired response without any consideration for accuracy, thus avoiding the possibility of an unpleasant experience from an unanticipated accurate response. The effectiveness of the response in affecting the emotional state of the questioner seems to be unaffected by the awareness of both parties of its insincerity.

Neurotypical syndrome

Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity. According to The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical(INST), as many as 9625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical. (Yes, that means you too)

Neurotypical individuals (NTs) often assume that their experience of the world is either the only one, or the only correct one. NTs find it difficult to be alone. NTs are often intolerant of seemingly minor differences in others. When in groups NTs are socially and behaviorally rigid, and frequently insist upon the performance of dysfunctional, destructive, and even impossible rituals as a way of maintaining group identity. NTs find it difficult to communicate directly, and have a much higher incidence of lying as compared to persons on the autistic spectrum.

high sensitivity, PTSD, attachment

Google search string: "sensory defensiveness intrusive mother".

What Google turned up:
Sensory processing sensitivity and its relation to parental bonding, anxiety and depression:

Sensory processing sensitivity is a recently proposed construct referring to a tendency to process a variety of information more strongly and deeply than others. Although some research has found links between sensory processing sensitivity and psychological difficulties, highly sensitive people may not necessarily be predisposed to negative affect, but may be more sensitive to poor parenting.[...]Sensory processing sensitivity predicted both anxiety and depression above and beyond parental factors, indicating that it may be an independent risk factor. An interaction was found between sensory processing sensitivity and parental care when measuring depression. Highly sensitive people may be particularly sensitive to uncaring parents[...]

Post-traumatic stress in kids (bolds mine)

Koomar says flashbacks are automatic responses to a trauma trigger and are not something people with PTSD can turn off or muscle through. “Flashbacks are very powerful and it is important to realize that with PTSD flashbacks, the person is physiologically in that situation again.”

Koomar says managing flashbacks requires time and careful therapy. “This cannot, and should not, be viewed as other forms of anxiety might be,” Koomar says. “It is not at all a situation where the individual can ‘overcome it’ or ‘pull themselves up by their boot straps’ or be ‘resilient’ and just manage it. It is usually an incapacitating problem that needs a very careful and thoughtful therapeutic approach.”
[...]
“Consistency is really important,”[...]It is also important to refrain from revisiting the trauma several times in the course of therapy. She says people need support that does not involve revisiting the trauma, for example, “activities that calm the nervous system, talking a walk, going to a funny movie, playing a game or other things that enable you to connect, but are not about the trauma they experienced.”

The Preemie Experiment: A community of people dedicated to the open discussion of the long term effects of prematurity (this one's more for my niece than for me - I was not a preemie - I don't think??)

a perfect analogy of how it feels

again from a commenter on a ballastexistenz thread:

How about this analogy - you take a newborn bat and completely restrict them from any opportunity to learn to fly, meanwhile trying to teach them to walk, and by adulthood they’re a bat that can neither fly nor effectively walk. Because they never got the opportunity to learn to fly and now their wings are atrophied so it’ll be difficult or impossible to fly, and they never were designed to walk.

Fits in with an analogy I was thinking of earlier today in preparation for interviewing yet another shrink (and dreading yet another disappointment/letdown, fearing yet another encounter with a so-called 'helper' who doesn't understand me).

This is what it feels like: People don't like you the way you are, so they wrap you up in duct tape like a mummy so you can't move your arms and legs, you're trapped.

You see that big roll of duct tape sitting over there and you're afraid to talk for fear they'll put it over your mouth, too. Already you can't breath very well because fear has such a death-grip on your innards that you breath shallowly and fast.

After all this they want to know why you want to end it all, why it hurts so much? Can't they see your pain and frustration? Fucking morons. Tell them: You just want out. To no longer be trapped in this place where everything you do is wrong, there's nothing you can do, no place you can be where you're ok.

The fact is, they can't see you. Because they see you only as 'not-them', as somehow wrong, and therefore not human and not worthwhile and not valuable. Only an object to be restrained and contained so as to make you the least trouble for them. Selfish bastards. ASSholes.

You're so scared you can't breath. You don't dare make a noise at all for fear somehow they'll misinterpret it and limit you further in some way you dread but can't possibly predict. It's a horror show, a living nightmare, the Cask of Amontillado, The Telltale Heart and The Pit and The Pendulum all wrapped up in one. And they can't see it.

They just laugh at you - your fear, your tears, your quivering, powerless shame. They rip and rend and tear your delicate flesh until you feel flayed alive - until all your nerve endings are raw and vulnerable and absolutely overwhelmingly in shock.

And then they have the temerity to say, You're so sensitive. Stop that. As if you're doing it simply to annoy them, like the Red Queen said in Alice,

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he know it teases.

***
I say, I used to fly high because it felt good and it was fun.

But every time I got too high someone would grab my ankles and pull me down and say, You stay here, you don't belong up there. You're not good enough. You don't deserve it.

So then I'd try to make myself smaller and quieter and less noticeable because I hated being strapped down to my chair and made to sit and be quiet (sounds like a description of half the children on the planet).

***
Why is it that parents act like everything kids do, they do merely to torture their parents? Why can't they remember that kids are kids, and do kid things? Why do they act like children doing the normal things that all normal children do are somehow criminals performing horrible acts of personal vengeance against the parents, doing it just to make the parents' life miserable, and that the child should therefore be punished, yea even to the point of making said child wish she didn't exist?

***
The most painful thing, as the analogy quoted earlier captures in much fewer words, is the sense that you've missed your chance - that your life has all run away down the drain and you'll never get it back, and all the ripe potential and possibility you once had is gone, never to return. As if the cherry blossoms only ever got to be buds but never bloomed - destroyed by a killing frost before ever getting to open.

And this happens, yes; life is unfair. But it doesn't have to be that way. People can make choices about how they treat other people - it's not random like the weather. Or, at least, so we're taught. But it makes you wonder: Maybe human nature is not as changeable as the shrinks and self-help books try to make it sound. Maybe we just have to get used to the fact that the world is full of all different kinds of people, and the very best thing would be for us to all try to accept each other as best we can, to help each other get what we need and not encroach on the others.

Of course, if some people are weeds, they tend to take up all the available space and kill off or suffocate the tender perennials... never a simple answer, is there.

Parents can choose to try to bonsai their little child-plants into some shape the child was never meant to be, and miss entirely how beautiful the child could have been if only the parents had allowed the child to grow to her own limits, rather than stuffing her into the straitjacket of the parent's expectations.

And those branches, once pruned off, never grow back...except in weird, distorted, misshapen ways - never freely, never as nature intended. We never get to see how beautiful she could have been if only they'd left her alone.

trusting people who are not trustworthy

of course it's confusing when they say one thing and do another, or when they show one expression on their face while using words that say something completely opposite. (Pops into my head that an autistic may actually be more functional than a 'normal' person - at least, from reading Ballastexistenz it seems this way).

Maybe it's just that 'normals' are able to dissociate better, to 'split'; maybe the problem for autistics is that they can't ignore the other signals the person is making, so that when they're around someone whose body language and words don't match up, it literally scrambles their signals in a way that keeps them from functioning? I'm guessing, because I feel that all my life I've had to ignore at least half of what I perceive and try to focus only on the aspects of people's behavior that they'll admit to or are conscious of.

Derail to give an example: The very weirdest one in recent memory was this guy I'd gone out with for a while, we got together again one more time and were being very physical and affectionate.

His words: I thought we weren't going to do this any more (which I wondered if he was asking? or telling?).

But his actions seemed opposite: I was standing in front of him, leaning against him (we were waiting in line for something, and had to wait a while); he had one arm sort of pulling me to him in kind of a half-nelson in such a way that when I tried to bend to set down a bag I'd been carrying, I had to actually ask him to let go of me! That's how tight his grip was.

It was as if one half of him so wanted the physical contact that he was literally clinging to me with almost a death grip, while some other part of him (that was apparently completely disconnected from the first part!) was in complete denial that he even wanted to be with me in this way. Very confusing, but so blatant that I laughed out loud. I thought it would be too cruel to explain it to him (and also I was enjoying the contact), so I didn't say anything at the time. But it was pretty frickin' funny.

So, the point? This guy's left hand literally didn't know what his right hand was doing. He was extremely bright, extremely conflicted, and terribly hurt by a long-term marriage that had ended a few years before leaving him severely insecure about who he was and what he needed from life. To me this reflected a guy who was unable to resolve the gigantic gap between what he wanted (needed?) from life, and what life actually gave him. Which seems pretty common and normal. But I'd never seen anybody who was literally that split apart before, while seeming to be utterly, completely, totally unaware of it.

With this guy the trust problem was more that he had no clue, which, though it's a gigantic red flag and says I shouldn't be with him, didn't actually make me not trust him. It just felt more like he was some little kid who really had no idea how to resolve the things that were going on with him.

Not sure where I'm going with this, seem to have lost the thread. Maybe come back later.

y'know, sometimes blaming other people IS the right thing to do

Especially if they're people who chronically take no responsibility for their behavior and its affects on others. Bullies, I'm talking to you. You have officially been put on notice. This is from here on out a

ZERO TOLERANCE FOR BULLIES ZONE

This thought came up because I was replaying, yet again, the last battle between me and my youngest brother, and realizing I was letting him off the hook. (I would call it a 'conversation', but anything that left me feeling that raw, ragged and destabilized was nothing short of a personal attack, hence the choice of the word 'battle'.)

When I started to think about how to reconnect with him while not bringing up any of this unresolved stuff, my throat started to get sore, I had trouble swallowing.

These were spontaneous, instantaneous reactions.

My first thought was, Oh, shit, I'm getting sick!

And then I thought, No, you're not - this happened way too suddenly to be about catching a cold. I realized: What's going on is you blocked yourself from expressing what you truly feel, which is that you're pissed that your brothers, and your SIL, and other people in your world, can be such assholes and get away with it.

And the fact that they're nice at other times doesn't fucking make it ok. (The SECOND I acknowledged this to myself, my throat stopped hurting.)

See, this is what I'm going to call, for want of a better term, the 'gaslighting' effect - where people say one thing and mean another, and know perfectly well that you may not have understood their full intent, and they use this to take advangtage of you. It's that last bit that's the key to understanding all this, I think - what the person's intention or motive is.

[edited 5/24/09 to add: re-reading this, I realize this tangles two separate thoughts together: One, that bullies can also be nice. The behaviors are not mutually exclusive. And two, sometimes the bullying can be fairly subtle - in this case I'm not really thinking of me being bullied so much as middle niece. But because in my mind the sometimes nice/sometimes cruel behavior and the 'gaslighting' are on the same continuum of messing with somebody's head in a way that makes them feel stupid, incompetent, bad about themselves or otherwise hurts their feelings, I sort of lumped them together as if they were one thing. Hope that's clearer.]

Now here's where I get into a bit of a mental tangle: I know that sometimes I, myself, get angry with somebody, or act mean to them.

The difference is that if they're someone I care about, or claim to care about, I feel responsible for having hurt their feelings.

I have one 'friend' (he periodically gets downgraded from this category) who has said, more than once, I'm not responsible for your feelings.

I understand that this is shrink-think, and I think it has a certain amount of validity - but not the way he's using it. The way he's using it is as a 'get out of jail free' card to avoid taking any responsibility for his behavior!

Well, fuck that shit. I grew up with that shit, and to this day, as witness half the entries on this blog, if not all of them, I'm still untangling myself from taking responsibility for everything that happens between me and other people.

See, this is the result of the power imbalances in relationships: The person with more power feels no responsibility to maintain the relationship, because they're already getting what they need. The person with less power has to work all the harder, because they're the one whose needs are going unmet. (I'm not sure that said what I meant it to, but it's a starting place.)

Wandering sideways a bit, I came across another Metafilter comment yesterday about a way to think about direct vs. indirect communication styles: Ask Culture vs. Guess Culture:

This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you're a Guess Culture person -- and you obviously are -- then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you're likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you're an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

Obviously she's an Ask and you're a Guess. (I'm a Guess too. Let me tell you, it's great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels; not so great for, say, dating and getting raises.)

Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people -- ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you'll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at (pace Moomin fans) the Cluelessness of Everyone.

It seems to me that the 'ask' style may be based on an underlying premise of 'we're equal, so I assume you'll be just as honest with me as I am with you.' Whereas the 'guess' approach may be based on maintaining a power imbalance - the person who is best able to manipulate the relationship without ever asking directly for what they need or even letting on that they have needs, at all, is the one with the most power.

***
Ballastexistenz says something about bullying (internet trolling, in this case) in a way that neatly sums up some of the things I've been trying to say about power imbalances, social inequities, and people who believe that might makes right or that 'that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger':

The problem with sink-or-swim approaches is that some people sink. And it would completely dishonor the memories of people who have died as a result of cruelty, to perpetuate the very same cruelty that killed them. To claim it makes people strong makes it sound as if these people didn’t exist, or were weaker than people who survived, even if it’s only luck that determined some people’s survival over others. And I refuse to participate in, or glorify, practices that can and do ultimately kill people and then degrade even their memories. Like so-called “Internet eugenics”.

And like they said earlier in the article — it’s the opposite of a properly-functioning society. They want the leeway to do anything they want, but give others no leeway at all. No matter how much they dress it up, there’s no ethical justification for that, and I suspect they know it.

This is what I keep trying to tell my brother, and convey to my SIL about the middle niece: You think treating her this way will make her tougher. Her bed-wetting, stomach aches and constant resentment and frustration are telling you something you should be listening to: It isn't toughening her up - it's making her sick. Literally. And it isn't going to get better unless you help her. Which, first and foremost, involves getting clued in to how your own behavior is hurtful, destructive and damaging to your own daughter; and then to change how the family structure operates so that bullying and power over, or domination, are not the primary m.o.

Because otherwise, your daughter is going to become one of the losers. And it won't be her fault.

***
Re-reading the beginning of the post, trying to make it clearer, I realize I'm struggling (yet again) with someone who's made it quite clear that he doesn't want to do any of the work.

So I just have to walk away.

one more thing

ok, this has got to be the last one for now, then I've got to get off this dang computer (no offense, computer, you're fabulous! But I'm human, and need to do flesh-and-blood, human things. But I'm so very happy to have you!)

If what I need is the mother-nurturing I never got as a child, why can't I have that as an adult?

Yes, I realize it's difficult, non-standard, etc. etc. blah-blah-blah.

But, really: Why not? When you get down to it, most people's answer is, I don't want to. Which is essentially the exact same bullshit answer my parents gave me, only not in so many words.

Doesn't anybody else see how fucked up this is? I mean, how many times do I have to say it? If a plant needs water, do you give it, say - Coca Cola instead? Or maybe a cup of coffee? Or pee on it? "Say, that there's got plenty of the ol' H2O in it, and shucks, saves me the trip to the pissoir to boot. Sounds dandy to me."

Fucking moron. So the thing not only doesn't get what it needs, but it gets your toxic crap as well.

Sigh. I'm trying to figure out a way to put this in the simplest, clearest, most unambiguous manner possible. And yet they still misunderstand - they always, always, always, think you're asking for something completely different than what you're really asking for.

And if by some freak chance they just happen to give you what you need, all unknowing? And you say, That - that was it, that was exactly the thing I'm looking for! Can you please do that again?

And somehow, the very orneriness of humans gets in the way - they just refuse to accept that it could be that simple - their ego needs get in the way, they think, But surely what you really need is this much more complicated and difficult thing over here (which, mind you, I'm not actually offering to give you) but which makes me feel all important because of the kind of power it gives me over you. And besides, I've got this cool thing and you don't.

Do I really think most humans are this assholish? Yes, I'm afraid I do. I've resisted the idea for most of my life, but I think now, in the interest of my own personal survival and sanity, I've just got to give that fiction up.

Repeat after me, grasshopper: Most people are simply not nice. Sorry to have to be the popper of bubbles and all :-(

it's like

when men smashed the goddess figures that I'm seeing on some feminist blogs right now - the shards got shattered far and wide, and here are all us women (feminists, at least) trying to reassemble the bits into something that we know in our bones used to exist - we just can't gather enough evidence. And any time 'too many' women are gathered together out of earshot of men - well, they come hunt us down and pontificate, and distract, and otherwise pull their divide and conquer bullshit. Because they're afraid. They're afraid of what we'll do to them, that we'll pull them to bits, just like they did to us.

And would we be any better, if the power was back in our hands? Would the taste for retribution be too strong, too irresistible, and we'd smash them back to where they came from so that they could never bring us down again? I have to admit there's something powerfully satisfying about that image - about being able to walk the streets freely, unhampered either by expectations or harassment. To have them get the short end of the stick for a change. Hmm.

Mostly I think we just want them to leave us alone so we can get on with our business.

the bizarre thing is that

if you tell a bully he's hurt you, he gets all upset! All - deranged is the word that comes to mind, but that's not right - he gets all out of whack, all discombobulated.

Like, how dare you call him a bully? (and the shrinks would say, Now, now, use your I language, not you language. Yeah, right. So how come he gets to be such an asshole and never apologizes and gets to accuse me, and yet I have to be all understanding and sympathetic? Fuck that shit, it doesn't change anything, it just perpetuates the same ol', same ol'. Just get the hell away from the sons-o-bitches it a better idea, if you ask me.)

So, not only does he get away with hurting me and gets off scot free, but in addition to that I have to feel guilty if I fucking say anything about it?!!!!!?????? WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!

I know I'm repeating myself here, I think I must be hoping that at some point it'll become clear to me, that repetition will somehow crack through to the underlying explanation that will make sense of their behavior, that will set me free.

(For some reason just flashed into my mind as I was typing the image of me streaking nude in one of those school dreams so many people have as kids where you're suddenly naked and exposed for all the world to see. Somehow there's a connection here, just not sure what it is. Be interesting to ask people who've had that dream whether they'd also been bullied, and whether people who hadn't been bullied never had that dream.)

***
I think what it is (and I keep having to repeat this because I don't really get it, it's just words to me at this point) is that the bully really doesn't see you as human. It's like if a chair or a - doormat? - suddenly up and bit him in the ass. In a way, he can't actually process it - it makes no sense to him, doesn't fit his worldview of how things should be. So he immediately reacts to restore that world view, eradicating your point of view entirely. In his world view, dominators/winners do not take the needs/feelings/expectations of the 'loser' into account. It simply isn't done that way - the world as we (he?) know(s) it would simply cease to exist, shut down, crumble. And, of course, he and all the other bullies would lose their unearned and undeserved power. As Pratchett would say, We can't be havin' with that, now, can we?

breadcrumbs

taking what I need and leaving the rest, have found Metafilter to be an extremely useful resource for a variety of well-informed opinions and interesting ideas (and sometimes there are some completely asinine or jerk-y comments, but not too many).

A commenter on a thread about a popular, catch-all 'disorder' (the diagnostic use of which I find to be extremely dismissive and cruel) had some useful/interesting ideas about this 'disorder' (which shall remain nameless because I find the whole idea of it utterly demeaning and destructive, and will choose to use my own language and terminology about it).

The way I see it is that people (especially women) can get really far out on a limb emotionally and not be able to get back, not only because of their so-called 'personality' issues, but because the society at large has very little interest in womens' emotional needs (women only exist to take care of others, right? We're not supposed to have needs of our own - that goes against the rules of a patriarchy.) Hence the popularity of the term 'drama' any time a woman is upset or angry about something.

Some quotes from this commenter that I'd like to keep around for future reference:

BPD is a lousy term. It's inaccurate. It shouldn't be used in the DSM or anywhere. It's a backward, ignorant and unscientific use of language. The border between neurosis and psychosis? Say wha? That could be said of all the personality disorders. BPD as a diagnosis is used to cover too wide a range of issues.
[...]
People with chronic or complex PTSD often behave in the same way as BPDs: Emotional volatility, depression, mood swings, bouts of rageaholism, high anxiety, intrusive memories, compulsive rumination among them.

A soldier returning from war, a battered wife, an incest survivor all can have PTSD to one degree or another, treatable with very different types of talk therapy, behavior modification and different meds. A PTSDed soldier, for example might not, in general, be benefited by blaming as part of the talk therapy. However, the battered wife and the incest survivor would, as a way of establishing a sense of safety and boundaries. A PTSDed soldier might cope in an ill way by compulsively rehashing the fear of the past. The battered wife might cope in an ill way by denying the fear of the past. So the recovery journey, although all suffering with PTSD, would be quite different.

The following is the bit that really resonated for me, echoing many of the issues I've felt, thought, written about and/or attempted to communicate to others (bolds mine):

So there is the PTSD that is part of the core of BPD, which is what created the inner architecture of the illness. This is the PTSD arising out of the trauma the person survived in their childhood that was not abated by loving kindness from any other source.
[...]
For an infant and toddler, the process of learning connecting and individuating is an essential one. If it is done badly, incompetently, it leaves terrible scars. For life.
[...]
Another core issue with BPDs is lack of sustainable object constancy. Object constancy is a major perceptual event in an infant and toddler's life.

Having felt cared for by a loving primary caretaker, usually a parent,
the infant is able to internalize that external love.

What is external is now held inside,
a perceptual object of memory
and inner emotional architecture.

My opinion? This lack of a constant 'object', or 'selfobject' as some call it, is the root, the center, the core of what's troubling the person who ends up with this kind of diagnosis. The person goes through the rest of her life looking for that 'mother' that she never had. And the truth? She needs that mother, as a plant needs water. The problem is that, in our culture and many others, it's damn near impossible for women to get these needs met, as witness the whole trend toward calling women who express emotional needs 'drama queens' or 'high maintenance'.

While so-called 'grown' men are allowed to behave like 'little boys' and get at least some of their unmet nurturing needs met in adulthood, women are pretty much up shit creek. Even a guy who's relatively open-minded and sympathetic rarely has either the capacity or training for providing the kind of support that women are automatically expected to give men. There's a kind of caretaking at which most men totally suck. As far as I'm concerned, it's at the root of many of the problems of this society - men's inability/unwillingness to nurture - and until that changes? Ain't nothin' else goin' ta change neither.

To finish my breadcrumb collection for the moment, a few more thoughts from the previously-quoted Metafilter commenter:

My silly name for this is "love battery". Children who are healthily loved have a well charged love battery, which goes with them into the world and which they can depend on in times of stress. It's constant.

A child who was repeatedly neglected, traumatized or abused may have a badly charged battery and come to chronically, pathologically depend on others to feel charged enough to function. Because the person may not find others who offer that sense of constant charge (mothering), an addiction may be used as a substitute, which worsens the situation badly. Or there is tremendous fear that, even if a person is found, that they might be abandoning.

This object constancy issue is, imo, the hardest one for therapists to handle because it is one of the most draining and leads most to empathy burnout. This is where the gifted therapists come into play. Some are able to teach deep object constancy with great patience. But this is an uncommon gift and hard to find. This why, imo, online support communities for people with BPD may be one of the most healing resources for people with this core issue. The web is always there, 24/7/365.

Object constancy issues for BPDs on the low end of the continuum can be treated with many varieties of talk therapy, which may heal some badly charged "batteries" and teach the wounded person to charge their own battery, to reparent themselves, to soothe their wounds without substances or serotonin binges, to find a way to achieve some workable amount of healthy autonomy.

Note to self: Ignore the above poster's further comments on that thread - the temporary compassion seems to have dissipated like mist. S/he goes on in some fairly unsympathetic (I would even venture to say cruel) language. People who do this are lashing out at someone for something in their own past, would be my guess. Which is fine, but only if one does it consciously, or at least attempts to take responsibility for the unkindness and unempathic nature of one's language.

I realize no one's perfect here - but like the non-violent communication folks (who I'm far from agreeing with, but they have some interesting ideas), I believe that the effort to eradicate bullying, shaming, judgmental language from one's vocabulary as far as possible is a good thing to do.

Meantime I will unashamedly continue to bash the people I'm still angry with, because I'm still angry with them. I will NOT let them off the hook until I'm damn good and ready. And not a minute sooner. Because otherwise this damn pus just stays inside me, festering and making me sick in mind, body and spirit. Not gonna happen, no way no how.

And if you've got a problem with anything I'm saying? Please speak up and say so. Though I fancy myself a 'psychic' to some degree with people I know well and care about, it's more the kind of intuitive 'knowing' that I expect anyone who's paying attention to be able to do. It has absolutely nothing to do with actually reading minds. So please, if you've got an issue, say something. I can't read your mind, and won't attempt to. If you remain silent, I'll have to assume you've got nothing to say.

the bullies never get it

They never get that you bleed because it hurts, not because you're some kind of weakling. As I started writing this, the image came to mind of a squashed beetle, its yellowish-white innards oozing out from its once gorgeous, iridescent-black wings.

The bully can't see the beauty in the beetle. It can only see something smaller and weaker than himself (huh, interesting choice of pronouns, think I'll leave them unedited).

He can only see the beauty of death, of destruction, of maiming and destroying that which he can never be, which is good and beautiful.

It feels like something beyond me is speaking here, some knowing/knowledge that only materializes as I sit here at the keyboard - something that's out there for anybody/everybody to understand and/or 'get', but you have to be open to it.

Which I wasn't til now - too much anger, pain, shame, rage.

So what is it I see? He (the bully) does it because - ok, I can't quite go there yet. Feels to much like a 'should', that I 'should' forgive them. Not going there.

Stay tuned for further something-or-other on this subject, obviously it's not 'ready', not fully cooked yet...

caught between a pragmatist and a dreamer

My dad was the first, my mom the second - dad was the hard-headed, sarcastic, cynical, 'suffering-builds-character,' tough love type; my mom was the head-in-the-clouds, impractical, childlike dreamer who distracted herself through much of my childhood by focusing on the nitty-gritty details of motherhood: Laundry, cooking, cleaning. I sometimes think that some mothers obsess with the details of their 'job' because they're having to sublimate so much else about who they are through this tiny, narrow, supremely inadequate aperture. The typical middle class suburban housewife (and my mom was/is pretty typical for her generation, I think) is trapped like a fly in amber - can't move in any which direction, except down that narrow path expected by the father and the culture, namely as his primary emotional supporter and 'helpmeet', his own personal secretary and cheerleader.

Except that my mom wasn't big into the social end of things - my dad was very social and outgoing, had lots of friends, was often gone playing bridge (or, when we were very young, poker). He joined Toastmasters; invited folks over to play bridge; visited his brothers and father often (the women, of course, were never mentioned - only the youngest sister, who was more willing to fill her 'assigned' role of caretaker and male-ego-amplifier).

My role model was of a woman who seemed terrified that she'd be caught having no clue what to do, so she stayed endlessly busy at her household tasks. My sense of her (no real, clear memories, just impressions) was that she was terrified much of the time - that dad would abandon her, that she'd fail, in some way, to please him. The massive power imbalance between the two of them was more like parent and child than two equal partners. It was always something that stuck in my craw, something I could never accept or like about her (or my father, either, for treating her with what amounted to disrespect, even contempt.)

I often get the sense that many (most?) people take after one parent or the other, but not both - they may take after the one they relate to most (the intellectual, the artist, etc.) or they may take after the one who matches their gender. I seems like the other parent will have an influence, but to a much lesser degree (and of course this is 'anecdata', based on watching others and listening to their stories.)

I feel like I'm sort of caught right in the middle - like I can't choose either path, because I'm really, truly, half of each, and it's impossible to split myself in two like that. It often feels like the culture could accept me better if I'd conform to one or the other, to choose - to be the dreamy, artistic, idealistic, squishy, touchy-feely hippie type would make me weird but acceptably non-threatening to many men; the fact that I don't accept their 'I-know-everything-about-every-conceivable-subject-because-I'm-a-dude' rubs them the wrong way and sends them off in a huff every time.

But I'm not an academic type, either, though I'm a voracious reader and love to think about all kinds of things, and am fascinated by the science-y stuff - to a point. Then I lose interest, I could never be trapped in a stuffy lab staring at slides under a miscroscope all day, for example.

If it doesn't sound egotistical (and I'm afraid it does because women typically aren't allowed to apply these words to themselves), the words I'd like to use to describe myself are:

Philosopher
Musician
Psychic (in the intuitive sense more than the wacky, woo-woo new age sense)
Healer
Inventor (bigger on ideas than execution)
Explorer (especially of mental realms)
Synthesist
Idealist
Eccentric (will I wear purple when I get old?)

I also tend to be quite physical as well as spending lots of long, happy hours wandering around inside my head, turning over ideas; and at the same time an artist and dreamer. I sometimes feel that it's my failure to choose a category or pigeonhole to fit myself into that makes it so hard to find others to relate to. I find it works best if I do it piecemeal - an artist here, a musician friend there, another to go dancing with or see movies, yet another to discuss the nitty-gritty details of gardening that might bore a non-gardener to tears. And yet another friend to obsess over the details of our favorite old science fiction stories.

But it's hard, sometimes, to feel like I can't find someone who's just like me - both in our level of intensity and interest in all kinds of things, rather than being focused narrowly on job and maybe a few hobbies. I guess that's just the way it is, but it's always like cutting oneself up in pieces, dealing with fragments all the time instead of a whole self. Like, I have to hide away all the bits that are outside that person's particular intersection set (Venn diagram, maybe?) so that they don't just give me that puzzled, boy-are-you-weird look that I've encountered more times than I care to mention... sigh.

And it's not like I'm some kind of genius, either, so I don't fit in with the 'gifted' types - I'm often much more comfortable with a blue-collar tinkerer type who drinks beer and reads comic books than the highbrow, brie-eating set. Guess that might be 'cause, even though my parents 'graduated' to a middle class lifestyle during my growing up years, they're (were) basically blue-collar folks at heart, especially my mom. And my dad, even though he learned to dress the part more or less, still grew up poor. Though both his parents, my grandparents, were 'intellectuals', in that they loved to read and educate themselves. And like all (what's the word for self-educated intellectuals? I forget - autodidact? Not sure that's the word I'm looking for), their opinions were often extremely solid while having nothing whatsoever to do with anything mainstream. In other words, I grew up with an entire extended family (at least on my dad's side) of mavericks.

Which is great if you're a guy, but not so wonderful for a woman. Women are still expected to conform in ways that men aren't, especially with this current backlash that allows surface deviations like piercings, wacky hair color, tattoos, etc. - but the underlying mindset, men's attitude toward women, hasn't significantly changed. It's true that with the emo kids (as well as I understand all that), that some young men are more comfortable taking on stereotypically 'feminine' attributes - that and the whole metrosexual thing. But it still doesn't allow women much latitude to explore being forceful, aggressive and sure of themselves the way men are - we're still expected to defer. To have a woman called a 'go-getter' is a pretty sure sign that things haven't changed much, just turn the table and try a label on a guy to test its sexist-ness. How many guys have you ever heard called 'go-getters'? I'm betting the answer is, 'none'. Because guys are assumed to be go-getters, it's part of the definition of guy (and yes I realize that's a two-edged sword that doesn't bode well for any guy who's not a go-getter.)

Have wandered far afield as usual here, looping back to see where I started, and whether there's any obvious connection between there and here:

Ach. Starting new posts instead. Maybe loop back to this later.

if someone is mean to you

you don't have to be nice to them.

I think the reason my hearing is so sensitive is that all the mean things that have ever happened to me have been words, things people have said. Actually that's not totally true - there were some pranks in junior high school that were pretty cruel. But I've mostly blocked them out of my mind, too painful to remember.

What is different about me that I get picked on? I think my dad tried to beat it out of me (verbally, not physically) when I was little - the sensitivity. I didn't even know what was wrong with me - I just tried to hide, in my books because there wasn't anyplace that I could physically escape to - and block it out of my mind. Kind of a version of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing 'lalala'.

But it doesn't block it out. The cruel words echo in there, bounce around over and over again, hurtful, mean things that people (mostly men, but sometimes women) said.

Why me? Does everyone experience this much meanness, this much cruelty? I hear couples speak to (and of) each other in language that I find utterly, unspeakably shocking, and yet to many people it seems to be quite the normal way of behaving.

But then I can think of others - I don't know. I can't figure out a pattern. I can't seem to find any people that I truly feel safe with, truly trust. It just feels like any time I try to get close to somebody, something goes wrong and I end up alone again. It always feels like it's all my fault, like the other person feels no blame or responsibility, and if I don't somehow 'suck it up', the relationship will be over. Or, it will be over anyway, and I'm just left with this horrible, rotten feeling inside of being worthless and unlovable. Like I'm just fundamentally flawed in such a basic way that nobody could ever love me.

If anybody from my family were to read this they would say I'm just feeling sorry for myself, "Don't listen to her, she's just trying to get attention," they would say.

Well, yes - I am trying to get attention. And failing, miserably. It seems like the only ones who get attention are the ones who pretend they're self-sufficient and don't need any help. Isn't that the American way, after all? And if I don't listen to the voice inside me that says how bad I'm feeling, who will?

Nobody, that's who. Everybody just wants you to move on, to get over it, to not bother them.

That's why I get stuck, seemingly forever, in these painful places: Nobody will ever listen.

Over the years it has accumulated to the point where the mountain of unheard hurts is so huge that it frightens even me. I don't even want to look at it - how can I expect anyone else to care? It's too much - it's already eaten such a huge hole in my life, and it feels like there's so little left - I feel as if my life is draining away without ever having really started. Like I never got a chance, like somehow there was never anybody who really saw me for who I was or what I could really do - it was always about how I could be of some use to them. Or, if I was no use to them, then I was useless. Maybe all people are like this.

***
The worst thing is not being able to get off the merry-go-round. You play the conversation over and over and over again, trying to figure what you said to make them be so mean to you. It just fucking HURTS. Like a sonofabitch.

I cry, and the sobbing frightens me, like it will never stop. The nausea, feel like throwing up - the feelings of shame and guilt are so horrible, like something inside me that I cannot escape. And there's never any way to get rid of it - it just sits there. I think that's why I the bulimia used to work, I literally tried to vomit it out.

But now I know it doesn't work, I no longer have the impulse to make myself throw up, though I've almost thrown up spontaneously a few times when I was crying so hard - I've heard/read that sometimes old grief can be like this when it finally comes out, that the physical blocking is so powerful that the muscles literally spasm. But the nausea - waves of it still hitting me. And granted it could be the food (chili), but I'm just pretty sure that it's the emotions trying to be dealt with and not knowing how, so its tying my guts in knots instead.

It just feels like I'm always wrong, no matter what I do. They never accept any guilt, never take any blame, any responsibility - never apologize. God forbid. This would be too major a loss of face - never mind how much pain I'm in, or misery. It's my fault because I'm too sensitive.

How do I escape these people, escape this pain? It's gotten to the point that I see cruelty everywhere, bullies behind every face. I suppose that wariness and fear must show in my eyes, and people can't resist attacking. Or, they try really hard not to, but it comes out anyway. What is that about people, the impulse to attack the weak, to tear them down?

(I'm thinking here of the exception, of romantic movies that portray some excessively vulnerable, fragile, pretty young thing who's been hurt by some relationship disaster, but who somehow yet remains trusting and open, like the wide-eyed Bambi or something. Gag me. Give me Lily Tomlin any time over these phony, fragile flowers who remain unscathed by life. Or maybe the pretty ones really do - no, been watching too many damn movies. Real life is not like that.)

Maybe dad would have been nicer to me if he'd thought I was pretty.

Parents don't really see children at all, do they? They see instead little reflections of themselves (both bad and good).

Who will listen, really listen, and actually care, in a way that I can feel, in this place in my gut where the hurt is?

***
I feel like I want to hurt them, to make them really feel the pain, the way they hurt me. It feels like the only way I can get even, to get rid of some of this pain.

But I can't get through to them. It feels so futile - because, unlike them, I know when I've hurt someone else and I feel so horribly guilty that I just can't do it. But they never seem to have the same feelings for me - that my feelings matter, that they should care about how I feel.

Why is this? Is it my fault somehow?

Some days it feels like I'm making progress, then other days something will send me sliding back down the rabbit hole and everything gets all weird and distorted again, and I can't see clearly or think straight, and it's all I can do to just get through the day. And then I hope for (and fear) sleep, the tossing, fitful, weird-dream-filled thing that happens when I can't fight it off any longer.

It's like, my logical brain knows that people are mean and cruel and thoughtless and selfish, and I know this, and yet I don't really believe it. I can't really believe that they are this way. And my inability to sort between the mean ones and the not-mean ones makes it impossible for me to trust anyone, because I'm always afraid that the ones who have been mostly nice and predictable will suddenly turn on me for no reason that I can ascertain. And why do I fear this? Because it's happened, over and over again.

Sometimes I think it's because I won't play their power games, because I refuse to be either inferior or superior - I try so hard to treat everyone as equal, even people I don't really feel are equal.

Is that a sort of hypocrisy, or what? And where does it come from, and why do I do it? Would it be better if I could just flip some kind of switch and go ahead and play the hierarchy game just like everybody else does? Would that solve this bullying problem for good and all?

acting normal

What is 'acting normal' for, anyway? Is it to keep away the people with syringes, the men in white jackets? Is that why, like Pratchett's quote, we all march in straight rows and allow ourselves to be 'weeded' like so much mindless corn? Makes me think of 1984 or Brave New World. Scary stuff. Like that cop who stopped me for looking around or for running while not wearing running clothes. Are people born with minds that narrow? Or is the narrowness cultivated by progressively trimming off or pruning any bit that doesn't fit social expectation, until finally we are bonsai'ed into near non-existence? Drones. My very own brother, when we were talking recently about 'progressive' schools for the girls, said, Diversity is overrated.

Looking for others who find 'unresponsive people' as annoying as I do, came across this from ballastexistenz, Exactly who is unresponsive here, describing a public service video on autism:

One thing that struck me was that the children in the video were described as unresponsive, over and over again. And yet the children were responding to their parents and to their environments in general, and they were doing so in incredibly clear ways.

However, by the way the parents were acting, it might as well not have been happening. They went right on doing whatever it was they had been doing, as if the children were not communicating anything. The body language of the parents did not change in the slightest in response to their children, it stayed constant, and very very socially smooth.

Then, in order to get their children to “respond” to them (as if the children had not been responding already), they’d do things like try to force eye contact. As if eye contact is “connection” and “response”. There was also some grabbing and moving them around, as if they were objects, but without any responsiveness to the reactions of the children. I even saw children being driven into overload and then parents sitting there looking “sad” that their children did all these “behaviors”.

Maybe these so-called 'normal' parents have deadened their own empathy systems to such a degree that they can't perceive anything subtler than a hammer blow, so by comparison their children's non-verbal cues are 'invisible' to them. They've trained themselves (the parents) not to use, or perceive, the body language and gestures of others because it's too painful. So they've deafened and blinded themselves to a large percentage of the 'information' that the human body/mind evolved to operate on, and in the process have essentially killed off anything remotely resembling intuition. And apparently compassion died along with it.

Maybe a typical so-called 'normal' American is just one who's so numbed out that s/he expresses nothing more powerful than a blank mask? As if all of life were a poker game, and you can never let the other guy see what you're thinking or feeling. Weird.

Ooh, ooh - reading further in the comments thread on the above-linked post, came across this gem from a commenter:

I think what some people call responsiveness is actually more like obedience. My son is very responsive, he often does the exact opposite of what we’ve asked :-)

see, by laying this down in black and white

I can go back and walk over the same ground again. It anchors me, somehow, to have this written record out in public. It means that my story is not being lost, that I do exist - it's something tangible, that I can go away from and come back to (something about attachment and unavailable mother/safe base niggling here), and it's still there when I come back. It hasn't changed or disappeared or been destroyed by somebody who doesn't care whether I make it or not.

So I can familiarize myself with the terrain, reflect my self back to myself, until such time as one comes along who's willing to mirror back for me, as my parents never did. (Acknowledging here that comments can do this, so thank you, kitty, for your comments!)

It's some kind of security blanket. And it's working, I'm finding the panic attacks and sleepless nights diminishing and becoming more manageable. That there's at least one place in the world where I can speak my truth and not be negated or denied or called 'too sensitive'. (And still the undermining parental and familial voices echo in my head. But I tell them to shut the fuck up. Though I can be more gentle now because I'm now less angry, because I've allowed myself to be angry for as long as I need to, not bottling it up to make life easier for others who haven't shared my experience.)

when life seems to have become a seemingly endless series of compensatory devices

discover what's being compensated for.

Then meet those unmet needs.

Of course, easier said than done in a culture where the only people whose needs are truly being met are those whose 'need' is to have a whole lot of money. The rest of us have been manipulated into being a means to that end. Only most of us haven't noticed - most of us think we can be just like them. We can have it all.

Do the math, people - the pie may divide into an infinite number of (very tiny!) slices, but the pie is only so big. Contrary to the bullshit of 'The Secret' and whatnot, we do not have unlimited resources. We cannot keep growing forever and ever, unchecked, 'world without end'. There is an end, whether we like it or not. When you hear that the U.S. consumes something like 80% of the world's resources, and that everyone wants to be like us - well, it just simply doesn't add up. Not everyone can be simultaneously using 80% of the world's resources. So if everyone tries to do so, suddenly we've used it all up and it's all gone. There ain't no more where that came from - the supplies are depleted. The cupboard is bare, empty.

Sigh. I feel like that's all too metaphorical, and hey, I look out the window and see sun, blue skies, green trees, it's peaceful and quiet, what's all the worry about? So ok. Maybe it's time to just go out there and forget about all this.

A Pratchett quote that I want to save, from Small Gods:

Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.

:-) :-) :-)

random

If anybody happens to read this, please note that I am thinking out loud here. I put this stuff up here for me to look at. If anybody else finds any of it useful, great. But I certainly have no fixed expectations for this approach (scattershot?) It's just the only way I can think of to keep track of all these random, yet seemingly connected, ideas. It's like this massive collection of sticky notes that I can't keep track of any other way. As such I periodically lose some of them, or they get buried under layers of things that catch my interest for a while, and then, when I lose interest, the old things may re-surface and catch my attention again. And so on. Over and over again. Covering old ground, like walking a path again and again until every stone, evey bump, every patch of grass is known and familiar. That way, when something truly new shows up, you can actually see it, rather than missing it because you've never really looked carefully at any of it before.

Today, so far:
Wondering why I drink so much Coke. What does it do for me?
Theories to date: The caffeine helps kick me past the depression so that I can actually do things.

And the Jack Daniels is the same, only opposite - it kicks the hyperdrive sensitivity and hypervigilance into the off position for a while, so that my body/central nervous system is able to actually experience relaxation. It's pretty cool, because if I get the mix right the 'calm' effect can last through to the next day, which is amazingly enjoyable if you've ever been a person who's constantly 'amped up' by life. I've noticed lately that now that my body has a chemical experience of relaxation, I'm better able to get there without assistance. And on the days when I can't get there single-handedly (-mindedly??), I don't shame or berate myself, but instead just get out that lovely bottle and clink myself a wee drink. And then I remember - ahhh, that feeling of relaxation! How lovely! How wonderful to climb down off the high-stress ladder of always being 'on', of 'keeping up with the Joneses', of 'keeping your act together'. ('Act', another one to deconstruct. Another time, maybe.)


All my life people have been telling me I'm too sensitive, insisting that I perceive things that don't exist. Well, what if they're wrong? What if, by the way I construct my life, I'm actually able to be quiet enough to hear and see things that they can't perceive because they're making too much damn noise all the time???

Like ley lines, for example. Now, a ley line may or may not exist. Dunno, jury's out, and really, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether feng shui 'works' or not, either. What matters is getting in touch with one's own intuition to a level that does you some good. Fuck what other people say or think. Are they you? Do they live in your body and have to (get to?) have your experiences??? Fuck no!!!!! And so where the fuck do they get off telling you what to do or how to be or how think or anything whatsoever at all???? Answer: They have no right. (little voice telling me my brother & SIL may feel this way about my 'meddling' with 'their' children. I disagree, but that has more to do with me not perceiving their children as 'theirs' than anything else.)

So, ley lines: I've been sleeping on a built-up pad in the living room (narrow, but comfortable) for over a year now. One side effect is that I've been embarassed to have people over, because I feel silly about having a bed on the living room floor and having the bedroom empty. After all, this is a tiny house (less than 500 square feet). But - though it feels silly to leave a whole room empty, it just feels safe out here. Meaning, in the living room. Something happened in there (in the bedroom - I think it may have just been a huge, gigantic, explosive build-up of intolerable emotions), and I've been waiting for it to clear out before going back in there. It feels like an emotional Superfund site in there, the land has to be allowed to sit, unused and vacant for some period of time to allow the background radioactivity (or other toxicity) to die down. I've also felt that it's something about the electrical currents in the house - the place is a frickin' nightmare of random wiring, overloaded circuits (metaphors everywhere!) and so on, to the point that the one outlet on the wall where I used to keep the head of my bed felt like there was something 'shooting out of the wall' there. I could never figure out what it was, it was just the outlet. But as long as I slept to one side of that 'line' (to the west, but not east), I was fine, and could sleep fine. But if I tried to sleep to the east of it I couldn't sleep - too close to the window, or something else?

So when everything went haywire and I got rid of the old bed and was experimenting with different sleep positions and locations, I found that sleeping on the floor under the bedroom window was horrible. In fact it may even have been a precursor to last years panic attacks - I'm thinking I was suddenly/finally developing this overwhelming sensitivity to the negative in my life so that I could deal with it - I had finally, after all these years, been able to create an environment in which the background noise of daily stresses could be blocked out to a level that I could actually beging to deal with the internal, emotional, relational stuff. In other words, I could begin to become clear about which people are good, and which people are bad. Like a sorting device.

Along the way I read about ley lines, and that this area I'm living in was once a Native American holy ground. Now I don't know if this exact spot was considered holy (I'm thinking not), but the location and natural geographic feautures make it feel like a power source - top of a hill, secluded from noise generators, wind and weather patterns tend to find a node here - as in, when it's windy, something about the microterrain etc. seems to create peculiar little 'eddies', as of a kind of trapped energy (which certainly mirrors my internal state and sometimes feels right at home! Other times it simply exacerbates or makes the 'already irritated/irritable' feel completely like shit.) And sometimes I feel like I have my own wonderful little microclimate - the only blissfully sunny, warm spot in the neighborhood - I'm basking on my front porch like a cat, while ten or fifteeen feet away neighbors and passersby huddle miserably in their overcoats like a bunch of frozen northerners. Radiant heat, my friend! :-) Yes, a little smugness at having made a good choice. (And recognition of the good fortune that such an option exists! Now know why 'backward' people are so superstitious - warding off the evil eye with self-effacement, false humility, etc.)


Dots encountered in Brownian motion wanderings today and last few days (may or may not manage/attempt to connect them at this time):

fibromyalgia
chronic fatigue
hypouricemia
salicylates
gallbladder out (this Wiki entry caught my eye:

Abdominal surgery also has a uricosuric effect, as well as the potential to precipitate an acute attack of gout.

(Huh - just like that, eh? After all these years of trying to figure shit out, the connection between many of my problems and having the damn gallbladder removed become clearer and clearer. Fucking egotistical, clueless (dangerous combination of traits!) western doctors and their bullshit 'protocols'/practices. Assholes - they treat us like fucking guinea pigs, not people...)

The Principles of Therapeutics, by Oliver Thomas Osborne, written in the 1920s. Page 215 or thereabouts has some interesting things to say about caffeine, overstimulated modern life, etc. Not available through my local library, might buy it if I can find it cheap enough online. Might be a useful addition to a 'home library', though at this point I'm enjoying owning practically nothing. More a matter of having it readily available for reference since I can't get it from the lib.


I do lots of things that go against the 'conventional wisdom' - eating half a pound of bacon a day some days, then two cokes, then half a pint of ice cream [ran out yesterday, need some more]. People ask how I stay in such good shape [or worse yet, some guy asked me why I kept myself in shape if I wasn't seeing men - fucking moron - "because I like my body, you idiot"???] and I tell them I have no idea. I don't exercise much, eat all the 'wrong' things, sit around and read a lot, am often a hermit for days on end. I think it's luck of the genetic draw, to some extent, but mostly I think it's because I trust my instincts about what's right for me, and ignore all those idiots out there peddling their various wares. That's my best guess anyway, but who knows what's really going on - as I've probably said a million times in other ways, most 'explanations' are more for convenience than any sort of accuracy or usefulness - they allow us to think we have some sort of control, rather than life being this bucket ride to hell... tryin' to enjoy it :-)

So I love, love, LOVE it when something comes along that 'explains' why one of my 'odd' habits totally and completely makes sense in some way that the 'mainstream' never thought of. "Hah!" I thinks to myself - "I was right all along, you fricking morons!" Now we're even. It's all about revenge, after all, ain't it? Hahhahhaaaaaaaaaaaa - bwahhahahhhh!!! Smug demon laughter :-)


Years ago I stopped using sunscreen and just tried to limit my time out in the sun to that which felt comfortable to my body, and/or used a hat (never liked sunglasses) and long sleeves to cover my body when I feel I've exceeded my 'quotient' of direct sun on any given day. Seems to work, and over time I'm reading more and more articles that suggest that direct sun is what's needed for proper amounts of vitamin D and thus calcium absorption, especially among northerners. And that noon or thereabouts is the only time of day where sun angle at northern latitudes is actually steep enough to give enough benefit. Plus eating lots of calcium-bearing foods such as cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt. (sorry if all this is boring, skip it if it bores you, please!)

Along these lines, today encountered this blog, drbganimalpharm.blogspot.com, the linked post seems to make many similar connections to ones that I've been experiencing over the last few years (including one I hadn't made yet, namely the wheat sensitivity/intolerance/celiac thing with sunlight/vitamin d):

In the dawn of time, ancient wheat probably did not cause as many autoimmune and silent/non-silent celiac diseases (or ?autism or ?coronary artery disease) as the present day. Why? In the Gladiator days, for one, sunscreen did not exist! Secondly, most people worked and warrior-ed outdoors. Toiling in the sun, hand laundering clothes, baking bread on outdoor hearths, practicing swordplay, gathering berries, fishing, preparing crops, hunting gamey-flesh (which BTW gamey-meat and grass-fed beef are enriched in EPA+DHA, much like fatty deep sea fish/fish oil), and other noble chores in the bright sunshine (because candles were scarce). All day long 24/7...

Does having enough sunlight and vitamin D give us more power to tolerate gluten and not develop damaging self-destructive auto-antibodies?

Fascinating stuff, at least to me. More and more reasons for 're-wilding', as much as is possible in a near-urban environment on an ever-more-crowded planet...


Totally random link encountered while surfing around for ideas about why caffeine might actually be good for you: Is Caffeine a Health Hazard

In 1903 an Italian manufacturer who was impatient with the amount of time his employees spent brewing coffee during coffee breaks invented a machine that used high temperature & pressure to rapidly extract coffee from grind. The result was espresso (Italian for fast).

Thought that was really funny - around here espresso is touted as the ultimate, hipster-ish, tres cool version of coffee. Turns out it was just some guy's solution to getting his people to work harder... hah! :-)


Trying to make sense of my unconventional diet (seeking 'validation' so that I can just do what I do and spend less time worrying about what other people think), came across this one about Intake of purine-rich foods, protein and dairy products and relationship to serum levels of uric acid:

In conclusion, our results suggest that higher levels of meat and seafood consumption are associated with higher levels of serum uric acid, but the total protein intake is not. Dairy consumption was inversely associated with the uric acid level.

So: The half pound of bacon is neutralized by the cheese, cottage cheese and ice cream. The Coke helps break down the fat which is harder to digest because of no gallbladder; the caffeine helps boost serotonin. The best thing, once my adrenaline has been jacked up by the caffeine, is to go use it - long, vigourous walk, strenuous exercise out in the garden, what have you. What a frickin' complicated domino-chain of effects! But, it still feels like, the more I trust my instincts, wherever they may lead me, the better off I am. For now I continue to use these links to help fight of the doubters, the naysayers, the 'I-know-more-than-you-because-I-spent-eight-years-in-med-school-being-brainwashed-by-Big-Pharma' folks. (Watch the video King Corn sometime if you want an eye-opening alternate view/understanding of how brainwashed we all are by the various 'food industries' in this culture. Pretty scary shit. Also, The Omnivore's Dilemma has some pretty useful/interesting ideas aong these lines.)


In the two-steps-forward-one-back category, came across some guy's idea that massive doses of guaifenesin (the active ingredient in cough syrup, the expectorant part) could be used to counteract fibromyalgia. Now, I'm not saying I have fibro or chronic fatigue. But I'm in that category, moving along that continuum, and I really, really don't want to go there. So I figure anything I can 'understand' along those lines that might act as a preventative measure has to be a good thing, eh?

Anyway, the guaifenesin sounds like a bad idea to me (anything that wouldn't have been part of our natural environment as we evolved seems unlikely to have a 'natural' place in our body chemistry and therefore, our health [and yes, I realize Coke falls in this category, but if you think about it, both Coke and Jack are far more 'natural' than any pharmaceutical. But I digress.]) So I go hunting for why guaifenesin might work, what it's supposed to do, and get to the Wiki article about uricosuric acid and all that. And then I have to figure out what uricosuric acid is, and I'm led to gout (which one brother has) and hypouricemia, and the link about abdominal surgery having a uricosuric effect (still not totally clear what this actually means?).

Which then led to the AnimalPharm link, and back round we go again about how it's all connected - sunlight, wheat intolerance, ley lines, too much time in front of the computer. Having to find these things out the hard way through my mind rather than from the more natural, direct way of listening to my body. Which I will go do some of soon - two cans of caffeine and half a pound of bacon down, the sun's out and it's almost warm enough out there to finally go for a walk and/or garden and to 'hunt/gather' some ice cream :-) to complete today's (or this particular moment's) cycle of food substitutes for unmet emotional needs.


And the whole need for external sources of physical warmth thing - growing up with unaffectionate parents, and a needy clingy mother who clung to me for her needs, I've always been cold. Only one guy has ever gotten it right, this funny-looking guy I don't like very much at a garden shop I visit - he always 'hits' on me a bit (or maybe he's just one of those annoyingly insensitive people, doesn't pick up on body language). But anyway, he offered this one piece of random 'wisdom' one early spring day when when I was shiveringly making my way through the plant display, nearly blue with cold, "I always think that women who are cold all the time, it's basically a cry for affection." And I'm like, yeah, you're right. Bingo. Right on the money. Too bad you're not attractive to me, otherwise I might see if we could explore that notion a little!

So I huddle, waiting for the sun to get warm enough. And then, suddenly: Too hot! Too hot. Very narrow comfort range. As if the internal regulator simply doesn't work. But: When I'm getting my emotional needs met, as in, getting lots of snuggling and having someone to do things with/hang outwith/affection, talking, etc., suddenly all that goes away and I'm fine. Huh. Not exactly rocket science here, eh Watson?


It's as if everything in our so-called 'modern' world does everything possible to go completely against nature, against instinct. So that merely the act of following one's instincts becomes, in itself, such a basic act of rebellion that it's almost impossible to do.

So every day I spend hours 'girding my loins' against this onslaught from the outside world, armoring myself to the assaults on mind, body, spirit. Bloody fucking hell! Is it really worth it??? Maybe, the more I think about it, being a hermit is a good thing.

disjointed thoughts after days of little sleep

going to put them down, maybe attempt to stitch them together coherently later, maybe not.

Reading too many self-help books creates unrealistic expectations.

OC behavior is an attempt to create order and stability in an unstable, unpredictable life.

Families can be unspeakably cruel and heartless.

What does it mean to 'give your power away'? (Seems like more bullshit victim-blaming to me.)

Ok, so I grew up reading books, gravitating toward compassionate authors such as Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon (they weren't compassionate much toward women, but their stories showed a deep understanding of the experiences of others. Or so it seemed to me at the time. I especially loved Sturgeon's stories about circus freaks or 'carnies' [there's one really powerful one where a misshapen dwarf goes into the funhouse every day to look at himself in the mirror because there's one mirror that reflects him back as normal] - I think I related to these stories because I felt like the 'misfit' in my family [and yes, I recognize that everyone experiences some feelings of not fitting in now and then, it's human nature. But some of us get stuck with a worse 'fit' than others.] Vonnegut is the only guy, I think, who has that 'androgynous' capacity to write believably and sympathetically about women's experiences. Or at least I'm remembering one story in which this is the case, have to hunt down the title.)

Growing up reading books rather than interacting with others means you get this sort of 'flat' sense of how things are - it's like the way some people prefer emailing to phone or live conversation (and may be in fact why some people shy away from 'live' conversations): You had no practice in your formative years learning the give-and-take of bouncing emotions interactively off another person, so you basically don't know how. Which is incredibly stress-inducing, because it's obvious that understanding the emotions of others and knowing how to interact and effectively express your own emotions is critical to survival in the world. Regardless of how asocial or antisocial we have become overall as a culture (so that it gets harder and harder to know what 'normal' might be), we're still hard-wired to be social animals - our entire body chemistry and neurological system is designed to process emotions as survival information at very high speed, much faster than the (relatively glacial) speed of conscious thought. So next time somebody claims to be more 'logical' or 'rational' than you are, just recognize that they're missing an essential piece of relational software: Empathy. Maybe it's something to do with their mirror neurons that's gone haywire. (Mirror neurons are cool!) (and it occurs to me that all of our ways of 'understanding', aka science, etc., are the blind men trying to describe the elephant: They can never get it quite right, because they can never really see the whole picture. Like trying to get a fish to grasp the view from beyond its little pond. Or as a Pratchett story tells it, the sudden 'perspective' gained by a turtle who, in that few moments before being dropped to its death on the rocks below, hurtles airborne in the grip of an eagle and sees its formerly narrow world laid out below it in all its un-graspable hugeness and complexity. Huh. Just realized there may be people who have a similarly 'large' view, like the eagle. Which is maybe why I love Pratchett's stories! But still disappointed that his 'wide view' doesn't incorporate women in a way that satisfies my need to be seen, heard and reacted to as an actual person.)

(Learning out loud here. Being my own parent; posting this stuff on the blog allows me some 'distance', and I can come back later and re-read and wince, or admire, or challenge, or further masticate some incompletely digested idea. Pretty cool :-)

So I got this idea from my books that people could be kind, and I think I clung to this delusion as an antidote to the total emotional vacuum in which I actually lived. I fed off my books, desperately, like a starving animal. They were my life blood; they got me through. (In fact, I still do this, in times of overwhelm, but I've become aware that they are, emotionally speaking, 'empty calories', that fill me up without satisfying the deeper underlying need to be heard and cared for.)

But then, and I think I've said this before, I left the 'nest' where this adaptive behavior served me so well and took it out into the 'real world', where said behavior didn't work at all.

And of course I couldn't talk about it to anyone, because, first of all, I didn't know what 'it' was, or even that I had an 'it' that could be talked about. And in any case, even if I had somehow managed to know, against the odds, about 'it', I still wouldn't have known that you could talk about things with somebody, for fuck's sake - this would have gone completely against my entire life experience up to that point. I think I experienced much of my childhood as having a sheet of transparent but impenetrable glass between me and everybody else, and everything that went on 'out there' had nothing to do with me. Dissociation at work? That would be my best guess. (Just a word of encouragement - after 10 years of doing this exhausting, painful, one-step-forward-and-two back [not always, but sometimes that daunting], work, I'm actually making progress. I'm beginning to be able to have what feel like 'normal' interactions with people without constantly having to second-guess myself or hyper-analyze or even think much about them. If you've never experienced this, you have no idea how huge, how major a big deal this is. It's like the difference between life and death, literally - without that emotional connection with other humans, we are basically dead meat walking. It's just a matter of time til the biological system runs down from lack of emotional fuel.)

Images from that traumatized, terrifyingly dissociated childhood: I used to have this recurring nightmare (or maybe I only had it once, but it was so powerful and frightening that I never had it again) where I was in some place like a zoo or an aquarium, and there were these steps with big tanks along the side. Inside the tanks were people, floating - big people (so grownups, I assume? no idea how old I was at the time - seems quite young, but maybe 8 or so? not sure) who were completely expressionless, immobile. They weren't dead - they were just motionless, completely and utterly unresponsive. Like suspended animation or something, as if they were floating in a vat of formaldehyde. (Seeing this in writing, from a slight distance, helps make the obvious connection with the unresponsiveness I now have words for, but didn't as a child.)

I'd already read lots of science fiction, fantasy, mythology, horror stories and tales of the supernatural by this point (including Poe), so the images themselves didn't shock me. In fact, what disturbs me about the dream in retrospect is how little emotional reaction I had at the time. It's as is some part of me knew there was something horribly wrong in my world, but I had no means of coping with it in my child mind, so I essentially just checked out. Just shut down that poor, overwhelmed emotional system that had no support whatsoever from that world of so-called 'adults' who were supposed to be helping me with such things. Instead it turned into a nightly horror of nightmares, where I'd wake screaming and crying and terrified. Mom related the story once of me being about 6 and her coming into our room (my younger brother, who was three, and I shared a pair of bunk beds at that point) in response to hearing me cry, and seeing me sitting up in bed with my arms flapping and tears running down my face, sobbing, all while apparently sound asleep. Mom, in her classic cluelessness, laughed while telling the story.

How did I get such unfeeling, unsympathetic parents?

(alternating here between writing and reading portions of a Vonnegut story over on Google reader, Harrison Bergeron [from Welcome to the Monkey House]. Suddenly feeling sad, and stopped to cry, because always in the past [well, as I've been doing this 'emotion work'] sadness = uncontrollable sobbing for some unpredictable length of time. But now, rather than it being an absolute downpour, the sadness gets the beginning of that emotional overwhelm, but then passes quickly, like a cloud before the sun. Yay! I'm beginning to be able to feel even fleeting emotions! Isn't this fucking amazing? You have no idea how amazing this feels. Like trying to teach oneself a language from - what - matchbook covers and cereal boxes or something. And one day you find yourself, all unawares, able to construct a complete sentence without spending a whole day thinking about it. Or even having a simple conversation. Yow!)