Processing Disorder Quotes

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, and calm, a Self that has been sheltered from destruction by the various protectors that have emerged in their efforts to ensure survival. Once those protectors trust that it is safe to separate, the Self will spontaneously emerge, and the parts can be enlisted in the healing process

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself -- that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83)

People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.

I would not encourage you to go through the sweat, blood, and tears of the recovery process only to reach some kind of mediocre state where you were just ‘managing’ the illness. It is possible to live without Ed.

Many empaths are diagnosed with chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia, CFS, lupus, and various autoimmune diseases, as well as psychological disorders such as agoraphobia, social anxiety, ADHD, depression, sensory processing disorder, among many others.

Empaths feel more deeply, more intensely, and more persistently than those around us. We even feel what other people are afraid to feel within themselves.

First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them." [Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking (The Creativity Post, December 6, 2011)]

All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma. Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It has meaning in every single case.

Weight and body oppression is oppressive to everyone. When you live in a society that says that one kind of body is bad and and other is good, those with “good” bodies constantly fear that their bodies will go “bad”, and those with “bad” bodies are expected feel shame and do everything they can to have “good” bodies. In the process, we torture our bodies, and do everything from engage in disordered eating to invasive surgery to make ourselves okay. Nobody wins in this kind of struggle.

In the life cycle of an intense emotion, if it isn't acted upon, it eventually peaks and then decreases. But as Dr. Linehan explains, people with BPD have a different physiological experience with this process because of three key biological vulnerabilities (1993a): First, we're highly sensitive to emotional stimuli (meaning we experience social dynamics, the environment, and our own inner states with an acuteness similar to having exposed nerve endings). Second, we respond more intensely and much more quickly, than other people. And third, we don't 'come down' from our emotions for a long time. One the nerves have been touched, the sensations keep peaking. Shock waves of emotion that might pass through others in minutes keep cresting in us for hours, sometimes days.

Many women latch onto language from popular psychology, such as "panic attack," when often they are instead experiencing sensory overwhelm.

Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.

As a scientist I rebelled against the disorder, and I had long since discovered that nothing thwarted the mental processes like clutter.

Recovery so far is, in some ways, as difficult as the bulimic/alcohol-ridden years, but difficult in a different way because I'm facing my issues for the first time instead of burying them with eating disorders and substances. I'm processing not only the grief of my mom's death, but the grief of a childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood that I feel I had never truly been able to live for myself. It's difficult, but it's the kind of difficult I have pride in.

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know.

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hyperme-diated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read –slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. ‘Writing has never been capitalism’s thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate’, Deleuze

no recovery from trauma is possible without attending to issues of safety, care for the self, reparative connections to other human beings, and a renewed faith in the universe. The therapist's job is not just to be a witness to this process but to teach the patient how.

When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you don't sense yourself directly. . . . I started teaching a simple belly meditation in which I asked people to become aware of sensations in their belly (numbness and emptiness count as sensations). Every time their mind wandered . . . I asked them to begin counting their breaths so they could anchor their concentration. Starting with the number one and saying it on the out breath, they'd count to seven and begin again. If they were able to stay concentrated on the sensations in their belly centers, they didn't need to use counting as a concentration anchor. . . . you begin the process of bringing yourself back to your body, to your belly, to your breath because they -- not the mind medleys -- are here now. And it is only here, only now that you can make a decision to eat or not eat. To occupy your own body or to vacate your arms and your legs while still breathing and go through your days as a walking head. . . . Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.

Dissociation leaves us disconnected from our memories, our identities and our emotions. It breaks the trauma into digestible components, so that different aspects of the trauma get stored in different compartments in our brain. What happens as a result is that the information from the trauma becomes disorganized and we are not able to integrate these pieces into a coherent narrative and process trauma fully until, hopefully, with the help of a validating, trauma-informed counselor who guides us to the appropriate therapies best suited to our needs, we confront the trauma and triggers in a safe place.

Keep those faces in mind, the little girls and boys in the early grades, all trusting the adults to show them the way, all eager and excited about life and what will come next, and then just follow those faces over time. Follow the face of a little girl who doesn't read very well and is told to try harder; who tends to daydream and is told she better pay attention; who talks out in class when she sees something fascinating, like a butterfly on the windowpane, and is told to leave the class and report to the principal; who forgets her homework and is told she will just never learn, will she; who writes a story rich in imagination and insight and is told her handwriting and spelling are atrocious; who asks for help and is told she should try harder herself before getting others to do her work for her; who begins to feel unhappy in school and is told that big girls try harder. This is the brutal process of the breaking of the spirit of a child. I can think of no more precious resource than the spirits of our children. Life necessarily breaks us all down somewhat, but to do it unnecessarily to our children in the name of educating them -- this is a tragedy. To take the joy of learning -- which one can see in any child experimenting with something new -- to take that joy and turn it into fear -- that is something we should never do.

There is no right or wrong way to recover. There is only the decision to do so.

Healing requires you to be vulnerable and strong at the same time.

I AM IN THE PROCESS OF REVIVAL AND RENEWING MY STRENGTH.

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.

Indeed, the underlying precept of the new science of mind is that all mental processes are biological—they all depend on organic molecules and cellular processes that occur literally “in our heads.” Therefore, any disorder or alteration of those processes must also have a biological basis.

If our mental processes become focused on our internal dogmas and isolated from the unfolding, constantly dynamic outside world, we experience mismatches between our mental images and reality. Then confusion and disorder and uncertainty not only result but continue to increase. Ultimately, as disorder increases, chaos can result. Boyd showed why this is a natural process and why the only alternative is to do a destructive deduction and rebuild one’s mental image to correspond to the new reality.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

It was that culture of denial that allowed my abuse to take place to start with. Did you know that it wasn't until 1984 that the Department of Health added the category of "sexual abuse" to its list of harms that can befall children? When I was being raped and made pregnant at the age of 11, it wasn't just my own dissociative process that told me that it wasn't happening; it was society too. "We don't have a category for that. Computer says no."͏

Powerful support for an amygdaloid role in fear processing comes from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated.13 Moreover, the amygdala expands in size with long-term PTSD.

all these disorders involve learned habits of negative thinking and behavior that hijack our attention and trap us in loops of self-reflection. “What started as a pleasure becomes a need; what was once a bad mood becomes continuous self-indictment; what was once an annoyance becomes persecution,” in a process he describes as a form of “inverse learning.

Needing help doesn't have a look, but asking for it always looks beautiful.

The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.

The process of healing is draining, but it has to be done because this time around I am not half-stepping—I am going all the way.

A really important and underestimated part of recovery is allowing yourself to fall apart without rushing in to fix it.

When experiences or emotions become too overwhlming, the mind clevely encapsulates the material and stores it for safe-keeping. Many people respond this way in the face of trauma, but the additional step that occurs in this process, in the case of DID, is the formation of distinct ego states that carry the experience.

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they "came to their senses" and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of "enoughness"".

But unpredictability was not the reason physicists and mathematicians began taking pendulums seriously again in the sixties and seventies. Unpredictability was only the attention-grabber. Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things. That was why scientists played with toys.

It is worth recalling here that the injudicious use of rewards and praise can be pressure tactics no less than verbal or physical coercion. As we have seen, there are three dangers with motivating by means of reward and praise. First, they feed the anxiety that not the person but the desired achievement is what is valued by the parent. They directly reinforce the insecurity of the ADD child. Second, since children can sense the parents’ will pushing them, even if under benign disguises such as gifts or warm words, counterwill will be strengthened. Third, praise and reward will themselves become the goal, at the expense of the child’s interest in the actual process of what he is doing. Children thus motivated will sooner or later learn to get by with the least amount of effort necessary to earn the praise or the reward. Short cuts and cheating often follow. Accepting

And that vulnerability, many thought, was really an issue with “sensory gating,” or the brain’s ability (or inability) to correctly process incoming information. A sensory gating disorder was the most common explanation for the schizophrenia experienced by John Nash—the Nobel Laureate mathematician depicted in A Beautiful Mind—who was able to detect patterns no one else could, and yet also was prone to delusions and visions of beings who were out to get him. Both of those aspects of Nash’s personality were said to be products of the same hypersensitivity

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.

Creativity is as much about order against freedom; control versus rebellion; organisation against disorder as it is about straightforward imagination.

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

life is a process not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

It is now recognised that dissociation is a way of forgetting, for a time. The mind siphons off the bad memories into a separate part, and reclaiming those hidden-away memories us a complex process. So, when the memories resurface it does not feel as though they belong to you, it feels alien, more as if someone had told them to you, or you had seen the images in a film.

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.

Recovery is real. It's not a luck-of-the-draw deal where you put your name in a hat and hope to be chosen. It's a grueling, relentless, personal process that will push you beyond your limits over and over.

Recovery itself is a very un-glamorous daily process of being willing to fall down again, to break again, to cry again, to get up and try yet again until ‘success’ manifests as ever-greater sustained healing.

The government researchers,aware of the information in the professional journals, decided to reverse the process (of healing from hysteric dissociation). They decided to use selective trauma on healthy children to create personalities capable of committing acts desired for national security and defense.” p. 53 – 54

Sometimes life doesn’t make sense. Sometimes there is no good reason for the events that take place. But most times, you’ll realize it will all make sense for a much better reason, if you’re patient enough to wait.

The term dissociation is ordinarily used to describe the phenomenon of compartmentalization or fragmentation of mental contents. It does not ascribe any particular mechanism by which the dissociative process occurs. Does dissociation occur as a result of automatic, nonconscious processes, or are there other specific mechanisms by which it occurs? Especially in the context of describing amnesia, the term repression is widely used in connection with several different mechanisms. As it is commonly used, it often implies how individuals may block our memories of uncomfortable or conflictual experiences. If done consciously, the mechanism is more accurately called suppression, which results from actively trying not to think about negative experiences.

Somehow the disorder hooks into all kinds of fears and insecurities in many clinicians. The flamboyance of the multiple, her intelligence and ability to conceptualize the disorder, coupled with suicidal impulses of various orders of seriousness, all seem to mask for many therapists the underlying pain, dependency, and need that are very much part of the process. In many ways, a professional dealing with a multiple in crisis is in the same position as a parent dealing with a two-year-old or with an adolescent's acting-out behavior. (236)

In my view, the spurning of DID is highly connected with knowing and not knowing about child sexual abuse. Side by side with denial of childhood trauma and of severe dissociation, is an unmistakable cognizance of dissociative processes as they are embedded in our language. We regularly say things such as, "pull yourself together", "he is coming unglued", "she was beside herself", "don't fall apart", "he's not all there", "she was shattered", and so on.

Along with the sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and the father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it. "I" expel it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself with the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see the "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, During that course I'm which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering the violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it abreacts. It abjects

This child did not need to “change his behaviors.” We needed to understand his behaviors and what they suggested as the probable underlying reason for the behaviors. We needed to remember that behaviors are a message, a symptom—not a diagnosis.

Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told — even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that — they were not disjointed They were not repetitive in terms of "I've heard this before". It was not just she'd someone trying consciously or unconsciously to get attention. really processed them out and was done with them. She didn't come up with them again [after telling the story once and dealing with it]. Once it was done, it was done. And I think that was probably the biggest factor for me in her believability. I got no sense that she was using these stories to make herself a really interesting person to me so I'd really want to work with her, or something. Or that she was just living in this stuff like it was her life. Once she dealt with it and processed it, it was gone. We just went on to other things. 'Throughout the whole thing, emotionally Cheryl was getting her life together. Parts of her were integrating where she could say,"I have a sense that some particular alter has folded in with some basic alter", and she didn't bring it up again. She didn't say that this alter has reappeared to cause more problems. That just didn't happen. The therapist had learned from training and experience that when real integration occurs, it is permanent and the patient moves on.

When clients relinquish symptoms, succeed in achieving a personal goal, or make healthier choices for themselves, subsequently many will feel anxious, guilty, or depressed. That is, when clients make progress in treatment and get better, new therapists understandably are excited. But sometimes they will also be dismayed as they watch the client sabotage her success by gaining back unwanted weight or missing the next session after an important breakthrough and deep sharing with the therapist. Thus, loyalty and allegiance to symptoms—maladaptive behaviors originally developed to manage the “bad” or painfully frustrating aspects of parents—are not maladaptive to insecurely attached children. Such loyalty preserves “object ties,” or the connection to the “good” or loving aspects of the parent. Attachment fears of being left alone, helpless, or unwanted can be activated if clients disengage from the symptoms that represent these internalized “bad” objects (for example, if the client resolves an eating disorder or terminates a problematic relationship with a controlling/jealous partner). The goal of the interpersonal process approach is to help clients modify these early maladaptive schemas or internal working models by providing them with experiential or in vivo re-learning (that is, a “corrective emotional experience”). Through this real-life experience with the therapist, clients learn that, at least sometimes, some relationships can be different and do not have to follow the same familiar but problematic lines they have come to expect.

There may not be any romance to mental illness but who needs romance when the preferable route is agency? The prevailing conversation around mental health issues is agency and the lack thereof on the part of the mentally ill. But what do you do if you’re a paid-up member of the mentally ill populace in question? Do you curl up into a ball and give up? No, you look for solutions. Ultimately, it’s about keeping despair at bay and sometimes simple things like running, taking up a hobby, doing charity work, painting or, in my case, writing can be a galvanizing part of the recovery process. Keeping the brain and the body active can give life a semblance of pleasure and hope. This is what writing has done for me. I took every traumatic element of my condition and channelled it into something useful.

Few of us can escape being neurotic or character disordered to at least some degree (which is why essentially everyone can benefit from psychotherapy if he or she is seriously willing to participate in the process). The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence. It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever-changing course of events.

In a nutshell, the process they [abusers in a ritual abuse group] use on survivors is designed to: break the will and personality of the person until they become as nothing... with no will of their own...no identity...then they... rebuild the person & shape their will in order to...try and make the person one of them...thus gaining power If abusers hold all the power, becoming one of them can, for some, be the only means of survival. However, this doesn't always work, instead survivors often find ways of regaining their own power and fighting back.

The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn’t even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, “I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It’s the only thing that works.” For her. Lord knows, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.

fat cells much more than passive storage sites for excess calories. Fat cells take in or release calories only when instructed to do so by external signals—and the master control is insulin. Too much insulin causes weight gain, whereas too little causes weight loss. So if we think about obesity as a disorder involving fat cells, then a radically different view emerges: Overeating doesn’t make us fat. The process of becoming fat makes us overeat.

Unless subjected to constant discipline the mental processes of the common sign types are apt to be scattered or non-eventuating. There is a distinct tendency to carry along unfinished business and to procrastinate in decision. If left to its own disorder, the mind may deteriorate into a tumbling ground for whimsies.

Setbacks allow us to take a step back and look at the view from a whole.

Another way to describe the Second Law is in terms of entropy, the degree of disorder and randomness in a system. Any spontaneous process tends to increase the entropy of a system.

Don't be afraid to start over ... because it is in that leap to the unknown where you will find your wings.

The truth was that for me, as for all addicts, the excitement was not in the ostensible goal—listening to the music—but in the process of acquiring.

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: RELIVING DISSOCIATED EXPERIENCES The reexperiencing of previously dissociated traumatic events presents in a variety of complex ways. The central principle is that dissociated experiences often do not remain dormant. Freud's concept of the “repetition compulsion” is enormously helpful in understanding how dissociated events are later reexperienced. In his paper, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud (1920/ 1955) described how repressed (and dissociated) trauma and instinctual conflicts can become superimposed on current reality. He wrote: The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. .. . He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past. (p. 18) If one understands repression as the process in which overwhelming experiences are forgotten, distanced, and dissociated, Freud posited that these experiences are likely to recur in the mind and to be reexperienced. He theorized that this "compulsion to repeat" served a need to rework and achieve mastery over the experience and that it perhaps had an underlying biologic basis as well. The most perceptive tenet of Freud’s theory is that previously dissociated events are actually reexperienced as current reality rather than remembered as occurring in the past. Although Freud was discussing the trauma produced by intense intrapsychic conflict, clinical experience has shown that actual traumatic events that have been dissociated are often repeated and reexperienced.

Trauma-related structural dissociation should be distinguished from more ubiquitous phenomena that are often termed dissociation, but likely have a different underlying process. Over the past several decades the original meaning of dissociation has been quite extended by the addition of other phenomena not typically considered to be dissociative. These include alterations in consciousness such as absorption, daydreaming, imaginative involvement, altered time sense, trance-like behavior, and “highway hypnosis” (e.g., Bernstein & Putnam, 1986).

You will become effective only when your loved one can trust you. For years, your loved one with BPD has felt emotionally isolated and misunderstood. How can he trust someone he feels has never heard him? He will begin trusting you when he senses you are truly listening to him, actually hearing what he says, and really trying to communicate with him. Having the humility to acknowledge your own mistakes will help you begin to repair the damage brought about by years of miscommunication. This will be a very slow process but, over time, you can do it.

The first glance at the pillow showed me a repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it--cockroaches as large as peach leaves--fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something. I had often heard that these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toe nails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more. I lay down on the floor. But a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair. In a few moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas were throwing double somersaults about my person in the wildest disorder, and taking a bite every time they stuck. I was beginning to feel really annoyed. I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck. The above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life.

members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.

Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

auditory processing issues: difficulty understanding spoken language, often experienced as a delay between hearing spoken words and being able to process those audio sounds into recognizable words .

The government researchers, aware of the information in the professional journals, decided to reverse the process (of healing from hysteric dissociation). They decided to use selective trauma on healthy children to create personalities capable of committing acts desired for national security and defense.” p. 53 – 54 ― Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country: Dale Griffiths, Cheryl & Lynn Hersha, Ted Schwartz Wikipedia has a long history of issues with inaccuracy and bias over dissociative disorders, abuse and ritual abuse http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/art...

Happiness is your natural birthright. Why then are so many unhappy? Unhappiness is a disordered state of mind; happiness is an ordered state of mind; there are many more disordered states than ordered states. You dwell in a disordered state by default and conditioning; you achieve ordered states by process of mind; each condition, event, situation, form and person is brought into your life by your thoughts and the images in your mind’s eye, which in turn arise from your deepest beliefs. The secrets of happiness are awareness and action, the exercise of energy in a way suited to a man’s nature and circumstances.

The act of consciously and purposefully paying attention to symptoms and their antecedents and consequences makes the symptoms more an objective target for thoughtful observation than an intolerable source of subjective anxiety, dysphoria, and frustration. In ACT, the act of accepting the symptoms as an expectable feature of a disorder or illness, has been shown to be associated with relief rather than increased distress (Hayes et al., 2006). From a traumatic stress perspective, any symptom can be reframed as an understandable, albeit unpleasant and difficult to cope with, reaction or survival skill (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). In this way, monitoring symptoms and their environmental or experiential/body state "triggers" can enhance client's willingness and ability to reflectively observe them without feeling overwhelmed, terrified, or powerless. This is not only beneficial for personal and life stabilization but is also essential to the successful processing of traumatic events and reactions that occur in the next phase of therapy (Ford & Russo, 2006).

The person’s cognitive distortions get triggered, and all kinds of extreme thoughts may get generated, including allegations of abuse by you. People with BP tendencies seem to desire the elimination of the other parent as much as possible, stating that you’re a “threat” to the child for some reason, and you need supervised visitation or no contact. Since these types of orders are used only when there are serious abuse allegations, people with BP or NP traits often make very serious abuse allegations. This entire process may be totally unconscious, although some blamers are willing to make knowingly false statements to accomplish their desperate goals.

Today, our view of genuine reality is increasingly clouded by professionals whose technical expertise often introduces a superficial and soulless model of the person that denies moral significance. Perhaps the most devastating example for human values is the process of medicalization through which ordinary unhappiness and normal bereavement have been transformed into clinical depression, existential angst turned into anxiety disorders, and the moral consequences of political violence recast as post-traumatic stress disorder. That is, suffering is redefined as mental illness and treated by professional experts, typically with medication. I believe that this diminishes the person,

It’s a grieving process,” Shrink agrees. “When you make the decision for health, for recovery, you make the choice to let go of your eating disorder. Have any of you ever felt that that the eating disorder was almost a companion?

Entropy is the degree of randomness or disorder in a system, Doctor.” His eyes fix on Werner’s for a heartbeat, a glance both warm and chilling. “Disorder. You hear the commandant say it. You hear your bunk masters say it. There must be order. Life is chaos, gentlemen. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even down to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of the species. Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, the chaff. This is the great project of the Reich, the greatest project human beings have ever embarked upon.” Hauptmann writes on the blackboard. The cadets inscribe the words into their composition books. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay.

It’s all in your mind” is almost insulting, implying there’s something strange or weak about you or that the symptoms are in your imagination. This is most unfortunate, since the symptoms are very real, the result of a very physical process.

Switches among identities occur in response to changes in emotional state or to environmental demands, resulting in another identity emerging to assume control. Because different identities have different roles, experiences, emotions, memories, and beliefs, the therapist is constantly contending with their competing points of view. Helping the identities to be aware of one another as legitimate parts of the self and to negotiate and resolve their conflicts is at the very core of the therapeutic process. It is countertherapeutic for the therapist to treat any alternate identity as if it were more “real” or more important than any other. Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

Fever is a symptom of your body when it is undergoing the process of fighting against illness or disorder. It is necessary to know if we get sick or ill. Most of the time, we ignore fever and let our body fight against any enemies causing bodily disorder, which includes a rise in temperature. We perspire to neutralise and balance our body temperature. Hence, fever means that our body is fighting…self-curing…a wonderful self-healing process of the well-engineered human system design by the Creator.

Secondary structural dissociation involves one ANP and more than one EP. Examples of secondary structural dissociation are complex PTSD, complex forms of acute stress disorder, complex dissociative amnesia, complex somatoform disorders, some forms of trauma-relayed personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS).. Secondary structural dissociation is characterized by divideness of two or more defensive subsystems. For example, there may be different EPs that are devoted to flight, fight or freeze, total submission, and so on. (Van der Hart et al., 2004). Gail, a patient of mine, does not have a personality disorder, but describes herself as a "changed person." She survived a horrific car accident that killed several others, and in which she was the driver. Someone not knowing her history might see her as a relatively normal, somewhat anxious and stiff person (ANP). It would not occur to this observer that only a year before, Gail had been a different person: fun-loving, spontaneous, flexible, and untroubled by frightening nightmares and constant anxiety. Fortunately, Gail has been willing to pay attention to her EPs; she has been able to put the process of integration in motion; and she has been able to heal. p134

Disordered-eating behaviors don’t exist in a vacuum. If you start eating to soothe yourself after experiencing trauma, for example, you’re not doing that in a culture of “Do what you gotta do to get through the day, and also let me help you process your trauma.” No, you’re doing it in a culture of “OMG YOU’RE EATING SO MUCH, YOU’RE GONNA GAIN WEIGHT AND THAT’S ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE—YOU NEED TO LOSE WEIGHT, STAT! (And PS, trauma? What are you even talking about? Just suck it up and move on!)” So even when people start eating to self-soothe, without any connection to weight or body image, they eventually end up absorbing our culture’s toxic beliefs about food and bodies. In our society at this moment in history, it’s basically impossible not to fall into diet culture’s clutches at some point.

A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the great unknown and the unutterable truths that structure existence. An afflicted person seeking clarification of existence cannot ignore the shamanistic calling of narrative exposition. Thus, I shall continue this longwinded howl – making a personal immortality vessel – into the darkness of night forevermore.

Often the thoughts that can act as emotional triggers seem to come from nowhere.  They can be positive or negative in nature.  For example a memory of a happy past experience can trigger a thought process which leads you to compare a good time in the past with your present circumstances.  Things may not seem as good now as they did then and this leads into an unpleasant cycle.  Alternatively, a negative thought can lead you to developing negative emotions, in turn leading you to avoid these, perhaps using impulsive behaviors to avoid the issue.

To change that thought process, state the obvious: “I was/am terribly depressed.” Now for the different thought. Say to yourself, “So how depressed am I?” Now go for the less obvious. “I am so depressed…” Now think of something not obvious. How about, “I’m so depressed I sleep under my mattress”?

Remembering things or processing memories can be a charged, or frightening, or uncomfortable time. It can help to imagine yourself being a reporter. This can take pressure off of needing to remember 'all the details' or not wanting to 'be wrong about something', if you simply just write down whatever comes to you down on paper without editing it, censoring it, or passing judgment—for the time being—on either its content, or on whether it is l00% accurate in every way. Simply write it down and come back to it later, when things may make more sense, or as additional information comes to you...

DSM-5 is not 'the bible of psychiatry' but a practical manual for everyday work. Psychiatric diagnosis is primarily a way of communicating. That function is essential but pragmatic—categories of illness can be useful without necessarily being 'true.' The DSM system is a rough-and-ready classification that brings some degree of order to chaos. It describes categories of disorder that are poorly understood and that will be replaced with time. Moreover, current diagnoses are syndromes that mask the presence of true diseases. They are symptomatic variants of broader processes or arbitrary cut-off points on a continuum.

Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it . . . The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house.

Anxiety and worrying can cause heart palpitations. Worrying about the palpitations causes anxiety. With increased anxiety come more frequent palpitations, which are perceived as being 'worse', or more intense due to the extreme focus that's placed on them. You can summarise it as a two-way process. Anxiety causes palpitations. Palpitations cause anxiety.

Paying attention also requires inhibiting certain responses when making the above choices. This involves inhibiting the following: Acting until information has been processed Speaking out one’s thoughts (This involves internalizing speech or “talking inside your head” without actually speaking one’s thoughts out loud unless that is the desired thing to do!)

Entropy is the degree of randomness or disorder in a system, Doctor.” His eyes fix on Werner’s for a heartbeat, a glance both warm and chilling. “Disorder. You hear the commandant say it. You hear your bunk masters say it. There must be order. Life is chaos, gentlemen. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even down to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of the species. Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, the chaff. This is the great project of the Reich, the greatest project human beings have ever embarked upon.” Hauptmann writes on the blackboard. The cadets inscribe the words into their composition books. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay. The

A patient complains of feeling nervous or fearful. These feelings and behaviors suggest that the patient has an anxiety disorder, and the doctor prescribes whatever drug will most probably work for an anxiety disorder. However, there's no conclusive way to tell that this patient definitely has an anxiety disorder. Even if the doctor did get the diagnosis correct, there's a great deal of variation regarding which drug class (for example, anti-anxiety drugs versus antidepressants) a particular individual will respond to and which drug within a class (for example, Prozac versus Zoloft) will work best. If the drug doesn't work, the doctor will try the next one on the list and so on, thus delaying treatment success and complicating the process with the mix-and-match type of treatment.

Unburdened by all of the normal constraints of listening and processing, they simply adopt the tactic of questioning their opponent’s every statement and devising counter-arguments that expose the flaws in their opponent’s views. Generally, narcissists do not hold onto any particular belief or consistent position, except one – the belief that they are superior to others. They can therefore constantly shift their stated position and adhere to this altered position as doggedly as before. This combination of rigid certainty (they are superior and therefore must be right) and blatant inconsistency (shifting their position moment to moment) makes it extremely difficult for others to counteract their arguments. As a result, narcissists often come across as being intelligent, articulate, and skilful negotiators – the ultimate triumph of style over substance.

Control of the pruning process is incredibly precise, and when it goes awry, neurodevelopment suffers. Children with autism, for instance, appear to have too many synaptic connections in certain parts of their brain early in life, and the usual culling that occurs in late adolescence is far less intense than that in children without the disorder. Perhaps, researchers believe, kick-starting the pruning process with a drug might help treat autism in the future.

There were times when Tristan’s natural inclination toward cynicism served some larger, more enduring disorder; a vast, chronic paranoia. Any rare glimpses of optimism were swiftly dealt with, like a virus his mind and body leapt to attack. Feelings of hope? Cancerous. Maybe it was systemic, a matter of lifelong institutional mistrust. There was a constant sensation for Tristan that if things seemed to be going well, he was in the process of being mightily tricked.

It helps when young people know that their family thinks they’re great and loves them, no matter what. It helps to have frequent, positive interactions with family members in order to figure out what’s fun and safe to do with peers, especially when parents aren’t looking. It also helps to pay attention to other people’s social customs and sensory preferences, not just our own. This all takes resolve and work—and the reward of a satisfying social life is worth all the effort.

As an individual passes from one situation to another, his [sic] world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. The process goes on as long as life and learning continue. Otherwise the course of experience is disorderly, since the individual factor that enters into making an experience is split. A divided world, a world whose parts and aspects do not hang together, is at once a sign and a cause of a divided personality. When the splitting-up reaches a certain point we call the person insane. A fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when successive experiences are integrated with one another. It can be built up only as a world of related objects is constructed.

It is the function which permits us to understand the organism. Thus, when they are inborn, anatomical structures should be considered as topographical conditions of the original functional development, modifiable by the function itself and thus comparable to the electrode which governs the phenomenon of electrolysis but is altered by it in return; when they are acquired, they should be considered the result of the most habitual functioning; thus anatomy should be considered as a stage in the development of physiology. Finally, if it were established that the nerve processes in each situation always tend to re-establish certain states of preferred equilibrium, these latter would represent the objective values of the organism and one would have the right to classify behavior as ordered or disordered, significant or insignificant, with respect to them. These denominations, far from being extrinsic and anthropomorphic, would belong in the living being as such.

However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the

to see that the danger and emotional pain remain contained. My experience with TMS has convinced me that the purpose of this repression is to protect the individual, to prevent the painful, dangerous feelings from coming to consciousness and causing even greater distress. The psychosomatic symptoms that accompany this repression, while sometimes extremely distressing, are not some form of punishment but are generated to distract the conscious mind and therefore to assist the process of repression.

However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the order created by biological evolution.

We must let go of any fantasy concerning the church as a stable, predictable, well-regulated organization. If the church is truly the place in the world where the existence of God is brought to the level of narrative discernment, the the church will always be disorderly. …We must let go of the desire for theology to be a finished product of complete conceptual symmetry. If theology is in fact the attempt to understand living faith, then it must always be an unfinished process, for the data continues to come in, as the Living God persists in working through the lives of people and being revealed in their stories. …We must let go of any pretense of closing the New Testament within some comprehensive, all-purpose, singular reading which reduces its complexity to simplicity. We must recognize our attempts to reduce multiplicity to unity. We must recognize our tendency to seek a stable package of meaning that we can then apply to other situations or fit within our systematic theological constructs, so that, ideally, we need never really read the texts again.

EMDR is a bizarre and wondrous treatment and anybody who first hears about it, myself included, thinks this is pretty hokey and strange. It's something invented by Francine Shapiro who found that, if you move your eyes from side to side as you think about distressing memories, that the memories lose their power. And because of some experiences, both with myself, but even more with the patients of mine who told me about their experiences, I took a training in it. It turned out to be incredibly helpful. Then I did what's probably the largest NIH-funded study on EMDR. And we found that, of people with adult-onset traumas, a one-time trauma as an adult, that it had the best outcome of any treatment that has been published. What's intriguing about EMDR is both how well it works and the question is how it works and that got me into this dream stuff that I talked about earlier, and how it does not work through figuring things out and understanding things. But it activates some natural processes in the brain that's helped you to integrate these past memories.

The normative temporal and spatial frames of historical materialism have ironically forced a congruence between Marxist and bourgeois definitions of civilization, both of which cast racialized nonnormative sexualities as anterior and as signs of disorder and social chaos within an otherwise stable social system. The contingency of queer relations, their uncertainty, irregularity, and even perversity, disregards the so-called natural bonds between memory and futurity, and in the process make an implicit argument for forgetfulness.

Helping the identities to be aware of one another as legitimate parts of the self and to negotiate and resolve their conflicts is at the very core of the therapeutic process. It is countertherapeutic for the therapist to treat any alternate identity as if it were more “real” or more important than any other. The therapist should not “play favorites” among the alternate identities or exclude apparently unlikable or disruptive ones from the therapy (although such steps may be necessary for a limited period of time at some stages in the treatment of some patients to provide for the safety and stability of the patient or the safety of others). The therapist should foster the idea that all alternate identities represent adaptive attempts to cope or to master problems that the patient has faced. Thus, it is countertherapeutic to tell patients to ignore or “get rid” of identities (although it is acceptable to provide strategies for the patient to resist the influence of destructive identities, or to help control the emergence of certain identities at inappropriate circumstances or times). It is countertherapeutic to suggest that the patient create additional alternate identities, to name identities when they have no names (although the patient may choose names if he or she wishes), or to suggest that identities function in a more elaborated and autonomous way than they already are functioning. A desirable treatment outcome is a workable form of integration or harmony among alternate identities." Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12:2, 115-187 (2011) DOI 10.1080/15299732.2011.537247

Though women have struggled successfully to achieve increased social and career options, they may have had to pay an exacting price in the process: excruciating life decisions about career, families, and children; strains on their relationships with their children and husband; the stress resulting from making and living with these decisions; and confusion about who they are and who they want to be. From this perspective, it is understandable that women should be more closely associated with BPD, a disorder in which identity and role confusion are such central components.

Even political systems follow a form of rational tinkering, when people are rational hence take the better option: the Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by “reason.” Polybius in his Histories compares the Greek legislator Lycurgus, who constructed his political system while “untaught by adversity,” to the more experiential Romans, who, a few centuries later, “have not reached it by any process of reasoning [emphasis mine], but by the discipline of many struggles and troubles, and always choosing the best by the light of the experience gained in disaster.

The answer was, we weren’t at all ready. Annual flu shots didn’t provide protection against H1N1, it turned out, and because vaccines generally weren’t a moneymaker for drug companies, the few U.S. vaccine makers that existed had a limited capacity to ramp up production of a new one. Then we faced questions of how to distribute antiviral medicines, what guidelines hospitals used in treating cases of the flu, and even how we’d handle the possibility of closing schools and imposing quarantines if things got significantly worse. Several veterans of the Ford administration’s 1976 swine flu response team warned us of the difficulties involved in getting out in front of an outbreak without overreacting or triggering a panic: Apparently President Ford, wanting to act decisively in the middle of a reelection campaign, had fast-tracked mandatory vaccinations before the severity of the pandemic had been determined, with the result that more Americans developed a neurological disorder connected to the vaccine than died from the flu. “You need to be involved, Mr. President,” one of Ford’s staffers advised, “but you need to let the experts run the process.

This syndrome is a distant cousin to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. What makes PBS different from PTSD is the sense of disbelief one gets from PBS. How could someone who loved me hate me so deeply? How could I stay and subject myself to all that pain despite all my education and awareness? Remember the error message—the brain can’t compute bizarre behavior right away, but after some time, it can look back and parse through the details. But that’s rarely a neutral process. It can create an inability to focus and a foggy mental state that keeps the victim stumbling through their day.

ASPARTAME AND MSG: EXCITOTOXINS Aspartame is, in fact, an excitotoxin, one of a group of substances, usually acidic amino acids, that in high amounts react with specialized receptors in the brain, causing destruction of certain types of neurons. A growing number of neurosurgeons and neurologists are convinced that excitotoxins play a critical role in the development of several neurological disorders, including migraines, seizures, learning disorders in children, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).1 Glutamate and aspartate are two powerful amino acids that act as neurotransmitters in the brain in very small concentrations, but they are also commonly available in food additives. Glutamate is in MSG, a flavor enhancer, and in hydrolyzed vegetable protein, found in hundreds of processed foods. Aspartate is one of three components of aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal), a sugar substitute. In higher concentrations as food additives, these chemicals constantly stimulate brain cells and can cause them to undergo a process of cell death known as excitotoxicity—the cells are excited to death.

However, resentment can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause, and thereby gain release from the constraints that normally contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. That, it seems to me, is what happens when left-wing movements take over. In such cases resentment ceases to be a response to another’s unmerited success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture of the one whom the world has betrayed. Such a person does not seek to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that hitherto controlled the world and which must now in turn be controlled. And all institutions that grant protection to that class or a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive rage. That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.

I’ve never understood Western society’s warped perception of grief as something quantifiable and finite, a problem to be fixed. Eight months after Grandpa died, my doctor suggested I see a psychiatrist because I was still having trouble accepting he was gone. After only one session, the psychiatrist promptly diagnosed me with “persistent complex bereavement disorder,” aka chronic grief, and suggested I take antidepressants. Turns out, in the opinion of most medical experts, your grieving process shouldn’t last longer than six months. And if you aren’t over it by then, there’s something clinically wrong with you.

Some parents resist the idea of ADD for fear of seeing their children labeled and categorized. They do not like the idea of pinning a medical diagnosis on a child who, except in certain areas of functioning, seems quite well. Such fears are not baseless. Too often ADD seems no more than a judgment that characterizes a child as a problem student, incapable of normal activity. How people use language is quite revealing. People commonly say that this adult or that child “is ADD.” That, indeed, is labeling, identifying the whole person with an area of weakness or impairment. No one is ADD, and no one should be defined or categorized in terms of it or any other particular problem. Recognizing a child’s ADD should be simply a way of understanding that helping him calls for some knowledgeable and creative approaches, not a judgment that there is anything fundamentally or irretrievably wrong with him. This recognition should enable us to support the child in fullfilling his potential, not to further limit him. That even open-minded people may have difficulty coming to terms with this diagnosis is only to be expected. Our usual mode of thinking about illness (or anything else, for that matter) is not comfortable with ambiguity. A patient either has pneumonia or does not; she either has some illness affecting the mind or does not. There is a popular discomfort with any condition of the mind perceived as “abnormal.” But what if illness is not a separate category, if there is no line of distinction between the “healthy” and the “nonheaithy,” if the “abnormality” is just a greater concentration in an individual of disturbed brain processes found in everyone? Then perhaps there are no fixed, immutable brain disorders, and we could all be vulnerable to mental breakdowns or malfunctions under the pressure of stressful circumstances. We could all go crazy. Maybe we already have.

It is not quite true that the Swiss do not have a government. What they do not have is a large central government, or what the common discourse describes as “the” government— what governs them is entirely bottom-up, municipal of sorts, regional entities called cantons, near-sovereign mini-states united in a confederation. There is plenty of volatility, with enmities between residents that stay at the level of fights over water fountains or other such uninspiring debates. This is not necessarily pleasant, since neighbors are transformed into busybodies— this is a dictatorship from the bottom, not from the top, but a dictatorship nevertheless. But this bottom-up form of dictatorship provides protection against the romanticism of utopias, since no big ideas can be generated in such an unintellectual atmosphere— it suffices to spend some time in cafés in the old section of Geneva, particularly on a Sunday afternoon, to understand that the process is highly unintellectual, devoid of any sense of the grandiose, even downright puny (there is a famous quip about how the greatest accomplishment of the Swiss was inventing the cuckoo clock while other nations produced great works— nice story except that the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock). But the system produces stability— boring stability— at every possible level.

Judith Hermann' study of trauma linked survivors of domestic violence, refugees and war veterans to the plight of communities living under tyraniical control. She noted the effects of self-medication in assisting dissociation from the feelings of past and present trauma, while also blocking the integration of experience required for healing, setting up conditions for inter-generational abuse and violence. Judy Atkinson also explored the process from an Aboriginal perspective in her work, Trauma Trails (2003). Survivor guilt, a victim mentality, anxiety disorders and depression are amongst the range of psychological disturbances that become masked by intoxication.

When its patent on Prozac expired, Eli Lilly put the same recipe into a pink pill, named it Serafem, and created a new "illness": premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) (Cosgrove, 2010). Many women become irritable when premenstrual, but it is one thing to say "I'm sorry I'm kind of cranky today; my period is due" and another to announce "I have PMDD." It seems to me that the former owns one's behavior, increases the likelihood of warm connection with others, and acknowledges that life is sometimes difficult, while the latter implies that one has a treatable ailment, distances others from one's experience, and supports an infantile belief that everything can be fixed.

What's interesting about if you look at the basic physics of the universe going from the Big Bang to where we are today, then the physics is driven by the fact that the universe began in an extremely ordered state. See, it was a very highly ordered system. And it is tending towards a more disordered system at the moment. And that's called the second law of thermodynamics. What we strongly suspect, and I would say know, is that in that processes of going from order to disorder, complexity emerges naturally for a brief period of time. So it's a natural path that in the evolution of the universe you get period in time where there's complexity is the universe - stars, and planets, and galaxies, and light, and civilisations. But they exist because the universe is decaying, not in spite of the fact that the universe is decaying. So our existence in that sort of picture is necessarily finite and necessarily time limited. And it is a remarkable thing that that complexity has gone so far, that there are things in the universe that can think, and feel, and explore it. And i think that is the answer. If you want an answer to the meaning of it all, it's that. That you are a part of the universe because of the ways the laws of nature work. You are allowed to exist, but you are allowed to exist for a temporary, small amount of time in a possible infinite universe.

About his madmen Mr. Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men, you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf. Pick for your companion a manic-depressive, afflicted by any of the various degrees of mania - chronic, acute, delirious. Usually more man than wolf, he will be instructive. His disorder lies in the very process of his thinking, rather than in the content of his thought. He cannot wait a minute for the satisfaction of his fleeting desires or the fulfillment of his innumerable schemes. Nor can he, for two minutes, be certain of his intention or constant in any plan or agreement. Presently you may hear his failing made manifest in the crazy concatenation of his thinking aloud, which psychiatrists call "flight of ideas." Exhausted suddenly by this riotous expense of speech and spirit, he may subside in an apathy dangerous and morose, which you will be well advised not to disturb. Let the man you meet be, instead, a paretic. He has taken a secret departure from your world. He dwells amidst choicest, most dispendious superlatives. In his arm he has the strength to lift ten elephants. He is already two hundred years old. He is more than nine feet high; his chest is of iron, his right leg is silver, his incomparable head is one whole ruby. Husband of a thousand wives, he has begotten on them ten thousand children. Nothing is mean about him; his urine is white wine; his faeces are always soft gold. However, despite his splendor and his extraordinary attainments, he cannot successfully pronounce the words: electricity, Methodist Episcopal, organization, third cavalry brigade. Avoid them. Infuriated by your demonstration of any accomplishment not his, he may suddenly kill you. Now choose for your friend a paranoiac, and beware of the wolf! His back is to the wall, his implacable enemies are crowding on him. He gets no rest. He finds no starting hole to hide him. Ten times oftener than the Apostle, he has been, through the violence of the unswerving malice which pursues him, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Now that, face to face with him, you simulate innocence and come within his reach, what pity can you expect? You showed him none; he will certainly not show you any. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, 0 Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. Mr. Lecky's maniacs lay in wait to slash a man's head half off, to perform some erotic atrocity of disembowelment on a woman. Here, they fed thoughtlessly on human flesh; there, wishing to play with him, they plucked the mangled Tybalt from his shroud. The beastly cunning of their approach, the fantastic capriciousness of their intention could not be very well met or provided for. In his makeshift fort everywhere encircled by darkness, Mr. Lecky did not care to meditate further on the subject.

There were other strange signals and signs. Another day, suddenly felt an almost overwhelming urge to travel to Balitmore. I wanted to 'kidnap' a helicoper fly it there if I didn't drive the there', she explains. 'I had no idea where I was to go, only that I was certain I would know my destination as I encountered signs and certain landmarks along the way. I was not even certain who I was to meet, or what my mission was, but I felt I must go.' Beginning to heal by this time with Talbon's help, she resisted that urge. Yet she sensed she would be summoned for three more Cat Woman missions: two in 1999 and one in 2000. As for the code words for activating her, those had been erased from Cheryl's conscious memory. Buried deep in her unconscious mind, however, the words, when called up, cause her to react as her programmers want her to. Though she can't remember the activation codes, Cheryl knows her handlers said the same things every time. 'I'm working on unblocking the words in therapy. Once I know what the words are, I can learn how to stop their effect on me. I did it already when I learned the control code. Standing in front of a mirror, I said the control code words over and over until I was completely desensitised to them. That's what I have to do for the activation code words... but I have not been able to recall all of them as yet.' Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. 'It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told - even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that - they were not disjointed. They were not repetitive in terms of "I've heard this before". It was not just trying consciously or unconsciously to get attention. She'd really processed them out and was done with them. She didn't come up with it again [after telling the story once and dealing with it]. Once it was done, it was done. And I think that was probably the biggest factor for me in her believability. I got no sense that she was using these stories to make herself a really interesting person to me so I'd really want to work with her, or something.

Though diagnosis is unquestionably critical in treatment considerations for many severe conditions with a biological substrate (for example, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, major affective disorders, temporal lobe epilepsy, drug toxicity, organic or brain disease from toxins, degenerative causes, or infectious agents), diagnosis is often counterproductive in the everyday psychotherapy of less severely impaired patients. Why? For one thing, psychotherapy consists of a gradual unfolding process wherein the therapist attempts to know the patient as fully as possible. A diagnosis limits vision; it diminishes ability to relate to the other as a person. Once we make a diagnosis, we tend to selectively inattend to aspects of the patient that do not fit into that particular diagnosis, and correspondingly overattend to subtle features that appear to confirm an initial diagnosis. What’s more, a diagnosis may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Relating to a patient as a “borderline” or a “hysteric” may serve to stimulate and perpetuate those very traits. Indeed, there is a long history of iatrogenic influence on the shape of clinical entities, including the current controversy about multiple-personality disorder and repressed memories of sexual abuse. And keep in mind, too, the low reliability of the DSM personality disorder category (the very patients often engaging in longer-term psychotherapy).

The flat tire that threw Julio into a temporary panic and the divorce that almost killed Jim don’t act directly as physical causes producing a physical effect—as, for instance, one billiard ball hitting another and making it carom in a predictable direction. The outside event appears in consciousness purely as information, without necessarily having a positive or negative value attached to it. It is the self that interprets that raw information in the context of its own interests, and determines whether it is harmful or not. For instance, if Julio had had more money or some credit, his problem would have been perfectly innocuous. If in the past he had invested more psychic energy in making friends on the job, the flat tire would not have created panic, because he could have always asked one of his co-workers to give him a ride for a few days. And if he had had a stronger sense of self-confidence, the temporary setback would not have affected him as much because he would have trusted his ability to overcome it eventually. Similarly, if Jim had been more independent, the divorce would not have affected him as deeply. But at his age his goals must have still been bound up too closely with those of his mother and father, so that the split between them also split his sense of self. Had he had closer friends or a longer record of goals successfully achieved, his self would have had the strength to maintain its integrity. He was lucky that after the breakdown his parents realized the predicament and sought help for themselves and their son, reestablishing a stable enough relationship with Jim to allow him to go on with the task of building a sturdy self. Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bearing on the self. Does it threaten our goals, does it support them, or is it neutral? News of the fall of the stock market will upset the banker, but it might reinforce the sense of self of the political activist. A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by getting us all worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals, thereby freeing up psychic energy.

I am very against physicians labeling high sensitivity as a sensory processing “disorder” instead of a gift with its own set of challenges. Medicine too often pathologizes anything “different” that it doesn’t understand. Empaths have special traits that exist on the normal continuum of human experience. They exemplify the wonderful diversity of our species. The problem with conventional medicine is that it lacks a paradigm that includes the body’s subtle energy system. This concept has been central to many healing traditions for thousands of years cross-culturally, including traditional Chinese medicine. What is subtle energy? It is the vital life force that penetrates the body and extends inches to feet around it.

we won a lawsuit for police misconduct in New York City. The police had been arresting homeless people for sleeping in public, and charging them with disorderly conduct. Hundreds of folks rallied to bring attention to this situation, and many of us slept outside to express our feeling that it should not be a crime to sleep in public. I was arrested one night as I slept. Through a long legal process, I was found not guilty, and then I filed a civil suit of wrongful arrest, wrongful prosecution, and police misconduct. And we won, in addition to a legal precedent, around $10,000, though we felt the money didn’t belong to me or to the Simple Way but to the homeless in New York for all they endure. It was their victory. The second thing

There appears to be a close connection between these skin disorders (acne and warts) and the emotions. As with virtually all of these mind-body processes, there is no laboratory proof of the causative role of emotions, but there is certainly a mountain of clinical evidence. Acne is one of the common "other things" that people with TMS have had or continue to have even while they're having back trouble. And then there's the story of the man who developed an itchy rash under his wedding band that disappeared as soon as he separated from his wife. Other gold rings did not produce a similar rash. It has been suggested that other skin disorders like eczema and psoriasis are related to the emotions. I am inclined to agree but have no evidence one way or the other. (page 195)

Cleckley reported that psychopaths never experience grief, honesty, deep joy, or genuine despair. From my own experience, I would add to Cleckley’s observations that the psychopath never ruminates on anything. Rumination is a process that often contributes to depression and in extreme forms to obsessive-compulsive disorder. The process of rumination is often associated with some anxiety or subjective feeling of concern or worry, and this can help precipitate change in the individual in order to reduce the anxiety. The psychopath experiences none of this. Indeed, if you ask a psychopath if he has ever worried about whether he left the house with the stove on (a common problem among those with obsessive-compulsive disorder), he will look at you like you are an alien, in stunned disbelief.

Virtually all the authors of popular books on the subject assert that ADD is a heritable genetic disorder. With some notable exceptions, the genetic view also dominates much of the discussion within professional circles, a view I do not agree with. I believe that ADD can be better understood if we examine people’s lives, not only bits of DNA. Heredity does make an important contribution, but far less than usually assumed. At the same time, it would serve no purpose to set up the false opposition of environment to genetic inheritance. No such split exists in nature, or in the mind of any serious scientist. There are many biological events involving body and brain that are not directly programmed by heredity, and so to say that ADD is not primarily genetic is not in any sense to deny its biological features — either those that are inherited or those that are acquired as a result of experience. The genetic blueprints for the architecture and the workings of the human brain develop in a process of interaction with the environment. ADD does reflect biological malfunctions in certain brain centers, but many of its features — including the underlying biology itself — are also inextricably connected to a person’s physical and emotional experiences in the world. There is in ADD an inherited predisposition, but that’s very far from saying there is a genetic predetermination. A predetermination dictates that something will inevitably happen. A predisposition only makes it more likely that it may happen, depending on circumstances. The actual outcome is influenced by many other factors.

If we want to be healthy, we need to eat and move about a little more like our ancient ancestors did. That doesn’t mean we have to eat tubers and hunt wildebeest. It means we should consume a lot less processed and sugary foods and get more exercise. Failure to do that, however, is what is giving us the disorders like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease that are killing us in great numbers. Indeed, as Lieberman notes, medical care is actually making things worse by treating the symptoms of mismatch diseases so effectively that we “unwittingly perpetuate their causes.” As Lieberman puts it with chilling bluntness, “You are most likely going to die from a mismatch disease.” Even more chillingly, he believes that 70 percent of the diseases that kill us could easily be preventable if we would just live more sensibly.

THE FIVE WAYS OF HIGH INTENSITY SELF-DECEPTION So, since we postulate psychosis as a continuum of self-deception experiences, it is appropriate to distinguish the main channels that the effort of self-deception, when carried out in a superlative way, would use to materialize a) Memory impairment This would be the case of one who remembers more easily successes than their failures at one end of low-intensity self-deception, or who changes his entire biography adopting a false identity at the other end, and through different gradations of self-deception. b) The alteration of the information from the 5 senses. This would be the case of hallucinations. c) Alteration of reasoning and logic. Even being true, the information coming from the memory and the five senses, it is possible to process it so that it reaches conclusions that are away from the premises and thus achieve self-deception. An attenuated example of this would be known "bias" and a stronger then this would be the total distortion of logic and language. d) Mysticism. While respecting the information that comes from the five senses, memory, and without destroying logic or reasoning, self-deception could be carried out in superlative dimensions if you follow the path of mysticism. Here, the mechanism operates like believing in stories that, because they are mystical, take place beyond the perceptible and, therefore, do not contradict the information provided by the five senses. e) Mixed. The fifth way, which will be the most common, will be a mixture of all –or some– of the above, in different proportions. In the famous Schreber case, for example, a mystical-type story is seen, along with certain "bizarre" content in its composition

Let me explain. Say you have an eating disorder like anorexia - you’ve probably been hiding the condition for a long time. After months or years, you face your demons, with or without therapy, you admit you’re ill and eventually decide you want to recover. But this is only half the battle. Once start to eat again, once you begin to gain weight, it’s unbelievably stressful. Having gone from absolute control over every calorie which goes into your mouth, you’re now being forced to double, maybe even triple that amount. You’re being forced to consume unsafe substances like butter, oil, nuts. Every mouthful takes a colossal effort. In your rigid anorexic mindset, not being underweight equates to being overweight. Not being hungry equates to greed. Giving up an eating disorder is frightening. It is almost impossible to imagine that the process will ever be ok.

We must break these intertwined systems of oppression. Every time we look to the police and prisons to solve our problems, we reinforce these processes. We cannot demand that the police get rid of those “annoying” homeless people in the park or the “threatening” young people on the corner and simultaneously call for affordable housing and youth jobs, because the state is only offering the former and will deny us the latter every time. Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system. The state may try to solve those problems through police power, but we should not encourage or reward such short-sighted, counterproductive, and unjust approaches. We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police. In the end, they rarely provide either.

As a powerful deterrent to natural play, fear of liability ranks right behind the bogeyman. One goal in the fourth frontier should be a nationwide review of laws governing private land and recreation, especially involving children. This review process should be public; it should invite parents, children, experts on child’s play, and others to offer testimonials. And it should be done with the goal of protecting both the child’s safety and the child’s right to natural play. It should focus on reducing the anxiety of parents and children—and the fear of lawyers that, even if only subconsciously, adds to modern barriers separating children from natural play. As part of this conversation, community associations should review their covenants to decide where they stand on the criminalization of nature play. Public governments should do the same. This issue is not only a question of the letter of the law, but also the spirit.

My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable. […] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.

Sadhana The body responds the moment it is in touch with the earth. That is why spiritual people in India walked barefoot and always sat on the ground in a posture that allowed for maximum area of contact with the earth. In this way, the body is given a strong experiential reminder that it is just a part of this earth. Never is the body allowed to forget its origins. When it is allowed to forget, it often starts making fanciful demands; when it is constantly reminded, it knows its place. This contact with the earth is a vital reconnection of the body with its physical source. This restores stability to the system and enhances the human capacity for rejuvenation greatly. This explains why there are so many people who claim that their lives have been magically transformed just by taking up a simple outdoor activity like gardening. Today, the many artificial ways in which we distance ourselves from the earth—in the form of pavements and multi-storied structures, or even the widespread trend of wearing high heels—involves an alienation of the part from the whole and suffocates the fundamental life process. This alienation manifests in large-scale autoimmune disorders and chronic allergic conditions. If you tend to fall sick very easily, you could just try sleeping on the floor (or with minimal organic separation between yourself and the floor). You will see it will make a big difference. Also, try sitting closer to the ground. Additionally, if you can find a tree that looks lively to you, in terms of an abundance of fresh leaves or flowers, go spend some time around it. If possible, have your breakfast or lunch under that tree. As you sit under the tree, remind yourself: “This very earth is my body. I take this body from the earth and give it back to the earth. I consciously ask Mother Earth now to sustain me, hold me, keep me well.” You will find your body’s ability to recover is greatly enhanced. Or if you have turned all your trees into furniture, collect some fresh soil and cover your feet and hands with it. Stay that way for twenty to thirty minutes. This could help your recovery significantly.

Everyone has had the experience of suddenly feeling intense physiological and psychological shifts internally at trading glances with another person; such shifts can be exquisitely pleasurable or unpleasant. How one person gazes at another can alter the other’s electrical brain patterns, as registered by EEGS, and may also cause physiological changes in the body. The newborn is highly susceptible to such influences, with a direct effect on the maturation of brain structures. The effects of maternal moods on the electrical circuitry of the infant’s brain were demonstrated by a study at the University of Washington, Seattle. Positive emotions are associated with increased electrical activity in the left hemisphere. It is known that depression in adults is associated with decreased electrical activity in the circuitry of the left hemisphere. With this in mind, the Seattle study compared the EEGS of two groups of infants: one group whose mothers had symptoms of postpartum depression, the other whose mothers did not. “During playful interactions with the mothers designed to elicit positive emotion,” the researchers reported, “infants of non-depressed mothers showed greater left than right frontal brain activation.” The infants of depressed mothers “failed to show differential hemispheric activation,” meaning that the left-side brain activity one would anticipate from positive, joyful infant-mother exchanges did not occur — despite the mothers’ best efforts. Significantly, these effects were noted only in the frontal areas of the brain, where the centers for the self-regulation of emotion are located. In addition to EEG changes, infants of depressed mothers exhibit decreased activity levels, gaze aversion, less positive emotion and greater irritability. Maternal depression is associated with diminished infant attention spans. Summarizing a number of British studies, Dale F. Hay, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, suggests “that the experience of the mother’s depression in the first months of life may disrupt naturally occurring social processes that entrain and regulate the infant’s developing capacities for attention.

All children are hostages of parents in the sense that they are totally dependent on their parents for survival. Children's survival is threatened by their underlying fear of parental abandonment as well as by actual and threatened physical violence. In approximately 50 percent of overt incestuous families, the father is physically abusive. Thus, children's submission to the father's overt sexual abuse is virtually guaranteed. Beyond the threat to survival that ensures submission, the incest itself is experienced as a threat to psychic survival. It is not uncommon for victims to dissociate during overt incestuous acts. (Dissociation is a psychic process, involving the breaking off of a group of mental activities that then function as if they belonged to a separate personality, which comes into play whenever events threaten to overwhelm the psyche of the victim.) Examination of long-term outcomes associated with incest (for instance, drug abuse, suicide, self-mutilation, borderline personality disorder, multiple personality disorder) reveal the severity of this threat to survival.

neurophysiologist Olaf Blanke, who came across the phenomenon unexpectedly. He had triggered it with electrical stimulation to the temporal parietal cortex of a patient’s brain while trying to locate the focus of a seizure.8 He has also studied a bevy of patients who complain of an FoP. He found that lesions in the frontoparietal area are specifically associated with the phenomenon and are on the opposite side of the body from the presence.9 This location suggested to him that disturbances in sensorimotor processing and multisensory integration may be responsible. While we are conscious of our location in space, we are unaware of the multitude of processes (vision, sound, touch, proprioception, motor movement, etc.) that, when normally integrated, properly locate us there. If there is a disorder in the processing, errors can occur and our brains can misinterpret our location. Blanke and his colleagues have found that one such error manifests itself as an FoP. Recently, they cleverly induced the FoP in healthy subjects by disordering their sensory processing with the help of a robotic arm.10

All forms of government destroy themselves by carrying their basic principle to excess. The first form is monarchy, whose principe is unity of rule. Carried to excess, the rule is too unified. A monarch takes too much power. The aristocracy whose main principle is that selected families rule. Carried to excess, somewhat large numbers of able men are left out, the middle classes join them in rebellion, and they establish a democracy whose principle is liberty' Then says Plato, that 'principle, too, is carried to excess in the course of time. The democracies become too free, in politics and economics, in morals, even in literature and art, until at last even the puppy dogs in our homes rise on their hind legs and demand their rights.' Then 'Disorder grows to such a point' — and here is the history of the last 25 years — 'that a society will abandon all its liberty to anyone who can restore order.' And then monarchy may be restored, and the process begins all over again. Plato concluded that until philosophers become kings, or until kings become philosophers, States will not cease to suffer from the ills.

All forms of government destroy themselves by carrying their basic principle to excess. The first form is monarchy, whose principe is unity of rule. Carried to excess, the rule is too unified. A monarch takes too much power. The aristocracy whose main principle is that selected families rule. Carried to excess, somewhat large numbers of able men are left out, the middle classes join them in rebellion, and they establish a democracy whose principle is liberty.' Then says Plato, that 'principle, too, is carried to excess in the course of time. The democracies become too free, in politics and economics, in morals, even in literature and art, until at last even the puppy dogs in our homes rise on their hind legs and demand their rights.' Then 'Disorder grows to such a point' — and here is the history of the last 25 years — 'that a society will abandon all its liberty to anyone who can restore order.' And then monarchy may be restored, and the process begins all over again. Plato concluded that until philosophers become kings, or until kings become philosophers, States will not cease to suffer from the ills.

I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness—very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would now become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right. I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

More Activities to Develop Sensory-Motor Skills Sensory processing is the foundation for fine-motor skills, motor planning, and bilateral coordination. All these skills improve as the child tries the following activities that integrate the sensations. FINE-MOTOR SKILLS Flour Sifting—Spread newspaper on the kitchen floor and provide flour, scoop, and sifter. (A turn handle is easier to manipulate than a squeeze handle, but both develop fine-motor muscles in the hands.) Let the child scoop and sift. Stringing and Lacing—Provide shoelaces, lengths of yarn on plastic needles, or pipe cleaners, and buttons, macaroni, cereal “Os,” beads, spools, paper clips, and jingle bells. Making bracelets and necklaces develops eye-hand coordination, tactile discrimination, and bilateral coordination. Egg Carton Collections—The child may enjoy sorting shells, pinecones, pebbles, nuts, beans, beads, buttons, bottle caps, and other found objects and organizing them in the individual egg compartments. Household Tools—Picking up cereal pieces with tweezers; stretching rubber bands over a box to make a “guitar”; hanging napkins, doll clothes, and paper towels with clothespins; and smashing egg cartons with a mallet are activities that strengthen many skills.

You have to get safe and know how to work together with your system of selves before you can work on the memories with all the details and all the feelings. Even then it’s not just letting it all hang out. It’s a long slow process that is designed to overwhelm you as little as possible. We can discuss it in depth at a later time. Right now, your situation reminds me of a bunch of folks on a big sailboat that’s taking on water. No one knows where the life vests are, or how to put them on. Half the crew is below decks refusing to come out, and the other half is fighting with each other. Then someone says, ‘Ooh there’s a hurricane, let’s sail into that!’ Doesn’t sound likely that the ship and the crew are going to do very well there, does it? Sometimes, even if you’re not prepared, a hurricane hits, but that’s different from deliberately sailing into one. ‘The first thing is that everyone needs to work on working together, getting safe from harm to yourselves and others. I really believe, from everything you’ve all said, that you’ve all been hurt enough. You don’t need any more harm coming to any of you or your body. You don’t have to like everyone, love everyone, or even trust everyone inside. It’s just a matter of seeing how you can begin to risk to work together.

We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com

Freud eventually developed his theory of transference, one that would play a key role in his method of treating emotional disorders and that still today gives us some insight into how we choose both our friends and the person we marry. Feelings in relationships as we now understand them run on a double track. We react and relate to another person not only on the basis of how we consciously experience that person, but also on the basis of our unconscious experience in reference to our past relationships with significant people in infancy and childhood—particularly parents and other family members. We tend to displace our feelings and attitudes from these past figures onto people in the present, especially if someone has features similar to a person in the past. An individual may, therefore, evoke intense feelings in us—strong attraction or strong aversion—totally inappropriate to our knowledge of or experience with that person. This process may, to varying degrees, influence our choice of a friend, roommate, spouse, or employer. We all have the experience of seeing someone we have never met who evokes in us strong feelings. According to the theory of transference, this occurs because something about that person—the gait, the tilt of the head, a laugh, or some other feature—recalls a significant figure in our early childhood. Sometimes a spouse or a superior we work under will provoke in us a reaction far more intense than the circumstances warrant. A gesture or tone of voice may reactivate early negative feelings we experienced toward an important childhood figure. *

It is clear that 'inquiry', as conceived by Dewey, is part of the general process of attempting to make the world more organic. 'Unified wholes' are to be the outcome of inquiries. Dewey's love of what is organic is due partly to biology, partly to the lingering influence of Hegel. Unless on the basis of an unconscious Hegelian metaphysic, I do not see why inquiry should be expected to result in 'unified wholes'. If I am given a pack of cards in disorder, and asked to inquire into their sequence, I shall, if I follow Dewey's prescription, first arrange them in order, and then say that this was the order resulting from inquiry. There will be, it is true, an 'objective transformation of objective subject-matter' while I am arranging the cards, but the definition allows for this. If, at the end, I am told: 'We wanted to know the sequence of the cards when they were given to you, not after you had re-arranged them,' I shall, if I am a disciple of Dewey, reply: 'Your ideas are altogether too static. I am a dynamic person, and when I inquire into any subject-matter I first alter it in such a way as to make the inquiry easy.' The notion that such a procedure is legitimate can only be justified by a Hegelian distinction of appearance and reality: the appearance may be confused and fragmentary, but the reality is always orderly and organic. Therefore when I arrange the cards I am only revealing their true eternal nature. But this part of the doctrine is never made explicit. The metaphysic of organism underlies Dewey's theories, but I do not know how far he is aware of this fact.

Just how important a close moment-to-moment connection between mother and infant can be was illustrated by a cleverly designed study, known as the “double TV experiment,” in which infants and mothers interacted via a closed-circuit television system. In separate rooms, infant and mother observed each other and, on “live feed,” communicated by means of the universal infant-mother language: gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions. The infants were happy during this phase of the experiment. “When the infants were unknowingly replayed the ‘happy responses’ from the mother recorded from the prior minute,” writes the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, “they still became as profoundly distressed as infants do in the classic ‘flat face’ experiments in which mothers-in-person gave no facial emotional response to their infant’s bid for attunement.” Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. All that was lacking in the instant video replay, during which infants saw their mother’s face unresponsive to the messages they, the infants, were sending out. This sharing of emotional spaces is called attunement. Emotional stress on the mother interferes with infant brain development because it tends to interfere with the attunement contact. Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional selfregulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at that moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb. Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill. As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. The muscles of smiling are exactly the same in each case, but the signals that set the smile muscles to work do not come from the same centers in the brain. As a consequence, those muscles respond differently to the signals, depending on their origin. This is why only very good actors can mimic a genuine, heartfelt smile. The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. Infants, particularly sensitive infants, intuit the difference between a parent’s real psychological states and her attempts to soothe and protect the infant by means of feigned emotional expressions. A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. The emotional sensory radar of the infant has not yet been scrambled. It reads feelings clearly. They cannot be hidden from the infant behind a screen of words, or camouflaged by well-meant but forced gestures. It is unfortunate but true that we grow far more stupid than that by the time we reach adulthood.

Prior to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder had been referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder. The renaming of this diagnosis has caused quite a bit of confusion among professionals and those who live with DID. Because dissociation describes the process by which DID begins to develop, rather than the actual outcome of this process (the formation of various personalities), this new term may be a bit unclear. We know that the diagnosis is DID and that DID is what people say we have. We’d just like to point out that words sometimes do not describe what we live with. For people like us, DID is just a step on the way to where we live—a place with many of us inside! We just want people who have little ones and bigger ones living inside to know that the title Dissociative Identity Disorder sounds like something other than how we see ourselves—we think it is about us having different personalities. Regardless of the term, it is clear that, in general, the different personalities develop as a reaction to severe trauma. When the person dissociates, they leave their body to get away from the pain or trauma. When this defense is not strong enough to protect the person, different personalities emerge to handle the experience. These personalities allow the child to survive: when the child is being harmed or experiencing traumatic episodes, the other personalities take the pain and/ or watch the bad things. This allows these children to return to their body after the bad things have happened without any awareness of what has occurred. They do this to create different ways to make sense of the harm inflicted upon them; it is their survival mechanism.

Suggestions to Develop Self-Help Skills Self-help skills improve along with sensory processing. The following suggestions may make your child’s life easier—and yours, too! DRESSING • Buy or make a “dressing board” with a variety of snaps, zippers, buttons and buttonholes, hooks and eyes, buckles and shoelaces. • Provide things that are not her own clothes for the child to zip, button, and fasten, such as sleeping bags, backpacks, handbags, coin purses, lunch boxes, doll clothes, suitcases, and cosmetic cases. • Provide alluring dress-up clothes with zippers, buttons, buckles, and snaps. Oversized clothes are easiest to put on and take off. • Eliminate unnecessary choices in your child’s bureau and closet. Clothes that are inappropriate for the season and that jam the drawers are sources of frustration. • Put large hooks inside closet doors at the child’s eye level so he can hang up his own coat and pajamas. (Attach loops to coats and pajamas on the outside so they won’t irritate the skin.) • Supply cellophane bags for the child to slip her feet into before pulling on boots. The cellophane prevents shoes from getting stuck and makes the job much easier. • Let your child choose what to wear. If she gets overheated easily, let her go outdoors wearing several loose layers rather than a coat. If he complains that new clothes are stiff or scratchy, let him wear soft, worn clothes, even if they’re unfashionable. • Comfort is what matters. • Set out tomorrow’s clothes the night before. Encourage the child to dress himself. Allow for extra time, and be available to help. If necessary, help him into clothes but let him do the finishing touch: Start the coat zipper but let him zip it up, or button all but one of his buttons. Keep a stool handy so the child can see herself in the bathroom mirror. On the sink, keep a kid-sized hairbrush and toothbrush within arm’s reach. Even if she resists brushing teeth and hair, be firm. Some things in life are nonnegotiable.

Central to any understanding of stress, health and disease is the concept of adaptiveness. Adaptiveness is the capacity to respond to external stressors without rigidity, with flexibility and creativity, without excessive anxiety and without being overwhelmed by emotion. People who are not adaptive may seem to function well as long as nothing is disturbing them, but they will react with various levels of frustration and helplessness when confronted by loss or by difficulty. They will blame themselves or blame others. A person’s adaptiveness depends very much on the degree of differentiation and adaptiveness of previous generations in his family and also on what external stressors may have acted on the family. The Great Depression, for example, was a difficult time for millions of people. The multigenerational history of particular families enabled some to adapt and cope, while other families, facing the same economic scarcities, were psychologically devastated. “Highly adaptive people and families, on the average, have fewer physical illnesses, and those illnesses that do occur tend to be mild to moderate in severity,” writes Dr. Michael Kerr. Since one important variable in the development of physical illness is the degree of adaptiveness of an individual, and since the degree of adaptiveness is determined by the multigenerational emotional process, physical illness, like emotional illness, is a symptom of a relationship process that extends beyond the boundaries of the individual “patient.” Physical illness, in other words, is a disorder of the family emotional system [which includes] present and past generations. Children who become their parents’ caregivers are prepared for a lifetime of repression. And these roles children are assigned have to do with the parents’ own unmet childhood needs — and so on down the generations. “Children do not need to be beaten to be compromised,” researchers at McGill University have pointed out. Inappropriate symbiosis between parent and child is the source of much pathology.

SENSORY AVOIDERS – SENSORY DEFENSIVENESS “And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?” -Edgar Allen Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) Imagine a day inside Jenny’s skin. The morning alarm goes off and she startles, her heart races, her body tightens, her breathing quickens.  Her husband turns to get out of bed, grazing her foot, and she cringes, her bodily rhythms speed up another notch and her body tightens further. He sees that she seems annoyed about something and affectionately strokes her cheek. She bristles and, when he turns around, rubs where he touched her. She slowly arises to get out of bed, as she feels a bit dizzy, and quickly puts on her soft cotton house slippers, as the feel of the carpet makes her recoil, and walks into the bathroom. The bright lights her husband has left turned on assault her. Her eyes squint painfully. She quickly turns off the lights and turns on a small lamp on the sink counter. Her already overloaded system gets further destabilized. She starts to brush her teeth but the toothbrush is new and the bristles tickle her uncomfortably. She leans over to spit out the toothpaste and feels a sudden loss of balance and a surge of panic engulfs her. She steadies herself and turns on the shower. The soft spray of water from the showerhead feels like pelts of hail hitting her body. Her already stressed system is accelerating fast into overload. And her morning has only just begun!  She still has to figure out what clothes to put on, as most textures annoy her and feel uncomfortable on her body. She has to figure out what to eat for breakfast, as anything soft, mushy, or creamy repulses her. Worst of all, she has to figure out how to face the world outside that, for her, is like maneuvering through a sensory minefield. Jenny is an avoider or what is commonly known as sensory defensive (SD), a common mimicker of anxiety and panic. The sensory defensive feel too much, too soon and for too long, and experience the world as too loud, too bright, too fast and too tight, becoming easily distressed by everyday sensation

Neo-Darwinism and Mutations In order to find a solution, Darwinists advanced the "Modern Synthetic Theory," or as it is more commonly known, Neo-Darwinism, at the end of the 1930s. Neo- Darwinism added mutations, which are distortions formed in the genes of living beings due to such external factors as radiation or replication errors, as the "cause of favorable variations" in addition to natural mutation. Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world is Neo-Darwinism. The theory maintains that millions of living beings formed as a result of a process whereby numerous complex organs of these organisms (e.g., ears, eyes, lungs, and wings) underwent "mutations," that is, genetic disorders. Yet, there is an outright scientific fact that totally undermines this theory: Mutations do not cause living beings to develop; on the contrary, they are always harmful. The reason for this is very simple: DNA has a very complex structure, and random effects can only harm it. The American geneticist B. G. Ranganathan explains this as follows: First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly, most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather than orderly changes in the structure of genes; any random change in a highly ordered system will be for the worse, not for the better. For example, if an earthquake were to shake a highly ordered structure such as a building, there would be a random change in the framework of the building which, in all probability, would not be an improvement. Not surprisingly, no mutation example, which is useful, that is, which is observed to develop the genetic code, has been observed so far. All mutations have proved to be harmful. It was understood that mutation, which is presented as an "evolutionary mechanism," is actually a genetic occurrence that harms living things, and leaves them disabled. (The most common effect of mutation on human beings is cancer.) Of course, a destructive mechanism cannot be an "evolutionary mechanism." Natural selection, on the other hand, "can do nothing by itself," as Darwin also accepted. This fact shows us that there is no "evolutionary mechanism" in nature. Since no evolutionary mechanism exists, no such any imaginary process called "evolution" could have taken place.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

true—helping a hurting person is a bit scary. We want to do the right thing, not the wrong thing—say what will help, not what will hurt. To add to our confusion, our friend is “not quite herself.” She’s different. We want our friend fixed and back to normal. All you have to do is care. Harold Ivan Smith described the process so well: Grief sharers always look for an opportunity to actively care. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief, but you can wash the sink full of dishes, listen to him or her talk, take his or her kids to the park. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief but you can visit the cemetery with him or her. Grief sharing is not about fixing—it’s about showing up. Coming alongside. Being interruptible. “Hanging out” with the bereaving. In the words of World War II veterans, “present and reporting for duty.” The grief path is not a brief path. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.[1] What can you expect from a friend who is hurting? Actually, not very much. And the more her experience moves beyond a loss and closer to a crisis or trauma, the more this is true. Sometimes you’ll see a friend experiencing a case of the “crazies.” Her response seems irrational. She’s not herself. Her behavior is different from or even abnormal compared to the person not going through a major loss. Just remember, she’s reacting to an out-of-the-ordinary event. What she experienced is abnormal, so her response is actually quite normal. If what the person has experienced is traumatic she may even seem to exhibit some of the symptoms of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). And because your friend is this way, she is not to be avoided. Others are needed at this time in her life. These are responses you can expect. Your friend is no longer functioning as she once did—and probably won’t for a while. You Are Needed You are needed when a person experiences a sudden intrusion or disruption in her life. If you (or another friend) aren’t available, the only person she has to talk with for guidance, support, and direction is herself. And who wants support from someone struggling with a case of the “crazies”? But a problem may arise when your friend doesn’t realize that she needs you, at least at that particular time. Your sensitivity is needed at this point. Remember, when your friend is hurting and facing a loss, you are dealing with a loss as well, because the relationship you had with your friend has changed. It’s not the same.

While the visual areas of the brain are active, other areas involved with smell, taste, and touch are largely shut down. Almost all the images and sensations processed by the body are self-generated, originating from the electromagnetic vibrations from our brain stem, not from external stimuli. The body is largely isolated from the outside world. Also, when we dream, we are more or less paralyzed. (Perhaps this paralysis is to prevent us from physically acting out our dreams, which could be disastrous. About 6 percent of people suffer from “sleep paralysis” disorder, in which they wake up from a dream still paralyzed. Often these individuals wake up frightened and believing that there are creatures pinning down their chest, arms, and legs. There are paintings from the Victorian era of women waking up with a terrifying goblin sitting on their chest glaring down at them. Some psychologists believe that sleep paralysis could explain the origin of the alien abduction syndrome.) The hippocampus is active when we dream, suggesting that dreams draw upon our storehouse of memories. The amygdala and anterior cingulate are also active, meaning that dreams can be highly emotional, often involving fear. But more revealing are the areas of the brain that are shut down, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which is the command center of the brain), the orbitofrontal cortex (which can act like a censor or fact-checker), and the temporoparietal region (which processes sensory motor signals and spatial awareness). When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is shut down, we can’t count on the rational, planning center of the brain. Instead, we drift aimlessly in our dreams, with the visual center giving us images without rational control. The orbitofrontal cortex, or the fact-checker, is also inactive. Hence dreams are allowed to blissfully evolve without any constraints from the laws of physics or common sense. And the temporoparietal lobe, which helps coordinate our sense of where we are located using signals from our eyes and inner ear, is also shut down, which may explain our out-of-body experiences while we dream. As we have emphasized, human consciousness mainly represents the brain constantly creating models of the outside world and simulating them into the future. If so, then dreams represent an alternate way in which the future is simulated, one in which the laws of nature and social interactions are temporarily suspended

Beauty Junkies is the title of a recent book by New York Times writer Alex Kuczynski, “a self-confessed recovering addict of cosmetic surgery.” And, withour technological prowess, we succeed in creating fresh addictions. Some psychologists now describe a new clinical pathology — Internet sex addiction disorder. Physicians and psychologists may not be all that effective in treating addictions, but we’re expert at coming up with fresh names and categories. A recent study at Stanford University School of Medicine found that about 5.5 per cent of men and 6 per cent of women appear to be addicted shoppers. The lead researcher, Dr. Lorrin Koran, suggested that compulsive buying be recognized as a unique illness listed under its own heading in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official psychiatric catalogue. Sufferers of this “new” disorder are afflicted by “an irresistible, intrusive and senseless impulse” to purchase objects they do not need. I don’t scoff at the harm done by shopping addiction — I’m in no position to do that — and I agree that Dr. Koran accurately describes the potential consequences of compulsive buying: “serious psychological, financial and family problems, including depression, overwhelming debt and the breakup of relationships.” But it’s clearly not a distinct entity — only another manifestation of addiction tendencies that run through our culture, and of the fundamental addiction process that varies only in its targets, not its basic characteristics. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush identified another item of addiction. “Here we have a serious problem,” he said. “America is addicted to oil.” Coming from a man who throughout his financial and political career has had the closest possible ties to the oil industry. The long-term ill effects of our society’s addiction, if not to oil then to the amenities and luxuries that oil makes possible, are obvious. They range from environmental destruction, climate change and the toxic effects of pollution on human health to the many wars that the need for oil, or the attachment to oil wealth, has triggered. Consider how much greater a price has been exacted by this socially sanctioned addiction than by the drug addiction for which Ralph and his peers have been declared outcasts. And oil is only one example among many: consider soul-, body-or Nature-destroying addictions to consumer goods, fast food, sugar cereals, television programs and glossy publications devoted to celebrity gossip—only a few examples of what American writer Kevin Baker calls “the growth industries that have grown out of gambling and hedonism.

Meanwhile, scientists are studying certain drugs that may erase traumatic memories that continue to haunt and disturb us. In 2009, Dutch scientists, led by Dr. Merel Kindt, announced that they had found new uses for an old drug called propranolol, which could act like a “miracle” drug to ease the pain associated with traumatic memories. The drug did not induce amnesia that begins at a specific point in time, but it did make the pain more manageable—and in just three days, the study claimed. The discovery caused a flurry of headlines, in light of the thousands of victims who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Everyone from war veterans to victims of sexual abuse and horrific accidents could apparently find relief from their symptoms. But it also seemed to fly in the face of brain research, which shows that long-term memories are encoded not electrically, but at the level of protein molecules. Recent experiments, however, suggest that recalling memories requires both the retrieval and then the reassembly of the memory, so that the protein structure might actually be rearranged in the process. In other words, recalling a memory actually changes it. This may be the reason why the drug works: propranolol is known to interfere with adrenaline absorption, a key in creating the long-lasting, vivid memories that often result from traumatic events. “Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it. So adrenaline can be present, but it can’t do its job,” says Dr. James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine. In other words, without adrenaline, the memory fades. Controlled tests done on individuals with traumatic memories showed very promising results. But the drug hit a brick wall when it came to the ethics of erasing memory. Some ethicists did not dispute its effectiveness, but they frowned on the very idea of a forgetfulness drug, since memories are there for a purpose: to teach us the lessons of life. Even unpleasant memories, they said, serve some larger purpose. The drug got a thumbs-down from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Its report concluded that “dulling our memory of terrible things [would] make us too comfortable with the world, unmoved by suffering, wrongdoing, or cruelty.… Can we become numb to life’s sharpest sorrows without also becoming numb to its greatest joys?” Dr. David Magus of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics says, “Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people.” Others disagree. Dr. Roger Pitman of Harvard University says that if a doctor encounters an accident victim who is in intense pain, “should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue with that? Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders.

Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”). Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus. This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task. A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing. A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.

A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?” He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course. When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity. When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless. Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly. When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice. I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street. But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance. That is why we need books like this one.

• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation" • We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet, • Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves, • "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it • Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt" • Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion) • The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. • "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done. • In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes. • We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines. • Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories. • She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable • What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? • Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present • Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth. • The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at • How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to. • The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits) • But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone. • In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment) • The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.

In the Trump era, the United States was in a de facto state of ideologico-political civil war between the populist new Right and the liberal-democratic center, with even occasional threats of physical violence. Now that Trump’s authoritarian populism has been defeated, is there a chance for a new “democracy reborn” in the United States? Unfortunately, this slim chance was lost with the marginalization of “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders and AOC. Only the alliance of Left liberals with democratic socialists could have pushed the process of democratic emancipation a step further.

THE “AWARENESS” SHIELD FEAT. According to the Bible, Joseph obtained enormous prestige in Egypt, when he was able to divine the dreams of the pharaoh, As Joseph earned that feat with a great social prestige, in different traditions the "awareness" of the future, or an inaccessible present, always proved a merit that produces social honor. Weber (1922) considers the prophets, along with the priests and magicians, as examples of charismatic leaders, and this is because "predict " or " perceive" the future has been, in different traditions, a strong feat that has given pride and social prestige those who perform. It postulates a "shield feat of awareness" that is intended to offset the impact on the pride of some future anti-feat. When the firepower that a possible future anti-feat has about pride and social prestige is too high and becomes unbearable, the person can go into that future equipped with a shield feat that will compensate. From that strategy, thinking badly of the future is a way of ensuring the "consolation prize" of having the merit of "prediction”. According to Steele (1988 ), when a person experiences a negative assessment of himself in a particular field, they can initiate a process of self-affirmation activating positive beliefs in another area, thus achieving a positive overall assessment of itself. The pessimistic shield feat "awareness of future failure”, would be a merit that safeguards to offset the impact of that failure on self- concept , an achievement an overall assessment that is not so negative.

The shield feat would be a process triggered by the strong emotion of fear before the arrival of an imminent future anti-feat . To protect the self-esteem to beat the anti-feat feared, this behavior is aimed in case the anti-feat will happen and has prepared a past event that will serve as a precedent to support it, performs better or decreases the intensity of unpleasant emotions.

It was a psychoanalyst colleague, Dr. Stanley Coen, who suggested in the course of our working on a medical paper together that the role of the pain syndrome was not to express the hidden emotions but to prevent them from becoming conscious. This, he explained, is what is referred to as a defense. In other words, the pain of TMS (or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, of colitis, of tension headache, or the terror of an asthmatic attack) is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere. It is intended to focus one's attention on the body instead of the mind. It is a response to the need to keep those terrible, antisocial, unkind, childish, angry, selfish feelings (the prisoners) from becoming conscious. It follows from this that far from being a physical disorder in the usual sense, TMS is really part of a psychological process.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily. . . . As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Mao speaks about disorder under heaven, wherein “heaven,” or the big Other in whatever form—the inexorable logic of historical processes, the laws of social development—still exists and discreetly regulates social chaos. Today, we should talk about heaven itself as being in disorder.

Today, when we are caught in the process of a gradual disintegration of the public common space, we can no longer rely on the trust in the people, on the trust that, if we only give the people the chance to break the spell of ideological manipulations, they will arrive at their substantial truth. Here we encounter the fatal limitation of the much-praised “leaderless” character of the French protests, of their chaotic self-organization: it is not enough for a leader to listen to the people and formulate their interests and wants into a program.

For many years I was under the impression that TMS was a kind of physical expression or discharge of the repressed emotions just described. In fact, this is what I suggested in the first edition of this book. I had been aware since the early 1970s that these common back and neck pain syndromes were due to repressed emotions. Eighty-eight percent of a large group of patients with TMS had a history of other tension-related disorders, like stomach ulcers, colitis, tension headache, and migraine headache. But the idea of TMS as a physical manifestation of nervous tension was somehow unsatisfactory and incomplete. Most important, it did not explain the repeated observation that making a patient aware of the role of the pain as participant in a psychological process would lead to cessation of pain, to a "cure." (page 56)

The pandemic is not just a viral process, it is a process that takes place within certain economic, social, and ideological coordinates that are open to change.

we should engage in the difficult and painful process of constructing a new normality. This construction is not a medical or economic problem, it is a profoundly political one: we are compelled to invent anew our entire social life.

Lonzi’s critique takes issue with the Marxist view of history as a dialectical progression through stages, wherein Blacks and women are “blocked” at lower “stages,” and women can eventually attain the freedom of self-consciousness only if they rejoin the male productivist logic.125 Lonzi rejects this entire vision as incompatible with an authentic revolution; “the revolutionary process is a leap, a non-dialectical rupture of the order of history that will open onto the invention and discovery of something that history did not already contain.

The dominant model of disease in our time is biomedical, built on a foundation of molecular biology. As Engel explains, It assumes disease to be fully accounted for by deviations from the norm of measurable biological (somatic) variables. It leaves no room within its framework for the social, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of illness. The biomedical model not only requires that disease be dealt with as an entity independent of social behavior, it also demands that behavioral aberrations be explained on the basis of disordered somatic (biochemical or neurophysiological) processes. Thus the biomedical model embraces both reductionism, the philosophic view that complex phenomena are ultimately derived from a single primary principle, and mind-body dualism.

Seek to attain an open mind (the summit of vacuity). Seek composure (the essence of tranquillity) All things are in process, rising and returning. Plants come to blossom, but only to return to the root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquillity; it is moving towards its destiny. To move toward destiny is like eternity. To know eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize eternity brings disorder and evil Knowing eternity makes one comprehensive; comprehension makes one broadminded; breadth of vision brings nobility; nobility is like heaven The heavenly is like Tao. Tao is the Eternal. The decay of the body is not to be feared

I've learned having insight means you can gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing. In my case, the deep intuitive understanding was of my core self, and how it contributed to my illness. Insight, or what I call "in-sight"-looking in- is the key to developing self-awareness. You need insight to be introspective, to examine and observe your mental and emotional processes and make changes accordingly. It involves the ability to have a flexible perception that can see from many angles, not only from your pre-existing lens which often gets distorted by your belief system. I can now see cause-and-effect both on my part and by others-how they intertwine with one another and how interactions get filtered through the lens of our experiences, beliefs, and expectations.

The pertinent bias here is that these common pain syndromes must be the result of structural abnormalities of the spine or chemically or mechanically induced deficiencies of muscle. Of equal importance is another bias held by conventional medicine that emotions do not induce physiologic change. Experience with TMS contradicts both biases. The disorder is a benign (though painful) physiologic aberration of soft tissue (not the spine), and it is caused by an emotional process.

The kingdom of poetry" This is like light. This is light, Useful as light, as charming And enchanting… …Poetry is certainly More interesting, more valuable, and certainly more charming Than Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Atlantic Ocean And other much admired natural phenomena. It is useful as light, and as beautiful It is preposterous Precisely, making it possible to say One cannot carry a mountain, but a poem can be carried all over. It is monstrous. Pleasantly, for poetry can say, seriously or in play: “Poetry is better than hope, “For poetry is patience of hope, and all hope’s vivid pictures, “Poetry is better than excitement, it is far more delightful, “Poetry is superior to success, and victory, it endures in serene blessedness “Long after the most fabulous feat like fireworks has mounted and fallen. “Poetry is far more powerful and far more enchanting animal “Than any wood, jungle, ark, circus or zoo possesses.” For poetry magnifies and heighten reality: Poetry says of reality that if it is magnificent, it is also stupid: For poetry is, in a way, omnipotent; For reality is various and rich, powerful and vivid, but it is not enough Because it is disorderly and stupid or only at times, and erratically, intelligent: For without poetry, reality is speechless or incoherent: It is inchoate, like the pomp and the bombast of thunder: Its peroration verge upon the ceaseless oration of the ocean: For reality glows and glory, without poetry, Fake, like the red operas of sunset The blue rivers and the windows of morning. The arts of poetry makes it possible to say: Pandemonium. For poetry is gay and exact. It says: “The sunset resembles a bull-fight. “A sleeping arm feels like soda, fizzing.” Poetry resurrect the past from the sepulchre, like Lazarus. It transforms a lion into a sphinx and a girl. It gives a girl the splendor of Latin. It transforms the water into wine at each marriage in Cana of Galilee. For it is true that poetry invented the unicorn, the centaur and the phoenix. Hence it is true that poetry is an everlasting Ark. An omnibus containing, bearing and begetting all the mind’s animals. Whence it is that poetry gave and gives tongue to forgiveness Therefore a history of poetry would be a history of joy, and a history of the mystery of love For poetry provides spontaneously, abundantly and freely The petnames and the diminutives which love requires and without which the mystery of love cannot be mastered. For poetry is like light, and it is light. It shines over all, like the blue sky, with the same blue justice. For poetry is the sunlight of consciousness: It is also the soil of the fruits of knowledge In the orchards of being: It shows us the pleasures of the city. It lights up the structures of reality. It is a cause of knowledge and laughter: It sharpens the whistles of the witty: It is like morning and the flutes of morning, chanting and enchanted. It is the birth and the rebirth of the first morning forever. Poetry is quick as tigers, clever as cats, vivid as oranges, Nevertheless, it is deathless: it is evergreen and in blossom; long after the Pharaohs and the Caesars have fallen, It shines and endures more than diamonds, It is because poetry is the actuality of possibility, it is The reality of the imagination, The throat of exaltation, The processions of possessions, The motion of meaning and The meaning of morning and The mastery of meaning. The praise of poetry is like the clarity of the heights of the mountains. The heights of poetry are like the exaltation of the mountains. It is the consummation of consciousness in the country of the morning!

Finding a person to declare your craziest, most profound insecurities to is not exactly a picnic. But the bureaucratic idiocy of America’s healthcare system turns what should be a chore into torture. If you’re a middle-class person in America, the dance goes like this: You call your insurance provider to find a meager list of therapists who take your insurance. Most of the people on the list are licensed clinical social workers or licensed mental health counselors. They can be wonderful and very helpful, but they often have less schooling and experience than, say, psychologists and PhDs. After digging deeper, you find that some of these therapists don’t take your insurance after all; others have full client lists. And even if they do have space in the day to treat someone, they might not be interested in treating you. According to one study, a low-income Black person had up to an 80 percent lower chance of receiving a callback for an appointment than a middle-class white person. And even though intellectually, therapists tell you that anger can be a helpful and legitimate emotion in processing trauma, God forbid you actually seem angry on the phone. Several mental health professionals have told me that therapists often avoid rageful clients because they seem threatening or scary. Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients. They love an amenable type, someone who is curious about their internal workings and eager to plumb them, someone who’s already read articles in The New Yorker about psychology to familiarize them with the language of metacognition and congruence. Good luck if you’re a regular-ass Joe who’d rather watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But say you get lucky and find a licensed clinical psychologist with an open slot. The psychologist is white, of course (86 percent of psychologists in the United States are), which isn’t ideal if you are a person of color. But, fine, whatever: You just need to receive an official diagnosis for your insurance. You are certain you have complex PTSD, but he can’t diagnose you with that because it’s not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Your insurance only covers treatment for conditions listed in the DSM in order to assign a number of sessions to you. Most forms of insurance will pay for, say, only six months of therapy relating to anxiety, ten for depression, as if you should be better by then. Another consequence of C-PTSD not being in the DSM: This psychologist hasn’t been trained in treating it. He says he doesn’t believe that it’s a real diagnosis. He’d like to provide you with some questionnaires to see if you have something he can actually handle—bipolar disorder, maybe, or manic depression. This does not inspire confidence, so you leave. After some internet sleuthing, you find a woman of color who seems really cool. She’s specifically trained in the treatment of complex trauma. She has blurbs on her website that resonate with you—it seems as if she might truly understand you. But she doesn’t take insurance. (Psychologists are the least likely of any medical provider to take insurance—only about 45 percent of them do. And most of the time, the ones who don’t are the most qualified practitioners.) You can’t exactly blame her. You learn on the internet that insurance companies haven’t updated reimbursement rates for therapists in up to twenty years, despite rising rates for office rent and other administrative costs. If therapists were to rely on reimbursement rates from insurance alone, they’d wind up making about $50,000 a year on average, which is fine, but like, not great if you’re an actual doctor.

Page 7: (H)e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the 'ethical cosmos' [the dual code of Amity and Enmity] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. … Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process … Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure. Page 25: Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?

Politicians in their speeches, goals, and promises aim at the timid concepts of “resilience,” “solidity,” not antifragility, and in the process are stifling the mechanisms of growth and evolution. We didn’t get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience. And, what’s worse, we didn’t get where we are today thanks to policy makers—but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.

Moruzzi and Magoun realized that the brain contains a system—which they called the reticular activating system—that extends from the brain stem and midbrain to the thalamus, and from the thalamus to the cortex. This system carries the sensory information from the various sensory systems necessary for the conscious state, and distributes it diffusely to the cerebral cortex (fig. 11.3). But while the reticular activating system is necessary for wakefulness, it is not concerned with the content of conscious processing, that is, with the content of awareness. Figure 11.3.

What we have here is worse than telepathy from the orthodox view-point. Randomizing should have produced fewer correlations, according to one application of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that disorder always increases in random processes. Here, randomizing produced more order instead of less.

Developmental Trauma Disorder.17 As we organized our findings, we discovered a consistent profile: (1) a pervasive pattern of dysregulation, (2) problems with attention and concentration, and (3) difficulties getting along with themselves and others. These children’s moods and feelings rapidly shifted from one extreme to another—from temper tantrums and panic to detachment, flatness, and dissociation. When they got upset (which was much of the time), they could neither calm themselves down nor describe what they were feeling. Having a biological system that keeps pumping out stress hormones to deal with real or imagined threats leads to physical problems: sleep disturbances, headaches, unexplained pain, oversensitivity to touch or sound. Being so agitated or shut down keeps them from being able to focus their attention and concentration. To relieve their tension, they engage in chronic masturbation, rocking, or self-harming activities (biting, cutting, burning, and hitting themselves, pulling their hair out, picking at their skin until it bled). It also leads to difficulties with language processing and fine-motor coordination. Spending all their energy on staying in control, they usually have trouble paying attention to things, like schoolwork, that are not directly relevant to survival, and their hyperarousal makes them easily distracted. Having been frequently ignored or abandoned leaves them clinging and needy, even with the people who have abused them. Having been chronically beaten, molested, and otherwise mistreated, they cannot help but define themselves as defective and worthless. They come by their self-loathing, sense of defectiveness, and worthlessness honestly. Was it any surprise that they didn’t trust anyone? Finally, the combination of feeling fundamentally despicable and overreacting to slight frustrations makes it difficult for them to make friends.

Neurodiversity supporters cling essentially to autism’s diagnostic criteria when challenging even mainstream critics, as we support acceptance of official autism domains of atypical communication, intense and “special” interests, a need for familiarity or predictability, and atypical sensory processing, yet distinguish between those core traits and co-occurring conditions we would be happy to cure such as anxiety, gastrointestinal disorders, sleep disorders, and epilepsy.

Every effort should be made to meet the needs of the nondisordered children in the family, but spouses have the same needs, too. The need for one-on-one quality time between spouses is often overlooked. Indeed, after each day spent trying to meet the needs of all children in the family as well as working a job and attending to all of life's other chores, it is most often the husband or wife who gets ignored. Parents need time away from the concerns of the world to focus just on each other.

The cat varieties today have developed by natural and artificial selection action on the original variability in the information (genes) of the original cats, resulting in differing combinations of information, and thus, speciation. Therefore, only a few "cat" pairs may have been needed on Noah's ark. This "speciation" is NOT "evolution", since it is based strictly on the created information already present, and is thus limited. Evolution from amoeba to man, however, requires new information to arise, and by natural processes. Put another way: one involves thinning of gene pools (natural selection/speciation), the other an expansion (evolution). Thus, for dinosaurs (or any other creature) to evolve, there would have to be a mechanism to produce information from disorder by chance (this has NEVER been observed to happen), and continually add in new information so new types could evolve. But true science has only observed that it takes information to produce information - information NEVER arises by chance. Thus, the evolution (in the Darwinian sense) of dinosaurs is impossible.

Atoms, elements and molecules are three important knowledge in Physics, chemistry and Biology. mathematics comes where counting starts, when counting and measurement started, integers were required. Stephen hawking says integers were created by god and everything else is work of man. Man sees pattern in everything and they are searched and applied to other sciences for engineering, management and application problems. Physics, it is required understand the physical nature or meaning of why it happens, chemistry is for chemical nature, Biology is for that why it happened. Biology touch medicine, plants and animals. In medicine how these atoms, elements and molecules interplay with each other by bondage is being explained. Human emotions and responses are because of biochemistry, hormones i e anatomy and physiology. This physiology deals with each and every organs and their functions. When this atom in elements are disturbed whatever they made i e macromolecules DNA, RNA and Protein and other micro and macro nutrients and which affects the physiology of different organs on different scales and then diseases are born because of this imbalance/ disturb in homeostasis. There many technical words are there which are hard to explain in single para. But let me get into short, these atoms in elements and molecules made interplay because of ecological stimulus i e so called god. and when opposite sex meets it triggers various responses on body of each. It is also harmone and they are acting because of atoms inside elements and continuous generation or degenerations of cell cycle. There is a god cell called totipotent stem cell, less gods are pluripotent, multi potent and noni potent stem cells. So finally each and every organ system including brain cells are affected because of interplay of atoms inside elements and their bondages in making complex molecules, which are ruled by ecological stimulus i e god. So everything is basically biology and medicine even for animals, plants and microbes and other life forms. process differs in each living organisms. The biggest mystery is Brain and DNA. Brain has lots of unexplained phenomenon and even dreams are not completely understood by science that is where spiritualism/ soul touches. DNA is long molecule which has many applications as genetic engineering. genomics, personal medicine, DNA as tool for data storage, DNA in panspermia theory and many more. So everything happens to women and men and other sexes are because of Biology, Medicine and ecology. In ecology every organisms are inter connected and inter dependent. Now physics - it touch all technical aspects but it needs mathematics and statistics to lay foundation for why and how it happened and later chemistry, biology also included inside physics. Mathematics gave raise to computers and which is for fast calculation on any applications in any sciences. As physiological imbalances lead to diseases and disorders, genetic mutations, again old concept evolution was retaken to understand how new biology evolves. For evolution and disease mechanisms, epidemiology and statistics was required and statistics was as a data tool considered in all sciences now a days. Ultimate science is to break the atoms to see what is inside- CERN, but it creates lots of mysterious unanswerable questions. laws in physics were discovered and invented with mathematics to understand the universe from atoms. Theory of everything is a long search and have no answers. While searching inside atoms, so many hypothesis like worm holes and time travel born but not yet invented as far as my knowledge. atom is universe, and humans are universe they have everything that universe has. ecology is god that affects humans and climate. In business these computerized AI applications are trying to figure out human emotions by their mechanism of writing, reading, texting, posting on social media and bla bla. Arts is trying to figure out human emotions in art way.

The neo-Eurasianist Aleksandr Dugin, in his terrifying 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics, which made him popular among Russian military and political elites, identifies America as “a total geopolitical rival of Russia.” He prescribes that Russia “counteract U.S. policy at all levels and [in] all regions of the earth.” Russia must “weaken, demoralize, [and] deceive, in order to win,” he writes. “It is especially important to introduce geopolitical disorder into America’s internal reality; to encourage separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts; actively support dissident movements [and] extremist, racist groups and sects; and to destabilize internal processes.”72

Because we first recognized dyslexia as a learning disorder rather than a learning or processing style, we’ve paid little attention to whether dyslexic processing might also create talents and abilities.

He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures into a scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world, and yet not of it—a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon another; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots, if one might use the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity. Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of angry faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down on him. Again he seemed to be in the interior of a house—an old house, apparently—but the details and inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or the furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed in just as great a state of flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer—damnably queer—and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when he declared that of the strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And all the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital processes.

From then on the disorder became her secret friend. She became not only an anorexic-bulimic, but the absolute best anorexic-bulimic she could be. She was strategic, clean, informed. She knew, for example, that the worst kind of vomit is the kind that isn’t properly chewed up. Lobes of steak that rise up your throat like Lincoln Logs. Ice cream is also a problem. It’s too soft and comes back up like liquid; it doesn’t feel like expelling anything at all and you can’t be sure it didn’t stick to the walls of your stomach. Then of course there is the question of timing. Everything in life is timing and with vomiting it’s no different. Too soon after you eat, and nothing comes up. You wreck your throat trying to regurgitate. Too late, and only the tail end of the meal comes; your finger is slicked in fawn fluid for nothing. You do it too soon or too early and you make too much noise because your body isn’t prepared. With vomiting, you have to work with your body. There is no working against it. You have to respect the process. The hope each morning was that she would barely eat—a pan-cooked chicken breast, an orange, lemon water. But if she failed—peanut M&M’s, a bite of someone’s birthday cake—then she would accept the failure at the same time that she would not accept the failure. She would go to the bathroom. Flush twice. Clean up. And reenter the conversation. It worked, for the most part. Field hockey suffered. In the ninth grade she had been a pretty serious athlete, but by the spring of tenth grade she was so skinny she could barely make varsity. School, in general, suffered. She stopped doing homework and stopped paying attention in class. Her family didn’t question her new body or her new habit. The closest her mother came to Why are you trying to kill yourself? was Why do you flush the toilet so many times?

The transition’s spreading disorder increasingly reflected not just organizational failures but Trump’s essential decision-making style. Charles Krauthammer, a sharp critic of his, told me he had been wrong earlier to characterize Trump’s behavior as that of an eleven-year-old boy. “I was off by ten years,” Krauthammer remarked. “He’s like a one-year-old. Everything is seen through the prism of whether it benefits Donald Trump.” That was certainly the way the personnel-selection process appeared from the outside. As one Republican strategist told me, the best way to become Secretary of State was to “try to be the last man standing.

Self-Image and Self Development ✓ Experiencing more kindness and compassion toward yourself. ✓ Becoming more and more the person you want to be. ✓ Self-appreciation. ✓ Enough security to be open to feedback. ✓ Sense of equality with others. ✓ High self-esteem. ✓ Sense of identity. ✓ Personal integrity. ✓ More wholeness and balance. Other Categories People have resolved or made significant progress with the following difficulties using the Core Transformation Process. ✓ Healing of Abuse and/or Trauma. ✓ Anorexia and Bulimia. ✓ Alcoholism. ✓ Drug Addiction. ✓ Co-dependence. ✓ Depression. ✓ Fears and Anxieties. ✓ Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. ✓ Hyperactivity and Learning Disabilities. ✓ Multiple Personality Disorder. ✓ Schizophrenia. ✓ Health Concerns. ✓ Resolution of specific issues and conflicts.

Why is it that the silhouette of a storm-bent leafless tree against an evening sky in winter is perceived as beautiful, but the corresponding silhouette of any multi-purpose university building is not, in spite of all efforts of the architect? The answer seems to me, even if somewhat speculative, to follow from the new insights into dynamical systems. Our feeling for beauty is inspired by the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder as it occurs in natural objects—in clouds, trees, mountain ranges, or snow crystals. The shapes of all these are dynamical processes jelled into physical forms, and particular combinations of order and disorder are typical for them.