liveonearth: (stone face)
2011-08-25 09:11 am

QotD: Dissociation

What survivors do...dissociate from the body and withdraw into the head.

Cut off from the body, one doesn't feel vulnerable. By identifying the self with the ego, one also gains the illusion of power. Since the will is the instrument of the ego, one truly believes "where there's a will, there's a way" or "one can do whatever one wills." This is true as long as the body has the energy to support the ego's directive. But all the willpower in the world is no help to a person who lacks the energy to implement the will. Healthy individuals do not operate in terms of willpower except in an emergency. Normal actions are motivated by feelings rather than by the will. One doesn't need willpower to do what one wants to do. There is no need to use the will when one has a strong desire. Desire itself is an energetic charge which activates an impulse leading to actions that are free and generally fulfilling. An impulse is a flowing force from the core of the body to the surface, where it motivates the musculature for action. The will, on the other hand, is a driving force that stems from the ego--the head--to act counter to the body's natural impulses. Thus, when one is afraid, the natural impulse is to run away from the threatening situation. However this may not always be the best action. One cannot always escape a danger by running. Confronting the threat may be the wiser course, but this is difficult to do when one is frightened and there is an impulse to run. In such situations mobilizing the will to counter the fear is a positive action.

--Alexander Lowen, MD, in Joy; The Surrender to the Body and to Life, page 81-82.
liveonearth: (Default)
2011-06-22 12:25 pm

QotD: on Human Attachment

So it is with emotional knowledge. In the first years of life, as (a child's) brain passes from the generous scaffold to the narrow template, a child extracts patterns from his relationships. Before any glimmerings of event memory appear, he stores an impression of what love FEELS like. Neural memory compresses theses qualities into a few powerful Attractors--any single instance a featherweight, but accumulated experience leaves a dense imprint. That concentrated knowledge whispers to a child from beneath the veil of consciousness, telling him what relationships ARE, how they function, what to anticipate, how to conduct them. If a parent loves him in the healthiest way, wherein his needs are paramount, mistakes are forgiven, patience is plentiful, and hurts are soothed as best they can be, then THAT is how he will relate to himself and others. Anomalous love--one where his needs don't matter, or where love is suffocating or autonomy intolerable--makes its ineradicable limbic stamp. Healthy loving then becomes incomprehensible.

Zeroing in on HOW to love goes hand in hand with WHOM. A baby strives to tune in to his parents, but he cannot judge their goodness. He attaches to whoever is there, with the unconditional fixity we profess to require of later attachments: for better or worse;, for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health. Attachment is not a critic: a child adores his mother's face, and he runs to her whether she is pretty or plain. And he prefers the emotional patterns of the family he knows, regardless of its objective merits. As an adult his heart will lean toward these outlines. The closer a potential mate matches his prototypes, the more enticed and entranced he will be--the more he will feel that here, at last, with this person, he BELONGS.

--p160 A General Theory of Love
liveonearth: (Default)
2011-01-30 01:58 pm

QotD: Mental Health for Therapists

...if therapy WORKS, it transforms a patient's limbic brain and his emotional landscape forever. The person of the therapist will determine the shape of the new world a patient is bound for; the configuration of HIS limbic Attractors fixes those of the other. Thus the urgent necessity for a therapist to get his own emotional house in order. His patients are coming to stay, and they may have to live there for the rest of their lives.
--Lewis, Amini and Lannon in A General Theory of Love p187
(emphases are original)
liveonearth: (Default)
2010-12-02 06:06 pm

Being Bullied Permanently Changes a Person

notes from an article in the Boston Globe by Emily Anthes
Inside the bullied brain; The alarming neuroscience of taunting
notes )
liveonearth: (Default)
2010-10-24 09:32 am

QotD: Risk Takers

Children born today with a diminutive level of worry--those whose emotional physiology underreacts to stress, novelty, and threat--grow up to become criminals much more often than average. Criminality has long been known to be partially heritable, and a worry volume set to "low" in the reptilian brain is part of the mechanism.
--Lewis, Amini and Lannon in A General Theory of Love p49

What interests me in their assessment of the value of risk aversion and its opposite as mentioned above, is that these physicians note no value in being a risk taker, only increased criminality. They mention that "Many of our ultralow-anxiety ancestors were bitten by snakes, gored by tusks, and fell out of trees. Those premature deaths shifted the gene pool toward higher trepidation." By my own observation, people who are less risk averse are more likely to be found in sports such as whitewater kayaking, backcountry skiing and paragliding. This is where I've found several of my dearest friends, and they are not, by and large, criminals. Also, Dr Thom continues to tell us that entrepreneurs are risk takers, much different from the rest of the population. The statistics show us that most entrepreneurs are male, which begs the question, are men more likely to be risk takers? I think so. And I don't think that this disposition is any guarantee of criminality, though it certainly does increase the odds that rules and laws will be taken with a grain of potassium. Another question: if it is so, then why are males less risk averse? I think evolution offers answers to that one also.
liveonearth: (Default)
2010-10-22 08:45 pm

NPR fires Juan Williams for saying he feels Nervous?

Here you can see the offending clip in which Williams admitted that he feels nervous when he sees people in Muslim garb on an airplane. I hadn't seen it until just now. Williams has a long history of working for human rights, and he is black. After he made this admission, NPR fired him, and he promptly got hired by FOX to the tune of a $2 million contract.

What happened here is in a way a repeat of something I observed in church a few Sundays ago. The pastor said that homophobia is a sin. Fear is a sin? Now NPR is saying the same thing. Nervousness around strangers in clothing representing so much = sin. This is ridiculous. This is a trap that liberals have fallen into. This is the disaster of PCism taken so far that people cannot even express their unbidden and unacted emotions. It's not even an opinion, it's an EMOTION. The opinion, being something concocted of reason in a quality man such as Williams, will not be bigoted. But emotions? I suspect that any reasonable person in Arab dress would understand that Williams is not a hater, he is simply human. We would all get along better if we allow each other to be human.
liveonearth: (Default)
2010-06-29 09:56 pm

Spanbauer on Dangerous Writing

Character lies in the destruction of a sentence.
--Tom Spanbauer
liveonearth: (Default)
2010-06-25 01:12 am

QotD: Feeling

A lot of people think or believe or know what they feel---but that's thinking or believing or knowing: not feeling. And being real is feeling---not just knowing or believing or thinking.
--unknown
liveonearth: (chickadee in snow)
2010-03-27 04:23 pm

Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear



I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

- Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
liveonearth: (Default)
2009-12-31 02:41 pm

Quote of the Day

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
--Carl Jung
liveonearth: (Default)
2008-12-31 06:05 pm
Entry tags:

Book: Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales


Finally finished reading this one. Good book! The copy I have borrowed is covered with sticky tabs left there by the last reader. It has been interesting to peruse what he thought was worth marking. I mark my books up with pencil brackets, dashes and dots, and create my own indices handwritten inside the covers.....but that's me. This book convinced me that I am a survivor, that I have all the classic characteristics and tendencies of those who manage to pull through when others might kill themselves through haste or ignorance. So it made me feel good. =-]
a few quotes and wonderings )
liveonearth: (Default)
2008-05-28 07:17 am

Synthesis Tangents

Practiced yoga at the school this morning. Was up before 6am. Mind is going. I believe that there is a biological link between the strength of the core and the experience of BEING. Notice how all the really brilliant, centered people all sit up so straight? Walk so tall? Having a strong core and an aligned spine links, I think, into our limbic systems, into the most primitive part of our brains. Walking resets the emotions. Terry male says I have an overactive amygdala which is what causes me to have religious experiences. Brons says the amygdala is all about fear and aversion, anxiety, fear conditioning, antinociception and autonomic adjustments. Religious experiences, fear and aversion. I wonder where awe falls into that mix.
I am fascinated by all my coursework right now but especially the brain material from Brons )
liveonearth: (Default)
2008-05-24 09:45 am

Motor and Limbic Systems: the Cortico Striate Loops


Ventral tegmental dopamine neurons respond only to UNPREDICTED REWARDS. When the goodie is predictable, those particular dopamine cells stop firing. They's the ones that say "Oh YEAH" to something one discovers as enjoyable and satisfying. Smoking a cigarette fires those cells even when it's not unpredicted, it provokes that Oh YEAH chemistry every single time you light up.

It's the dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens that stengthens the links between the stimulus and the wanting. Wanting and liking are not the same.

boring to most, notes from organ systems class and later added notes from Intoxicating Minds, this reminds me of the wampus game on the old obsorne PC's, draw your twenty rooms and start sketching in the links )
liveonearth: (Default)
2008-03-20 08:51 pm

Portland Bike Beat and other random thoughts

A friend from AZ just brought the newest bicyclist's joy in Portland to my attention: they're putting big green areas on the pavement at some intersections so that bikes have a place where they are supposed to wait at intersections. Here's the link: http://bikeportland.org/2008/03/17/portlands-first-bike-box-is-now-complete/
more )
liveonearth: (Default)
2008-03-08 01:59 pm

Is that a real smile or a fake one?

Test your ability to tell the difference, thanks to the BBC, at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml. I can tell that John McCain's smile is phoney, and so is the smile of Bill Richardson. I wouldn't mind politicians and their fake smiles to much if they weren't plastered all over. Hints for recognizing real and fake smiles are behind the cut---cut---. )