When the panic sets in

 Life, Mental health  No Responses »
Feb 012012
 

Panic

On top of a whole bunch of professional stresses for me at the moment I got a phone call on Monday which really upset the apple cart – our landlord is selling. In addition to the significant disruption to our personal lives over the next 6 weeks as the house prepares for auction, we also have to face the very real prospect that when our lease expires in May we’ll be needing to move. Given we’d been hoping to remain here for at least 2 years, if not longer, it’s both a disappointment and a stress.

So it’s no surprise that there’s a bit of panic in my life at the moment. It’s like a many armed many fanged creature scratching at the back door, just looking for a way to get inside and tear things up. (Think: Mordant’s Need).

We’ve all been there before, of course. But this is the first time I’m finding myself in a particularly stressful situation since the mental health stuff, and as such it’s unsurprising that I’m applying a reasonably analytical approach to the entire process.

So what am I doing to reinforce that door?

  1. Acknowledgement – I’m admitting that the concerns behind the nascent panic are actually legitimate. Pretending that I should be able to get through it all unemotionally is a bad mistake.
  2. Distraction – I often end up working half the day without any music on, just because … well, I end up forgetting to put it on. When you work in an office that’s probably a good thing. When you work from home that’s not. So I’m being more attentive to putting music on. And not ambient noises or ‘soothing’ music, I’m deliberately picking music that has a real rhythm and energy to it. (So currently that’s alternating between Gin Wigmore’s Gravel & Wine, and Mariachi El Bronx’s second album, II.)
  3. The positives – The easy mistake in this situation is to keep on thinking about the things that are bugging you, especially if they’re active at the time. But taking a few minutes out periodically to think of everything else that is good can be excellent at achieving headspace.
  4. Getting out – Working from home I need to get out more, and the biggest mistake I tend to make when things are getting to me is to become more of a hermit, which perpetuates the problem. A house may be a shelter at times, but it can also be a prison if you’re spending too much time there. So I’m focusing on Darren’s return from work each afternoon as a trigger to get out of the house, if only for half an hour to an hour, just to escape a bit.
  5. Saying No – It’s too easy to answer “yes” when you’re asked to pitch in that little bit more, or do something else. That’s all well and good, and it often speaks to our willingness to help others. But we have to recognise the point where taking on more actually makes us less productive. It may be that there’s too many time clashes, or it may be that there’s too much of an impact on that much-needed down time, but there comes a point where the only appropriate answer is no.

Life. A constant series of curveballs.

 Posted by PMdG at 9:26 am  Tagged with:

Hit and run

 Life, Mental health  No Responses »
Jan 012012
 

Me: Did you see what just hit me?

You: I think it might have been a year.

Me: What model?

You: Looks like a standard model

Me: Did you at least get its number?

You: I think it was … 2011?

I got asked last night whether 2011 was a good year or a bad year – or whether it was a great year or a terrible year.

The answer to simple questions are not always simple, and a simple question such as “was 2011 a good year or a bad year” is decidedly not simple. Or to be more correct – it doesn’t have a single answer, and if you do want a single answer, that answer has to be both.

At the start of 2011, Darren and I were still living in Springfield, NSW (2250, not 2630, as Dominos would want you to believe – shit heads), and while our plans to move to Melbourne were well and truly apace, we still had almost 6 months to go. But that time raced by, with the one exception that to a degree we’d already moved, in our hearts, and so living away from home for that length of time was a bit painful for both of us.

The move would have been incredibly stressful, were it not for Darren’s cool headedness and the phenomenal organisational skills of my aunt (we used her national removalist company to get down here). Within 24 hours we were socialising with people, including one person who was to become my best friend in Melbourne, yet even the arrival was tinged with pain, for within just a few days of arriving Darren’s grandmother, Betty, passed away. It was not so much unexpected as it was a melancholy closure to that chapter of our lives. Darren had spent so much time in his grandmothers’ house, growing up, that it seemed impossible to reconcile all those memories with the simple fact that she’d never be sitting in the kitchen surrounded by loved ones and friends again. It was also, for me, the first time I’d had someone close to me die; whether getting to 37 years without having to deal with such an event is a blessing or a curse is impossible to say, though.

We arrived at practically the start of Southern Hibearnation, and yet, throughout such a huge fortnight where people were thoroughly busy with either attending or organising (or both!), we were made to feel so incredibly welcome that we knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we’d made the right decision in moving down to Melbourne. While we didn’t go to many events, we went to enough to meet some amazing folk, both locally based and spread far and wide – Sydney (ironic, given our previous proximity to it), Brisbane and Auckland, just to name a few.

And it was in that community, surrounded by so many friends, many of which were already like a new family to both of us, that when RUOK Day rolled around and passed by, I finally got to the point where I admitted that I wasn’t, and it was time to do something about it. That road is now well trod, with the net effect being that I’ve been able to deal with a lot of the monsters of the Id and neuroses of my past, and while I don’t pretend to be 100% fine, I’m certainly OK, and I’ve got the tools I need to continue the journey. (And if you’re wanting to read about that from start to finish, there’s a list of links at the end. After all, I share so many other thoughts on my blog, it would have been lying by omission if I’d left out that journey.)

30 November 2011 marked our 15th anniversary – not bad for a first relationship, we thought, and certainly having lasted a lot longer than so many of those celebrity marriages people pay money to read about in magazines, and so we threw caution to the wind (and ourselves up against Den night) and invited a big group of friends to help us celebrate that achievement. Ironically, we found ourselves introducing people who had seen each other across crowded rooms for years to each other, and at one point when the party was at its fullest, a close friend who we’d both previously expressed our fear of diving into the bear community to leaned in and asked almost incredulously, “And how long have you been living here?”

2011 was one hell of a year: it wasn’t so much marked as its good points or its bad points, but by the roller-coaster ride in-between, and the frenetic pace at which it passed. But even taking into account all the challenges of the year, I’ll say this much about it: it was fantastic.

– finis, 2011 –

And now, that quick list of posts of my mental health journey:

(For what it’s worth, I haven’t reposted all those links just to celebrate the Madness of PMdG; rather, I’ve been wanting them all together in one place for a while, in case they help even one other person decide to take that journey of self discovery, and this seemed as appropriate a post as any to put all those links in sequence.)

 Posted by PMdG at 8:13 am  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

A man walks out of a psychologist’s office

 Life, Mental health  1 Response »
Dec 192011
 

So on Friday I effectively had my last session with my psychologist. I’ve worn him out – he’s moving to Brisbane.

Well, that’s only half true. He is moving to Brisbane, but it’s for reasons entirely unrelated to me.

While in theory I could go do more sessions, perhaps finding another therapist, I walked into Friday’s session believing it could be my last, having achieved what I set out to achieve with the process, and so I thought it might be worthwhile noting what I got out of it all:

  • Self control.

That’s it.

Of course, we can summarise too much, and the real story is more intricate and complex than just “self control”, but at the core of it, that’s what I got. That self control isn’t just some idle little thing, it’s big – it’s about understanding.

Very little of that understanding came in the form of my therapist actually saying “I think you should do X or Y”; indeed, one might say that the biggest time he suggested anything along those lines was to explain how to beat the fight or flight syndrome – to slow down, breathe deeply, and in doing so, physically counteract that adrenaline surge that comes from shallow and angry or panicked breathing.

Self control can be a deceiving term, too. Some might read it (and I’d have previously read it) as keeping a lid on it all. But that’s precisely the behaviour that got me into the messed up and neurotic state I was in; self control isn’t about who-bottles-it-up-the-longest, it’s about having the ability to let things out in a way that is both healthy and safe.

So self control came not from learning new techniques to suppress, but by coming to grips with the validity of emotions I’d long trained myself to hold in. Yet that’s like trying to squeeze a handful of water … it’ll keep leaking through in various ways, and if you squeeze too hard, it’s just going to come spurting out in all different directions.

A significant part of the therapy came in terms of talking long enough about issues that the root cause became apparent. Maybe for others it’s a longer process, but part of my sometimes neurotic behaviour had been an essential recognition of where issues were springing from, but not being able to work past that. Talking openly with someone about it let me get past those blockages.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but for many people there’s a mistaken perception that we should be able to work through any issue in our head on our own. Yet, biologically and chemically, this just isn’t true. The brain is a complex organ – I spent years at Uni studying Artificial Intelligence research, and I maintain a “lay-IT” interest in it, and the ironic thing is that for all the research that’s been done, the brain itself is still at best only barely understood in places, and not understood at all in others.

Yet the brain is an organ. It has electrical impulses, it has chemistry and hormones and all sorts of other things happening within it. Learning is believed to be about the repeated firing of synapses in a particular path, effectively making that path the default path. So unlearning is about coming up with techniques for breaking those paths.

Only idiots think that you can heal malfunctions in vital organs without getting medical attention. When those issues are healed without official medical attention, there’s still a form of medical approach being made. Vitamins aren’t magic tablets; if they work it’s because they chemically interact in a beneficial way.

In the same way that it’s generally accepted that a person with heart problems should see a cardiologist, we should get to the point where we happily accept that people with mental health issues see a specialist in that field. Sometimes that might be a neurologist, sometimes it might be a psychiatrist, sometimes it might be a psychologist, and sometimes it may be a GP.

I refuse to feel any form of stigma about making the decision to see a psychologist. It was the best, most appropriate decision that I could make at the time, and doing so solved a bunch of problems for me – and gave me the tools to continuously chip away at them. Will I be perfect at it and never get depressed again? No – but we’re entitled to be sad from time to time. We have all those different emotions for a reason, and it’s not crazy to acknowledge them. If you want crazy behaviour, it’s expecting that you should be happy and stress free 100% of your life.

With that self control and higher self understanding comes a renewed me. I’m not reborn, that’s a stupid term – but I am reinvigorated.

In a post from some time ago, I said that I admired one friend in particular since he “reminds me of the best parts of myself, but unencumbered by the hangups I had when I was his age” … I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the last couple of days since the final therapy session. Not out of regret, but of renewal – of a willingness to stare down those hangups that I’ve lived with for such a long time, and reassert control. Not to try to throw them out – they’re there for a reason, and pretending I can fully excise them would be an exercise in self delusion. But to acknowledge those hangups and know why they’re there – that’s powerful: to know where your weaknesses lay and have the tools to confront them is infinitely better than pretending they’re not there at all.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:27 pm  Tagged with: , , ,

What is this, a welfare state?

 Equal Rights, Life, Mental health, Morality  3 Responses »
Nov 112011
 

It’s long been acknowledged that an unfortunate national trait in Australia is “tall poppy syndrome”; that’s where if someone becomes popular, or successful, it’s almost seen as a bad thing. This can lead to savage personal attacks on celebrities, politicians, etc., for no other real reason than “they’re more successful than I”.

Unfortunately, a growing trait that is less discussed is the “kick a poor bastard while he’s down” one. This is a festering, pestilent rancorous trait that comes from the bogan attitudes spewed with vitriolic disdain from shock jocks, imitation current affairs shows, and tabloid journalism.

I hate to sound crass, but it’s effectively about the Americanisation of Australia’s social welfare system. It spews from the notion of a fair go for everyone means everyone pulls their weight, which sounds logical, until you realise that it’s a trojan horse for rolling back welfare advances as an appeal to narcissistic bogan greed and problem simplification.

It appeals to dark and selfish thoughts like:

I pay my taxes, I don’t want to support bludgers.

Why should someone get paid for not working?

The radio and TV tells me that people fake injuries all the time.

If I can’t see an injury it mustn’t be serious.

Everyone should be required to contribute.

People who are out of work should do any work they can get in preference to benefits.

Immigrants shouldn’t get benefits.

And here’s what really gets my goat: it’s a betrayal of core, human, moral values. It’s a betrayal of us cooperatively forming a better society by helping everyone reach their potential, and ensuring those who need the most help get it.

It’s an affirmation of that insidious stockmarket attitude of the 80′s, “Greed is good”.

In simple, it’s about creating a mean society. A society where paranoia and suspicion take priority over respect and pity. Yes, pity. Pity is not a swear word. Pity doesn’t mean infinite handouts or molly-coddling, but it does mean sympathy. If we let the idiots and the greedy dominate the welfare argument, we become a society without sympathy.

When we become too mean, people suffer. Penny-wise, pound-foolish as the saying goes – bitching and scrimping and demanding money be kept away from bludgers, a degeneration of welfare harms and hinders rather than helps. In “Even conservatives say the dole is too low“:

“THE right-wing economist handpicked by former prime minister John Howard to set the minimum wage has declared the dole is too low and warned that giving people so little to survive on is causing desperation and depression.”

(Misha Schubert, The Age, 16 October 2011.)

The dole, as it currently stands in Australia, according to the above article, is $245 a week. Advocates, including that economist cited above, are arguing for a $50 a week increase, which will be a bottom line impact of around $1 billion AU per year on our budget. However, that’s still less than the current $375 per week for the disability pension, or $590 per week as the minimum wage. How many of those people who run around screaming about dole bludgers, for instance, could happily survive on $245 per week? We’re told, by the way, in that article:

“When your living standards are going down like that, people get desperate and depressed. The system is out of kilter. And if they stay on it long enough, they get depression and then they’re moved on to the DSP [disability support pension]“.

In other words, treat people mean enough and it’ll come back and bite you on the arse.

Tellingly, the simple truth about the inequity of welfare payments and potential increases was summed up with the following:

“If you start to build up the case [for a $50 per week dole increase], if you can get someone like me on side, you can just tell the shock jocks to piss off. They’d spend $245 on a meal. And the thing about that is you can confront them. Most people would say, gosh, that can’t be right, it’s so low.”

Actually, most people when confronted with that sort of truth – $245 a week – wouldn’t settle for “gosh”.

Yet, elements of the media are obsessed with spoon feeding the ignorant with stories that increase their ratings by providing people with an excuse for self-aggrandising feelings of what they feel is righteous anger. Dole bludgers, welfare cheats. People claiming depression yet they’re filmed outside in a park smiling. People claiming serious injuries but they’re shown carrying a shopping bag.

Sadly, we’ve seen the logical conclusion to this, where one of Australia’s supposed “current affairs” programmes exposed a person who had been supposedly doing dodgy VCR repairs, hounded him … and he committed suicide. Supposedly such little things are food for fodder for the masses; we’re told these are the “important” issues.

Except, they’re not. People doing bad repairs? People cheating welfare? These aren’t the “real” issues. If current affairs programmes were serious about their work they’d spend time documenting and investigating institutions that have been covering up child abuse for decades. But you see, those institutions have lawyers, and what Australians typically see as current affairs programmes are actually just bully shows. And bullies don’t like picking on anyone who can give them a bloody nose back.

Yet, I digress.

Someone reading this, who disagrees with me, is likely to be champing at the bit to point out that there are welfare cheats and there are people who claim to have injuries but don’t really, etc.

And I’d fully agree with them. If you take any system at all that is designed to work as a safety net, then I, as a non-gambling man, would lay odds that someone will find a loop hole and abuse it. Systems are there to be used, but they’re also going to be abused.

The mean spirited approach to welfare consists of the following ‘logic’:

  1. People abuse welfare.
  2. To prevent people abusing welfare we’ll:
    • Minimise the amount of money paid;
    • Maximise the effort of the people claiming welfare to get that welfare;
    • Assume that everyone claiming welfare is potentially cheating.

It’s actually contrary to our entire justice system – innocent until proven guilty – for welfare, you’re guilty until proven innocent.

My simple response to the issue of welfare cheats is this: so what?

Acknowledging that a safety net is going to be abused doesn’t mean giving people free reign to abuse it. It means simply accepting that no matter what is done, someone will find a loop hole. So we have better checks in place, and appropriate punishments for cheats, but we don’t continually accuse the innocent, when they’re already down on their luck and struggling, of being guilty.

Now, what right do I have to say this?

Well, I’m a high tax payer. I’m in the highest tax bracket in Australia, and I have been for several years now. My yearly tax contribution is considerably more than the entire income of someone on a minimum wage for a year. So I, as a high paying tax payer am saying: open the system up, and treat people with the respect they deserve.

For what it’s worth, I’ve received this mean spirited treatment first hand. In 2006, the company I was working for collapsed in a screaming heap. Administrators were called in and all staff were laid off on the spot. From the time the shit hit the fan in a visible way to the time that I lost my job, there were around 3 business days warning.

Having just spent 3+ years working 80 hour weeks in a combined manager/engineer role, having invested so much of myself in my role, with profound feelings of anxiety and panic, I walked into a centrelink office after travelling home from being laid off … and was treated like a sack of shit by some po-faced front-desk worker who felt her job was to be cerberus to the government’s coffers. Someone who took all the effort in the world to point out why I wouldn’t get anything to start with because I didn’t have the right paperwork from the administrators to prove that I wasn’t cheating.

I was unemployed for 4 weeks, and in that time got one payment from centrelink. One measly payment that wasn’t even the full dole amount.

That’s not welfare, that’s public blood sport.

So when I hear someone mouthing shite from tabloid journalism, shock jocks or supposed ‘current affairs’ programmes about how people are defrauding the welfare system, that they’re all cheaters and liars and don’t deserve a cent of that person’s taxpayer money, guess what I think?

You poor bastard: I hope you never need to use welfare.

Australia is meant to be about mateship and helping people when they’re down, but the attacks on the welfare system are a direct attack on that spirit. If you want to see where Australia is headed, have a look at America: those poor bastards can’t even get universal healthcare in place, because people selfishly say “why is it my problem if my neighbour – or worse, someone I don’t even know – gets sick?” Those poor bastards lose their jobs and are given a timeframe to get a new job or they become cast off by the system.

[For follow up reading, I suggest you look at "Paula's Benefits" over at Bipolar Bear's Blog].

 Posted by PMdG at 6:29 am  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

The triple edged sword of introspection

 Mental health  1 Response »
Nov 052011
 

“Understanding is a three-edged sword; there is your side, there is the other side, and then there is the truth.”

Babylon 5.

As the Robbie Williams song goes, lately I’ve been doing a lot of “thinking about thinking”. I’ve been involved recently on Facebook with a private support network of men who all have some form of mental health issue. We’re a disparate bunch spread across Australia and New Zealand at least, if not further, and the primary purpose is to allow each other to sound off, and get advice from others when needed.

Like any forum situation, this effectively allows me to do a form of self analysis by proxy; in observing and talking to others I’m observing and learning more about myself. I’m also learning about commonalities between our situations.

One of those commonalities is a strong degree of introspection. Some might say it’s actually an unhealthy level of introspection. Note that the word may imply a choice, but choices are never as simple as they seem. When we delve into behavioural processes, one of the simplest factors is that behavioural traits become self-reinforcing. Effectively, our neurons start firing along a particular path, and repeated firings mean that it becomes a trait.

There’s a common notion that people fall into two main categories – “glass half full”, or “glass half empty”; however, when we approach depression and other forms of mental health issues, there’s most definitely another category – “glass half empty, cracked and you can see the rest of the water leaking out”. OK, that’s a bit of a mouthful, but it serves the purpose. When you’re feeling down, it’s not just a case that the glass is half empty, but the approach almost leads to the situation where glass half empty is actually an optimal situation, and it’s actually getting worse as the seconds tick by.

It’s like being stuck on a möbius strip, and with each pass over the one-sided devil, things get worse.

Mobius Strip

(Image taken from Wikipedia article, Möbius Strip.)

Effectively that möbius strip is a representation of an endless, frustrating loop – or what can be an endless, frustrating loop.

At that point, logic can become skewed, and the loop can feel like it’s tightening. But that’s because we’re mentally operating within the confines of the one-dimensional möbius strip. There’s other truths and world-views out there, just not quite visible, because they’re two dimensional, three dimensional, and four dimensional.

The real goal of any form of group support in mental health is to help lift people back out of that one-dimensional möbius strip view of the world they’ve fallen into, and come back up to a full world awareness.

Or to come back to that original quote, understanding is a three-edged sword. There’s your side, there’s someone else’s side, and then there’s the truth. This is why I work so damn hard at forcing myself to keep Hanlon’s Razor as a mantra in my head at all times:

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

When we’re in that one-dimensional möbius strip view, we struggle to recognise the truth of Hanlon’s Razor because, as I mentioned before, our logic becomes skewed.

If you find yourself walking that same path over and over again in your head, constantly ending up back where you started, please, please take that as the signal to ask someone nearby for an alternate perspective. That perspective may be surprising. One thing is for sure based on my observation and participation in this support group – making that step really does work.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:05 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Advice to my younger self: don’t change a thing

 Mental health  No Responses »
Oct 292011
 

If I were to somehow travel back in time and were able to give my younger self some advice without causing a temporal paradox, I can honestly say that I’d give only one piece of advice: don’t change a thing.

Young PrestonThe above photo was taken when I was somewhere around 4 years old, and much of my psychology sessions so far have turned out to be addressing things related to the next 5-10 years of that little boy’s life.

Yet, I am who I am, and every event in my past has contributed to making me the person I am, and just as importantly, has contributed to me knowing the people I now know. Sure, there’s some shit in my past, but wishing I could somehow wipe that away means wishing for an erasure of self – of this self.

When I’d been thinking about Friday’s psychologist visit on Wednesday and Thursday, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d be discussing, other than a desire to explore what options there might be on the social phobia front. Then, late Thursday evening, I saw an incoming consulting request which might mean travel to the opposite side of the world. My first, initial reaction, was pure horror.

What was useful though was having already spent a couple of sessions discussing various bits and pieces of my psyche, my self awareness had been tuned enough that I could recognise this reaction for what it was – social phobia. Not a lack of appreciation (or, likely), a lack of desire for the work. Just the typical gut fear for having to go into a new situation.

So I made a brief comment about it on Facebook, knowing it would elicit some feedback, then went to bed to sleep on it. That in itself was a sign of an improved reaction. And so, the next morning, I threw the consulting opportunity request across to my managing director.

It certainly gave me something to talk about on Friday afternoon though with my psychologist, and as I’ve discovered in previous sessions, for me at least, those sessions are about me talking to someone sufficiently independent and outside my ‘loop’ that I can validate my subconscious thoughts on what the solution might be – thus enabling me to actually apply those thoughts and head towards that solution.

When we see people talking about seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist on TV, the term “repressed memory therapy” is tossed around like a sad meme, and so it builds up this notion that it’s either all bullshit or it’s all involving deep hypnotherapy sessions. For me it’s not so much a case of “repressed memory” but “unprioritised memory” or “unacknowledged memory”. In this case, we started talking about my general struggle with travel and its linkage to my social anxiety and suddenly I remembered the significance of an experience when I was around 10 or 11. A few friends and myself from our school had been given the opportunity to go to a one week “creative” camp – video, music, writing, etc. I’d approached it eagerly, but the morning I had to go, a huge dread built up in me, and I spent the entire week away utterly miserable. It was the first time I’d ever really been homesick, and it hurt bad. I got a cold as well, which made the experience doubly annoying, but I still remember to this day leaning over an upstairs railing at the event and thinking “If I manage to fall over I’ll likely break my arm and then they’ll have to let me go home”. I didn’t go through with it of course, but it was that level of discomfort.

And for the most part, it is that frightened, homesick kind of kid that pops up in the psyche when solo travel is discussed. (That kid that also grew up in the cold war, the 70s and 80s, who was smart enough to understand worrying parents and be terrified of the notion of  being away when a nuclear holocaust started.)

I know in many circles, Freud is getting a bit passé, but there is something to be said in particular for the base notions of id, ego and super-ego – at least from a lay perspective. That super-ego approach has been to trample and dominate the id, to invalidate its processes and suppress them. Or if you want to bring it out of the Freudian analogy, it’s about trying to suppress the negative emotions in the limbic system.

Ironically in doing so, I’d achieved the exact opposite: The angry side that lead to intense anger suppression for lengthy periods followed by irrational outbursts, and the traumatised, scared side that hated the notion of travel or dealing with new people. “Monsters of the Id” – and we’re taught monsters don’t exist, so they should be ignored. The super-ego approach of “reasoned intellectual response will rule” – the vulcan attitude, you might say, creates an opposite result than intended.

So what’s the net result?

A cure isn’t about learning to control these elements – well, not in the suppress interpretation of control, but how to integrate them.

I don’t need to go back and tell that little boy from my past to change anything. (That’s not his job, and if he did, I wouldn’t be me, I’d be someone else anyway.) I just need to give myself the permission to make those changes now, in me.

(Oh, and apparently I need to learn how to relax, so I’m off to learn about the parasympathetic nervous system…)

 Posted by PMdG at 6:39 am  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

I know what humanity really needs to be saved from

 Mental health, Morality  No Responses »
Oct 272011
 

In an article in the UK Telegraph, we’re told that Pope Ratzinger recently declared in an address that “saving” humanity from homosexuality and transexuality can be compared to saving the environment:

In his address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration, the Pope himself described behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations as “a destruction of God’s work”.

He said the Roman Catholic Church had a duty to “protect man from the destruction of himself” and urged respect for the “nature of the human being as man and woman.”

The pontiff added: “The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less.”

To be perfectly blunt, I think the pope yet again has his head stuck so far up his arse that he can see what he had for breakfast.

Instead, I’d suggest a few things that humanity really does need to be saved from:

  1. People who molest and abuse children. On the scale of which it has been conducted by the catholic church, this constitutes a crime against humanity and as such the pope and his most senior advisors need to be charged and investigated for shielding and suppressing these details.
  2. Overpopulation. This week the world’s population will hit 7 billion. The incessant immoral teachings of religious organisations against birth control imperils the entire human race, on a daily basis. We have already reached population levels that are likely to be unsustainable. The vatican, through its continual preaching of abstenance-only birth control is directly attacking humanity’s future.
  3. Poverty. Sure, the catholic church’s charitable arms do good work, but the vatican has amassed considerable riches which is hoards like Scrooge McDuck. “Bankers’ best guesses about the Vatican’s wealth put it at $10 billion to $15 billion … The Vatican has big investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, real estate … Unlike ordinary stockholders, the Vatican pays no taxes on this income.” (Time Magazine, US, February 26 1965.) The church apparently got jack of this sort of notoriety and started publishing finances, but these seem to be clearly doctored, with a 2005/2006 report estimating the net worth of all the church’s real estate at just $908 million US dollars. The trick, you see, is to treat each diocese as largely (financially) independent. But that’s sheer sophistry, given all humanity-damaging church policy is enforced from the central authority – and so too could wealth redistribution.
  4. Suicide. The catholic doctrine explicitly says that those who commit suicide go to hell. Yet, by continually pushing religious intolerance towards homosexuality, it systematically and directly contributes to the bullying and self-hatred experienced by many same-sex attracted people – bullying and self-hatred that leads to a higher suicide rate in the gay/lesbian community than experienced in the heterosexual community. By their own arguments, they are guilty of mortal sins by encouraging this behaviour.

Perhaps, after he pulls his head from his arse, this self proclaimed moral arbiter of the world could look into the recesses of his abscessed and pestilent organisation, and realise that humanity actually needs to be saved from the catholic church.

 Posted by PMdG at 4:36 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monsters from the Id

 Mental health  1 Response »
Oct 222011
 

Monsters John. Monsters from the Id.

Monsters of the IdOn Friday morning, after feeling a little anxiety rising, I found myself again sitting down to another 50 minute session with my psychologist. We started talking about language and the way I ‘see’ conversations when I’m post-analysing, as a result of use of the word ‘issues’ in the previous session. One of the more interesting parts of that component of the conversation was coming up with an alternate word so that I’m not dealing with the mild cognitive dissonance of my view of ‘issues’ and what he (and likely most people) would see it as. In particular, he visibly balked when I suggested calling them ‘problems’ instead, since he felt that a ‘problem’ had negative connotations. My answer: a problem is something that needs analysis and leads to a solution. And the negativity may not be a bad thing – after all, if I’ve been dealing with these ‘issues’ the wrong way for years, then maybe giving then a more negative label is a good way of encouraging me to deal better with them.

So, problems it is. Problems can be dealt with.

As I suspected with therapy, the real process for me is having a sounding board, completely outside of my ‘loop’, who I can impartially talk to and get that new perspective I need to break out of certain areas. I guess the closest analogy would be that I’m stuck in a maze, but anyone else in the ‘loop’ with me is equally stuck in the maze too, so there’s not much point talking to them. Someone sitting in a chair above the maze though? That’s the person to talk to.

Ironically, having realised I was feeling anxiety, a lot of the puzzle pieces had already started falling into place before I walked into the session. For years I’d labelled my introversion as the reason why I’d sometimes be reluctant to go out – and that’s certainly a contributing factor, but it’s only a peripheral one. As we got onto that topic of comfort levels in social situations, I discussed a typical situation for Darren and I when we go out into any situation where either (a) we’re going somewhere new, (b) we may be or are intending to meet people I don’t know, or (c) we’ll be doing something newish. And in those situations:

  • I get grumpy a couple of hours before we go out;
  • I mentally have to drag myself out the house – or Darren has to do similar;
  • I’ll be stressed the entire time to the destination;
  • Once we’re there, I’ll continue to be anxious for a while;
  • It’ll reach a crest where I want to just get the hell out of there;
  • Someone or something will break the ice;
  • I’ll be almost entirely comfortable for the rest of the time.

(Then, to top it off, I’ll frequently get guilty about the fact that I’m getting grumpy, I’ll then get angry with myself for being guilty about being grumpy, I’ll then get guilty with myself for getting angry about being guilty about being grumpy … and so on. But I’ll get to that in a moment.)

Answer? That one’s easy – I have a mild social phobia. It’s not the sort of debilitating one that leads people to be complete hermits, because I recognise the need to get out and frequently want to get out, it’s just I have an anxiety period associated with it until I reach that required comfort level. Solution? Be prepared it will happen, social anxiety is common enough that there’s nothing to really worry about. Relax.

Relax.

So much of my problems probably spring from years of refusing to relax. I’ll get to that another time.

The anger/guilt cycle though is quite simply neurotic. And it is worse when I get irrationally angry – such as in situations where I’ve been over-managing my anger and it jumps out at an inappropriate time. I know it’s completely irrational to get as mad as I do at the time, so I get guilty about it, so I get angry about having to let it go when I feel like it needs to come out, and again, the cycle happens.

The neurotic behaviour is the one to really focus on, and the way to achieve that (which I’d been looking for) is to short-cut the anger/guilt cycle so I can pull myself out of the anger. The theory behind that solution is amazingly simple, and while I can’t say I look forward to trying it out, I can equally say I’m hopeful it will help, since logically it makes sense.

Rightly or wrongly, that anger when it rises is basic fight-or-flight, but I’m effectively preparing to do both. So that means shallow breaths, it means altering the oxygen/CO2 balance. It means putting the body on edge. Which does explain the slightly altered vision when I’m getting irrationally angry and moving into that cycle.

Which leads to the action. It’s possible to simultaneously be in fight-or-flight and relaxed. Deliberately short-cut by taking deep slow measured diaphragmatic breaths. That helps restore the oxygen balance in the body and brings down the fight-or-flight reaction to the point where logic is no longer as skewed and coherent decisions can be made. Such as, “OK, so I got stupidly angry. I’m not going to get guilty about it, I’m going to move on, rather than trying to hold onto it.”

Growing up, I’d be tormented to the point where I exploded, then I’d be told that I was such a bad sport and told my behaviour was unacceptable. So my anger over-management kicked in. My general cycle has been to refuse to acknowledge the anger, trying to suppress it, until it’s too late and so when it does burst out it’s emotionally harmful to those caught in its wake. And by ‘those caught in its wake’, I invariably mean Darren.

Monsters from the Id, indeed.

Ultimately those different deep emotional parts of us aren’t meant to be suppressed, or excised. They are a real part of us and shunning them doesn’t solve anything. Equally though, letting them into executive control isn’t something that should be done either. Yet, continually trying to suppress means that occasionally they will sneak through into executive control.

I’m surmising as much as anything my depression has been stemming from twin neuroses – first, refusing to acknowledge the validity of some forms of anger, and second, by going into my anger/guilt cycle. Both ultimately lead me to have up/down swings while the internal battle is going on. (The first, in fact, is actually just an apex manifestation of the real core neurosis – I’m incredibly, harshly judgemental of myself.)

I’ve still got a long walk ahead of me – I’m not going to solve this overnight. But at least, I’ve now got a compass to find my way out of the maze.

–
End note: “Monsters from the Id” is reference to the 1956 Science Fiction movie, “Forbidden Planet“. If you haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend you do. It’s one of the best science fiction movies of all time, and totally stands the test of time. “Id” is something that the psychologist didn’t mention – I know to a degree the Freudian notion of Id/Ego/Super Ego have slipped out of fashion, but if you equate Id to the limbic system or reptilian part of the brain, there are worthwhile analogies to be drawn.

 Posted by PMdG at 6:57 am  Tagged with: , , , , ,

High Anxiety

 Mental health  1 Response »
Oct 212011
 

High Anxiety

 

So I’m about 3 hours off my second psychologist appointment, having woken up with a filthy headache (gone now, all praise panadeine), and that constricted feeling in the throat is rising, meaning I’m feeling the onset of some level of anxiety.

I walked out of the last session feeling so good, then a few hours later crashed so strongly (having allowed myself to get too wrapped up in my own definitions of words), that there’s some level of nervousness in just approaching the next session.

One of the side-effects of deciding to confront all of these issues is, quite frankly, a significantly more acute self-awareness. (I’ve always been reasonably self aware that there’s been issues, but (and there’s no way around this), I’m a damn good liar when I set my mind to it, and I’m also so regularly reserved that the average person who has known me for years wouldn’t really have noticed much, if anything, anyway.)

With that significantly increased self-awareness comes a self-admission that I can at times feel somewhat anxious about having to deal with new people and new situations. Not to the point that you’d call it a phobia, but there’s definitely that strong introvert sitting there wanting to shutdown, withdraw and have some solitude when things get ‘new’. For instance, on Wednesday night Darren and I went to a comedy club in North Melbourne with a couple of his work colleagues, and suddenly confronted by (a) having to meet new people who I had practically zero frame of reference for, (b) doing it in a location I’ve never been, and (c) going to a type of venue I’ve never been, I had to drag myself out of the house, and at every step along the way found myself mentally clawing for an escape route.

It wasn’t until the first of the three comedy acts was over that I found myself actually letting go of that desire to flee.

In the introductory session I touched on my fight-or-flight desire with the psychologist, mentioning the irony that I can happily stand up in front of a large group of people and talk about something I’m a subject matter expert in, but the notion of going into a small situation with unknown people who I have to make small talk with is about as terrifying as zombies to me. (Well, I didn’t mention the zombie-phobia to him, but that’s a quicker way of explaining it here.)

But it’s probably something I need to explore a little more.

 

 Posted by PMdG at 7:20 am  Tagged with: , ,

Will the vulcan klingon?

 Life, Mental health  4 Responses »
Oct 152011
 

Yesterday morning I made my first visit to a psychologist. It was more of an introductory session – exploratory, if you will. The psychologist was probably as much as anything wanting to make sure that we could achieve results together, since everyone in mental health seems very clear that one of the biggest challenges is matching a patient to a compatible therapist.

Yet, some things did get discussed – enough, at least, for me to walk out of the session having been told some useful things, namely:

  • Yep, I’ve been dealing with depression for likely some time.
  • My depression comes from various items of trauma, and is unlikely to stem from an actual disorder.
  • I don’t have anger management issues – I have anger over-management issues.

Net result, I was told, was that I should reassure myself that I’m not ‘crazy’ but I just simply have some issues that I need to resolve.

So, I walked away from the clinic with a spring in my step that I hadn’t felt for ages – discussion had started, I was walking that (potentially long) path towards clearing up, I can reassure myself that I’m not crazy, and I equally don’t have a disorder I’ll have to learn to manage. I just have issues.

And I felt really good for about 2-3 hours, until my self analysis kicked in.

The curse of being intelligent is that you’re often your harshest critic, and so my thought process eventually turned down the following path:

  1. So I don’t have a mental disorder.
  2. I don’t have a physical disorder.
  3. I just have issues.
  4. Does that make me a failure as a person for having not dealt with them?

So yesterday afternoon, all into the night and then through to early this morning, I was stuck in that loop. No actual ‘excuses’ for the failed thought processes, so it’s just a failure on my part to actually deal with my issues under my own steam. The ‘breakthrough’ of deciding to see someone wasn’t a breakthrough but an admission of failure. It doesn’t matter that having learnt the term this week that I’m aware I frequently have impostor syndrome. Self awareness and intelligence, it appears, is a bitch when it comes to mental health, since it means lengthy stretches of cognitive dissonance – such as in this case simultaneously holding the world view that I’m a failure and knowing it’s not the case.

This morning though, after a night of existential nightmares, and ramping up into the same feelings of failure, I managed to get myself onto enough of a different tangent that I could see the issue in a different context.

Context is without a doubt a core problem for me. I’m going to make a bold claim here and suggest that I may have synaesthesia. If you’ve heard of it, you’ve probably heard of it in the context (ha!) of associating/seeing colours with sounds, or seeing words and text in colour. It’s a condition that has several formal recognised versions and considerably more informal ones that haven’t been studied enough to be formally recognised.

Mine? If it’s not synaesthesia it’s likely going to be some variant of a linguistic disorder. It all stems from how I learnt to speak though. I had a speech impediment as a kid that was so strong I had to go to speech therapy, and a considerable part of the learning there involved having flash card sessions. A picture of a cat, with the word “cat” underneath, and having to repeatedly say “cat” until it sounded close enough to move on to “dog”, or whatever the next flash card would be.

So I learnt to read while I learnt to speak. And for years I thought that was the only net effect of it, until only recently I realised that it affects how I communicate, too. In fact, it affects it hugely. Darren and I will periodically have contextual failures in communication, and it goes like this:

Darren: So, Steven said X.

Me: Oh, that’s interesting.

>I go off on a mental tangent about another person, Stephen<

>Context has switched, I’m now thinking Stephen instead of Steven<

Darren: And then Steven said Y

Me: Huh? What? What are we talking about?

You see, I make a contextual switch based on the words, not the content of the discussion, and I lose track of the actual discussion. Spelling becomes meaning, for a start – but my interpretation supersedes meaning. Why?

Because of the stupid fucking flashcards.

I don’t just see words associated with things, I see meanings associated with words. There are whole books and theories of academic studies about whether language shapes thought or the other way around, and I’ve got the entire fucking battle running around in my head on a daily basis. So, particularly as I run through things in my head later, I’ve got those flash cards in my head tagging my meanings to the words that come back. If it’s just about cats, dogs, place names, people’s names, inanimate objects, that’s all fine.

Words that can have interpreted nuances, though?

Something Darren says frequently in instant messaging is “fair enough”, as a response. It’s a statement that he’s seen and understood what’s been said to him, felt it necessary to  acknowledge it, but has nothing further to say, quite possibly because there is nothing further to say.

“Fair enough”, for me, still interprets as “Oh fair enough!”, with extreme exasperation. And so every time Darren says “fair enough”, I have that “blink blink” moment where I first see my interpretation, then pull out of it and see his interpretation. Or more correctly, see a more likely interpretation. Indeed, another best friend in Melbourne happens to say “fair enough” when he chats online with me as well, and I have to equally do the same “blink blink” every time he says it.

This, as a quick side point, is why I react so strongly towards hate speech. I’m not just seeing the words. I’m seeing the meaning, overlaid like an augmented reality over the words. I see the anger, the depraved need to hurt and cause injury all wrapped up in the words.

Maybe my synaesthesia is that on non-neutral words, I don’t just see the word, I see the emotion of the word, or the interpreted meaning of the word. Not always – I’ve got some theories about how it triggers, but I’m still exploring that.

But where does any of this come back to my plummet yesterday?

Issues.

It all hinged on the word issue, and how I naturally interpret it. For me, an issue is that I can’t find a file on my computer I need to use. Or I’m looking for a pair of scissors I misplaced. It’s a minor, niggling thing. So once that self-analysis kicked in yesterday afternoon – fuck, if all I have are issues, that’s pretty lame – I’m pretty lame. And that’s where the loop started.

Yet, in no way is that what the psychologist meant yesterday when he said I had issues. So now I’m going through that period of cognitive dissonance where I’m simultaneously aware of what I mean by ‘issues’ and what he meant by ‘issues’, reconciling the differences between the two, and dealing with the need to not see my meaning when I think of him talking about ‘issues’.

(Of course, this is now the bit where my natural curiosity kicks in. Do others who had to do similar speech therapy as children deal with language the same way (or at least a similar way) to how I do?)

So, as I undergo therapy, it’s clearly something I’ll have to clearly spell out to my psychologist – my contextual failures aren’t just something that causes me to lose track of conversations as I’m having them, it’s also something that affects my post-conversation analysis, too.

The old clichéd saying is that every cloud has a silver lining. It may have taken me around 33 years to work out the negative impacts of the speech therapy I had as a kid, but I wonder whether they can be harnessed in a positive way? In the simplest form, obviously by retaining as much as possible a foreground awareness of how they impact my interpretation of information, I can start to control and limit that interpretation, channeling it in the direction it should go rather than the direction it would naturally go (for me). But what of other possibilities? For instance, I’ve always been atrocious at learning languages. For example, after 2 years of study at high school, I can introduce myself and ask if someone speaks English, in French. But would I be make better progress on languages if I did it via flash cards?

I have much food for thought.

Will the vulcan klingon? I certainly hope not.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:21 am  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
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