@“2501”#p106385 why do you put yourself down so much?
@“connrrr”#p106396 At the center of the triangle of OCD, Tourettes, and ADHD is a brain that does not let go of anything. You end up being totally incapable of forgiving yourself or anyone else for anything that anyone ever does or anything that ever happens because to you, it is always right there, like a song in your head that never stops repeating.
@"2501"#p106385 Just chill out bro! The only thing that can validate a person's existence is true love and you're gonna find it as long as you focus. Take a step back and look at the specs of your machine, evaluate your formation and your strengths and weaknesses. Think about your health, your skillset, your stat points and your skill trees, your real life talents and credentials. Do you drink? Are you getting enough sleep? Enough exercise? Are you eating the right macros? Are you taking medications? Do they help? Have you been out for a walk, for a run, do you ever do tai chi? Calisthenics? Yoga? Some push ups and squats and stretches to get your blood pumping? Have you ever drank some nice herbal tea to cleanse your tired renal system?
Think about what you like to do, what you want to do, where you want to be. What does it take to get there? You already know how to do some things. You've been thinking about this your whole life dude! As long as you stop avoiding the answers you've already got, you can do this! Reality is just the material for building your dream. Work isn't what you do to get money and earn the right to exist. It's the way you transform the circumstances everyone lives in into something that's worth it.
Your pain has already taught you a lot!
@“connrrr”#p106396 To me it just feels like being realistic. But I’m not sure I can even explain it fully, I’ve been doing it compulsively literally since I was a small child. Might be the result of emotional abuse or something or just a flaw in my personality, I really don’t know for sure. But I definitely assume people see the worst in me and, if they don’t, feel like I’ve deceived them.
@"IncompatibleKaiser"#p106402 Mostly what I’ve learned from pain is compulsive avoidance (of risk/exertion/people/myself).
Don’t wanna get too specific about my personal history, both for general purposes and because I know for a certainty that others here have had it worse by any practical measurement. Bad things happened and environments were not always stable or positive, but in the grand scheme as a grown-ass adult human I know I have no one to blame for where I am but myself. Entering your 30s relatively privileged but completely dysfunctional and emotionally hung up on trauma that disrupted your normal human development when you were, like, in high school, is not a great look. For example.
@“2501”#p106465 Sounds like you're in your comfort zone no matter how gross it makes you feel.
Try fasting, brutal exercise, or some form of pseudo religious self denial so that you have no comfort zone. Deprive yourself of reward entirely to become truly productive. Then slowly ween yourself back on to self love.
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@“2501”#p106465 Might be the result of emotional abuse or something
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@“2501”#p106465 I know I have no one to blame for where I am but myself.
Yeah ok no lol. And that's not just a suspicion with evidence: just as you'd be full of yourself to take all the credit if your life were going great, you can't have single-handedly produced all the problems you're having.
And it doesn't have to be about blame, it could just be about finding out what fucked you up. I don't think that's splitting hairs. Blame is impulsive and we think it'll be cathartic but it isn't, and it isn't the same as responsibility. If someone in your life is responsible for whatever trauma you've gone through, it might be worth it to confront them. It might be a waste of time. It might be a shared responsibility and they may shrug off their share of it. Forget blame, focus on diagnosing the problem and figure out next steps.
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@“2501”#p106465 Entering your 30s relatively privileged but completely dysfunctional and emotionally hung up on trauma that disrupted your normal human development when you were, like, in high school, is not a great look. For example.
Who gives a fuck? You gotta work through it whether or not the "optics" are good, and I don't see why they aren't? I was on welfare when I entered my 30s. My life's been hampered by fuckups just about the whole way through, and I was only able to admit to myself that that has probably been due in part to me self-sabotaging a few months ago. Maybe it makes it easier for me to keep going by treating my life as an experiment, which motivates me to stay alive and keep trying long enough to see what I can change for the better. If it helps, you could try thinking of your life that way too.
Also: aerobic exercise is indeed great for trauma. It makes your brain cells [grow back](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160208083606.htm), and that could be necessary if you do have trauma of some kind. PTSD leaves you with a shrivelled hippocampus. The intensity doesn't matter, just the amount of it you do. Give it a try if you don't already have some sort of routine.
@“connrrr”#p106499 You ever play a real hard action game and start breathing tons of air like you're running? Like if you get to the last stage of a 30 minute bullet hell? Beating Vergil on the higher difficulty in dmc3 or dmc5, that sort of thing? I tell you its the chefs kiss of nootropics. Eat some ginseng pills, drink some reishii tea, chug a 20 cal energy drink and game the fuck on dude. Its better than cocaine.
God i love erythritol and stevia dudes. Give me 68k of vitamin b12 bro set my heart on fire and jack me the hell up.
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@“connrrr”#p106499 PTSD leaves you with a shrivelled hippocampus.
Always worth beating the drum on how mental health is physical health. If PTSD can be thought of as, shall we say, the maladaptive overemphasis on the recall of certain memories or states of consciousness, and we also of course know the brain's functions are actualized through biomechanical processes, it follows that the overemphasis on the recall of those memories and states of consciousness must also have a physical component as well. I do believe that more recent research has been observing and trying to understand this connection, but, I won't pretend to understand any of that well enough to say whether there is definitive evidence on that.
It's a cruel, cruel condition, in the sense that a wound on your consciousness and a scarring or maladapting of the actual brain tissue that is what your consciousness physically is, isn't like a broken ankle that you can rest and prevent strain on by sitting or laying down or using mobility aids. You can't go to a Registered Brain Massage Therapist who will use Deep Brain Massage techniques to soothe pain and promote growth and repair. Your consciousness and the physical functions of your brain don't, _can't_ stop. Shit, even your heart can slow down and take breaks... and what regulates that? Your brain! And don't even get me started on psychosomatic feedback loops that are probably what make up a huge amount of anxiety disorders, too. And, for the record, psychosomatic does _not_ mean that things are just "in your head," I mean, as I was just saying, your brain is still a physical organ that doesn't adapt its form based on what is best for your health, it adapts to more readily perform the functions that it does most often, whether that's contentment or the feedback loop of an external stressor causing the sensation of a lump in your throat (called globus by the way) which causes a psychological state of fear which causes fight or flight responses which causes elevated heart rate which causes hyperventilation (a natural process by which your brain is trying to change the chemical balances in your blood) which causes elevated states of stress and fear which cau-you get the picture, but that's another really vivid example of how mental health and physical health are so much less separate than fuckin Bell Media wants you to think, corporations only give a shit about mental health and only really want it to be talked about and especially talked about as some abstract independent part of individual existence so that you can take a pill that will cure your anxiety (as if anxiety is just, like, anti-depressant deficiency like scurvy is vitamin C deficiency) and get the fuck back to work. For another gesture towards posterity I have no qualms against psychoactive medication, I take one every day, it's just not a cure-all like your employers desperately want it to be.
Anyway. "Time heals all wounds" is a bit of oversimplified promise, because it isn't _just_ time that allows someone to heal from PTSD, but when we're talking about perhaps the most complex and intricate part of your body, spending enough time on the methods of healing that work for you is so important. I won't say anything further out of respect for people's privacy but I can provide at least say that I've been trusted with quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that even severe PTSD is something one can heal from with enough time and, not even effort, but a supportive environment.
I guess this is another reason why when I went to name this thread I said "holistic wellness." You can't really separate illness or injury or debility into these discrete categories and expect that interventions on each discrete category only need to focus on that singular aspect of health. It's Bell Media that wants to you take a chill pill and get the fuck back to work when really what people need is the chill pill AND more time to rest and enrich their lives away from work (and many other things but it's never just one thing (unless we're talking shit like pellagra cause then yeah the one thing you do need is some fuckin niacin)). Well, it's also because I'm Ojibwe and it's a convenient way to summarize our traditional perceptions of individual health, which always emphasize that wellness can be thought of in terms of the physical and mental wellbeing, but also the emotional and spiritual, and that all of them need to be balanced when promoting wellness.
I'll throw in another tidbit of traditional knowledge and share an anecdote that stuck with me and continues to stick with me that happened in a language class. We were wrapping up for the day and people were openly asking the teacher random questions. One person knew what the Anishinaabemowin word for medicine was (I would say mushkiki but I can't remember what word they provided then), but wanted to know if there was a term for "good medicine," or if the way they thought to translate it was correct. We have terms like mino bimaadiziwin, which roughly translates to the concept of a good way of living life or the good life, so I think they asked if the term was mino mushkiki, which seemed obvious. Somewhat unexpectedly though, this gave the language teacher pause, and after thinking for a few moments what they said was that such a term didn't exist. This was kind of surprising to everyone listening, but their explanation of a different kind of expression made it all make a lot of sense. What they explained is that the traditional view wouldn't project inherent value or ethics on to medicine, in of itself. Medicine has properties and effects that are known and put to a good use, but these effects aren't inherently good or bad. What's good is the good health that medicine can cause, the outcome from the use of that medicine is what is viewed as good or bad. This surely makes more sense in Anishinaabemowin because it's a heavily verb centric language, but the closest equivalent to "good medicine" they could think of in the language translated to a phrase that would mean "the medicine is working/helping." How I understood their explanation is that it wouldn't even necessarily be correct to say that medicine can be seen as good if it is very likely to help based on the understanding of the person's need and that the effects of the medicine can address that need--it's only "good" in that sense if it _does or did_ help as intended. A medicine in of itself can't be "good" because there is no way to be 100% certain that it will help in the way that is needed, it's only the action of a positive result that makes it something you can speak about positively.
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@“Gaagaagiins”#p106591 You can’t go to a Registered Brain Massage Therapist who will use Deep Brain Massage techniques to soothe pain and promote growth and repair.
You can for a limited amount of time go to south america and take a specific formulation of ayahuasca that will repair the mechanisms of addiction and memory in your brain in a sway specifically tailored to your issues, until the rainforest gets developed to the point of this opportunity being lost forever to all but the most well connected spiritual preservationists.
After that's gone you'll have to rely on probably Chinese or Indian ancient herbal medicine possibly supplementing with rituals from across the world like the astonishingly potent Yartsa Gunbu.
If I were a billionaire I'd probably go and cultivate all this stuff and hire a bunch of sufis and yogis and shamans and alchemists to run a medicine greenhouse and sustain this sort of medical technology but what are the chances of that happening any time soon amirite
>!Edit: You could also just cultivate mentality to the point of transcending physicality. Or at least, I can. Shoot me in the hecking brain, bro, I ain't gonna die. Conversely, I will get crippling physical pain from psychic problems that exceeds any physical suffering. A 9.7 on the pain scale?! I can't imagine what a 10 must be like if cluster headaches are a 9.7.!<
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@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p106595 If I were a billionaire I’d probably go and cultivate all this stuff and hire a bunch of sufis and yogis and shamans and alchemists to run a medicine greenhouse and sustain this sort of medical technology but what are the chances of that happening any time soon amirite
Well, you know, the hope is always that we can find more sustainable alternatives, and leave the stuff that can only be cultivated in fragile ecosystems in low volumes to be protected by those it is most culturally important to, and shared with others as they see fit.
I mean, I won't pretend to be an expert on this kind of obscure and deeply powerful natural medicine, but isn't peyote also used in a similar way? I mean, peyote is also subject to ecological conditions that are fragile and under threat as well so that doesn't meet the condition of being more sustainable to produce at a scale needed for how fucked up so many people are. However I've also heard at least vaguely similar things from consuming psilocybin, at least doing so combined with the right environments/state of mind/supports/ceremonies/etc. And I assume that even if I wanted to I would never do so without the direction of a ceremonial guide, if I can order psilocybin online from some weirdos in B.C. and have it sent through the freaking regular ass mail directly to my home, it must be relatively easier to cultivate in, not an industrial scale, but using more controlled processes.
It's really not my purview or even in my interest, but, yeah, it seems that many peoples all over the world cultivated powerful medicines with at least vaguely related purposes, and I'm surely the last person around who is going to dismiss traditional practices.
@“Gaagaagiins”#p106600 yeah dude peyote is definitely one of the plants that are used
I remember my father suggesting he drive me to Toronto and I (or we? ugh) take ayahuasca for my depression in like 2010. I‘d never been so angry at him, and not because I’m anti-drug or whatever. People reach for substances as a first line of treatment an awful lot, without ever trying anything else. I remember posting about my caffeine withdrawal on reddit years ago now and all around me were threads asking like “what nootropic should I replace caffeine with?” Really? Just substitute one dependence with another?
In this case though, It was my third year away from home and I was getting more and more frustrated by the clash in culture between Montreal and my family, to the point I was starting to see my father as the enemy haha. Hearing this complete doofus, with zero self-awareness—after years of screaming beet red in the face and swatting and grabbing and throwing etc. me around the house, not to mention the gaslighting and putdowns and other controlling behaviour—suggest that I just drink a really specialized concoction of psychoactive drugs to feel better, made me so mad. I just don't believe in having to go to such lengths, and can't believe he would just to dodge owning up to a mess he created. He gave me this DVD on depression too, and it was full of the same junk nonsense about chemical imbalances people still hold onto that aren't useful to anyone but pharmaceutical companies looking to justify their products.
Before that: I'd seen the school shrink in 2009-ish and without looking up to meet me in the eyes even once, after I was done the elevator pitch for my then-current problems, she immediately started rhapsodizing about the wonders of whatever drug she was about to prescribe me. I fucking hate shrinks lol replace them all with talk therapists. But then when I left without pills and tried talking to one of the counsellors on campus, the woman I saw (let's call her Noreen, because that was her name (***[color=red]Fu[/color][color=orange]ck[/color] [color=yellow]yo[/color][color=green]u, N[/color][color=blue]or[/color][color=indigo]ee[/color][color=violet]n!![/color]***)) just insisted I was a pervert—this was a year or so before I came out and needed someone to talk to about the feelings I couldn't suppress anymore. Boy did I have bad luck. I had enough of her eventually and gave Celexa a shot. It sucked! Yeah it obliterated my fear, but it also made me so apathetic I didn't feel like doing any of my homework anymore, and I finished my last year with zero credits. And everything else fell apart too, and after throwing out my last two pills it was months before I could cry again.
I hope my train of thought here is coherent. From my perspective people take a real cavalier attitude toward drug and general substance use and I think it can be a real distraction from healing.
@“connrrr”#p106616 Uh ok but ayahuasca frauding by con artists is kind of a thing and you cannot actually do it without going to south america and seeing a real shaman for an actual ceremony where it has to be made on the spot. You also probably can‘t do it with a toxic relative sitting beside you as if your relationship is the thing that’s supposed to get repaired, if anything, cutting emotional ties to that person is the intended effect.
Substance usage and physical treatment is not something you should expect to "cure" any kind of mental disorder, but the act of committing to it and undertaking a ceremony that you've researched and invested in has a real possibility of junctioning an actual change in your psychology. For better or worse medicine, illness, and recovery can change the way we feel and sometimes it's permanent.
@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p106628 but in every anecdote, whatever the medicine, it was propped up that way. It‘s always a quick fix, not a tool to enable some second step. The shrink I mentioned talked big about lifting people out of depression with her brain candy, but come on—before even suggesting anything else?? That’s extraordinary emotional laziness.
And the thing about ayahuasca, and I'm not going to look it up because I'm not that interested: this is meant to be taken as part of a ritual with a social element, right? What can an outsider to the culture hope to get out of that? It really would feel like an extreme measure, being where I am from.
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@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p106628 and sometimes it’s permanent.
lol everything that happens to you leaves a mark. You're always changing. That's like pressing your finger into a perfect sphere of clay and calling it permanent. Is the mark still there if you roll the clay back into a ball? Did you undo the change just because it looks at first glance like the same sphere?
@“connrrr”#p106616 god I hate that shit “chemical imbalance” nonsense. People just looking around at our insane fucked up country and lifestyles and being like “curious… looks like 100 million people have a chemical imbalance for some reason!”
My reasons for talking to the doc are more closely related to ADHD and fuck those SSRIs!!!!!! (for me personally, its cool if they work for you!) It's like the ultimate band aid shit, oh you're depressed because something is wrong. Well this will just zap the depression from your brain without fixing anything else. I had one doc who had given me a couple that I rejected and then he did something very smart. He asked me a series of questions about my life. After learning I was super broke, had a bad job, had no partner at the time, no activities going on, no opportunities he was like ah.. I see why you're depressed.
Also ayahuasca might be really cool, I dunno. But I definitely hate all those rich fuckers who fly their ass out to patch their busted evil brains back together so they can get right back to being pieces of shit full time for a few more years before they rinse and repeat. sigh.
TW: SA, Suicide
@“connrrr”#p106632 p much how i feel about being molested
Edit: woke up thinking suicidal again.
My entire life has been _ruined_ so many times I actually can't remember them all. I am thinking right now maybe I gotta go bleed in public for some _answers_ because without a reason to panic no one has the courage to just talk to me.
About once or twice every year some person who is unbearably important to me will show up completely without warning or me expecting them to be there. They basically shoot their shot without really giving me any introduction or explanation at all and never have any segment of a total conversation with me. They stand there and I walk away from them without recognizing them until I think about it for several hours. They never chase me. They never reach out to touch me. Nobody ever explains to me what is happening or how they got there or where they came from. In some ways they treat me like I should just already know and control everything.
I have a brain condition that causes things to fall through it like a sieve. The way they are treating me is extremely upsetting to me.
@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p106640 I‘d like to reply to this more meaningfully but I can’t right now.
without a reason to panic no one has the courage to just talk to me.
That's kind of how our healthcare system treats mental health too: unless you're in imminent crisis you can't expect any help.
I just wanted to add to the above discussion to say, medications can help. It just shouldn‘t be a one-size-fits-all solution the way our medical system treats it. I was misprescribed an SSRI by an unscrupulous psychiatrist who wouldn’t even give me 5 minutes to talk about my symptoms and it sucked. But I did find an NDRI for anxiety which has helped my ‘irrational’ physical anxiety symptoms a lot. I would have panic attacks at times when I was happy and totally chilled out or have fight or flight during mildly stressful situations, and I think medication has lessened that. Ideally we would live in a world where the complex root causes of our issues could be addressed immediately, but it doesn't really help you in the moment as much as a band aid solution.
I think if you're going to be on meds, you need to also do some talk therapy. Talk therapy is great because it helps you work through some of those root causes and the more 'rational' anxieties. It has definitely helped me get past some repetitive thought patterns and let me work through feelings. But, it can take months or years or longer to have a breakthrough. Sometimes you also get a therapist who doesn't ask the right questions or kind of waste your time. It's just so important to look out for yourself and make sure you're in charge of getting what you need.
@“Tradegood”#p107015
TW: Body Positivity/Negativity
TW: Body positivity and Body negativity =???
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Body positivity is entirely internal with the exception of stressors, and for most people that‘s basically any reference to their body or habits or performance at all because everyone wants to be loved for who they are not what they do. (Most people try to gain love through action rather than expression, but uh, don’t do that. Do it for someone who already loves you when you already know what they like please.)
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Scientists and doctors know that sugar is more addictive and a greater health risk than cocaine, it is basically a drug more prevalent than alcohol that everyone self medicates with. When you eat sugar you are making either a conscious or subconscious decision to make yourself be happy and stop being in pain. Eating healthy and cutting calories then is a conscious decision to be in pain and do something that is guaranteed to make you feel like shit. Then your mom will still call you fat even though she's the one who raised you on sugar and you will, out of sufficient spite, knowingly hurt yourself to rebel against her, and feel good while doing it, even though this was probably her plan from the beginning.
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I‘m not sure what the solution is for other people but my pattern now is to feel like shit no matter what happens anyway. There is no physical power that either sugar or cocaine has to break the circle of self abuse that continues inside my mind at all times, so I simply embrace the pain of living. Each day I get about 2 hours of light exercise walking or 1 hour of intense exercise weightlifting, and I don’t eat anything that makes me happy, because nothing does make me happy. Over time I‘ve come to understand that I'm not supposed to be happy all the time and that avoiding pain is wrong. My life isn’t about feeling good or being happy its about doing the right thing at all times, even if it hurts me, and especially if it can hurt other people as much as me
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At least I'm aware of it now!
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but anyway I quite like fasting and destroying my mood and then allowing it to recover for about one day a week because it at least affords me the opportunity to feel better sometimes even if it doesn't ever feel good
@“IncompatibleKaiser”#p106595
After that’s gone you’ll have to rely on probably Chinese or Indian ancient herbal medicine
One time I got high off of eating a large amount of freshly grated nutmeg.