ACE's STUDY: The Long Term Effects of Childhood Hell...

You are a product of your past ONLY if you fail to acknowledge the effects of the past and seek to discharge those effects through a process of recovery and healing. The ACE's study demonstrates that what is NOT acknowledged and dealt with will haunt you mentally, emotionally, spiritually and, more importantly, physically, for the entirety of your existence.

Your brain is a recording device that stores trauma experiences in a subconscious archive that may lie dormant for years until a triggering event or episode suddenly lays waste to the rest of your life. The idea that "if I don't think about it, it will go away" denies the impact of trauma upon brain circuits, because if you refuse to think about it, it will gradually and insidiously find a way to destroy all your dreams and reduce you to chemical/behavioral addictions and mental/emotional impaired symptomatic functioning.

HOW DO WE STOP CHILDHOOD ADVERSITY

FROM BECOMING A LIFE SENTENCE

The ACE Study is one of the largest scientific research studies of its kind [between 1995 & 1997], with over 17,000 mostly middle income Americans participating. The focus was to analyze the relationship between childhood trauma and the risk for physical and mental illness in adulthood. Over the course of a decade, the results demonstrated a strong, graded relationship between the level of traumatic stress in childhood and poor physical, mental and behavioral outcomes later in life.The ACE Study is an ongoing collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente. Co-principal Investigators Robert F. Anda, MD, MS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;Vincent J. Felitti, MD, Kaiser Permanente, San Diego. LINK

PERSONAL & PARENTAL REFLECTIONS

ON ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES

Prior to your 18th birthday:  

Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Push, grab, slap, or throw something at you? or Ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever… Touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? or Attempt or actually have oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Did you often or very often feel that … No one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? or Your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Did you often or very often feel that … You didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you? or Your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you or take you to the doctor if you needed it?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Were your parents ever separated or divorced?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Was your mother or stepmother:
Often or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her? or Sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard? or Ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or knife?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic, or who used street drugs?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Was a household member depressed or mentally ill, or did a household member attempt suicide? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
Did a household member go to prison?
No___If Yes, enter 1 __


Now add up your “Yes” answers: _ This is your ACE Score  LINK

WOUNDS THAT WON'T HEAL

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are common. ACE data from the BRFSS was similar to that of the original ACE Study. Regardless of the data source, almost two-thirds of surveyed adults report at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more ACEs.

The ACE score, a total sum of the different categories of ACEs reported by participants, is used to assess cumulative childhood stress. Regardless of the data source, study findings repeatedly reveal a graded dose-response relationship between ACEs and negative health and well-being outcomes across the life course. As the number of ACEs increases so does the risk for the following:

Myocardial infarction

Asthma
Mental distress
Depression
Smoking
Disability
Reported income
Unemployment
Lowered educational attainment
Coronary heart disease
Stroke
Diabetes

Centers for Disease Control & Prevention

ACE'S, MENTAL HEALTH AND 

SUBSTANCE ABUSE

"A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that children who experience six or more traumatic events in their childhood -- events that can include emotional, physical or sexual abuse or household dysfunction -- have an average lifespan 19 years shorter than those of their counterparts who do not suffer that degree of childhood trauma." CDC

RATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: "I love him, but I'm not in love with him..."

I've heard the refrain countless times. The emotional emancipation proclamation that claims...

..."I love him, but I'm just not in love with him."

Often the attachment has been eroding for years, with building frustration and mounting resentments on both parties. She informs me that, "he caters to my every need, sends me romantic texts everyday, makes me coffee every morning, last week he sent flowers to my job...

...but I don't want him to touch me and I feel bad because I don't know why."

He doesn't get it either, "I do everything for her, why won't she love me?" So he does more and the more he does results in more disdain, dissociation, detachment, estrangement and alienation. She's pulling away and in his desperation he accelerates the demise of the relationship by doing ever more to maintain it.

But she feels jipped. "He's not the man I fell in love with." "He changed after we got married." "I don't know who he is anymore."

I once had a man tell me that when he met his current wife, "I was raising my daughter as a single dad, working two jobs and attending school." I responded, "that's the strong, independent, resourceful man she picked, but who are you now?"

In the subconscious balance of the masculine/feminine (yin/yang), energy is precarious and fluctuates over time, because neither wishes to control or be controlled. Both masculine and feminine traits are within all individuals and manifest in different ways, times and circumstances.

With any intimate relationship the one who needs the other the most has the least control and power. This results in an imbalance to the dynamic in which the specific cause cannot be identified, but the imbalance is felt more deeply over time resulting in an alienated state.

Love grows within equality. Resentment festers under control. In a healthy relationship, neither party is in a state of need, because need denotes dependency, addiction, victimization and control. 

If the foundation of your love is need, you place a burden upon the other that will eventually evoke resistance and a natural pulling away to lighten the weight of that burden. Intimate relationships are a precarious balance between dependence and independence. Too much of either leads to unstable interactions and perpetual conflict. Interdependence, or the mutual dependence upon another that does not suffocate the other's independence, is often difficult to achieve if one partner has drained the other through prolonged dependency.

You say you adore her, but in your adoration have you impeded her ability to adore you? She doesn't want an adoration that negates YOU over her, because her commitment was to your strength joined with her own. 

Respect is the foundation of every relationship, but is particularly crucial within intimate pair bonds and becomes the chief measure of the status of your relationship. When there are NO boundaries to what you will tolerate, the other will naturally assume control, but will lose respect and evoke a sense of guilt for the boundary violations you fail to confront and coupled with that guilt will be resentment.

You cannot make her "happy," since happiness is an internal state under the direct control of the individual and not contingent on any external person or event, but directly related to the individual's conscious interpretation of that person or event.

Change over time is an aspect of the fluid personality and the neuroplasticity of the brain, but change solely to accommodate another's happiness, regardless of the consequence to your own state of mind, becomes a form of emotional bondage and it will materialize subconsciously, under the radar, until the day it cannot be denied (which may be too late).

Recall the man you were when she committed to you and ask yourself...

...who am I now?


RATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS THREAD

RATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: Shame Based Control...

Embedded within every relationship is an underlying, unconscious control drama and the more intimate the relationship the more that drama may become suffocating.

We are ego-centered beings constantly evaluating how much control we have over our personal world. We are hard-wired to immediately assess how much control we can and cannot assert in each and every experience we encounter and this subconscious evaluative tendency is a survival tactic going back thousands of years, when we existed in small tribes of hunter-gatherers.

However, the most extreme and often damaging effects of egocentric control is manifest in modern intimate relationships, in which partners, husbands/wives, parents/children, are constantly strategizing for control on a subconscious/unconscious level. Even young children, who have little power and control within the family system, quickly learn the emotional buttons that can rapidly change a parental "no" into a "yes."

Projecting guilt onto another, over time, will inevitably progress into shaming tactics, in which a poor decision becomes a reflection of the inherently defective nature of your very 'being.' It was not simply an error in judgment, that can be corrected in the future, you made an error in judgment because you are a bad person, implying that bad decisions are inherent to your nature and will inevitably be made consistently throughout your entire life. This is particularly pernicious when employed as a means to control children, since it can only lead to a maladaptive self image which will impede success in adulthood.

Guilt seeks to repair. Shame seeks to hide. Guilt seeks apology. Shame seeks escape. Guilt molds and shapes future behavior for improvement. Shame molds and shapes future behavior for defeat. Guilt makes relationships stronger through repair. Shame destroys relationships through denial. Guilt rates your actions. Shame rates YOU. 

Shaming tactics seek control by grinding away at the core of your being and are only effective if you're in an emotionally fragmented state that is not seeking to heal deep seated insecurities, and even denies the insecurities exist. Your deeper insecurities can only be identified by those closest to you and if they seek to exact control over you, shaming tactics will emphasize those insecurities (this is why we are often more deeply hurt by the ones we "love" because they know our depths).

The only way to insulate yourself from shaming tactics is to identify your insecurities and engage recovery. Simply being in the process of healing constructs an impenetrable shell around your psyche, insulating you from shaming tactics. By fully acknowledging and seeking to heal your insecurities, your self-confidence and self-worth grows and what was once seen as weakness becomes a sign of strength, making you virtually impervious to shame.



Fragmented Self

SUBCONSCIOUS SHADOWS: You can run, but you can't hide...

You've never been in the world, not even for a brief visit. You've only ever been inside the mental workings ("mind") of your brain and, in 'there,' your entire life has been condensed, literally compacted in your cranium and every experience that you have ever encountered is linking up with associated neural circuits (we are inextricably bound to neurally hardwired associations/habits/repetitions based on excitatory and inhibitory impulses) to insure you respond adequately in the future, because your brain is genetically programmed for the survival of the whole organism (the I-me-ego-self-body-mind) and is expert at identifying threats to the function of survival.

But some of what's in there is dark and can rise to the top when least expected, tailoring lifelong impulsive behaviors that elicit feelings of guilt and remorse which, ironically, emotionally certifies that same response for a repeat performance. Amongst 87 billion neurons, linked up over a trillion miles of neuro-circuitry, repetitive behavior (or subconsciously habituated responses) is afforded high precedence because it has allowed mankind to exist and predominate over 2.4 million years.

Most of "you" is a subconscious neural accumulation of good and bad, joy and trauma, war and peace. But, the subconscious (often referred to as the "unconscious") is not accessible to conscious thinking and exists in the periphery of deliberate attention. Yet, when specific external and internal variables are aligned (triggers), subconscious impulses and memories can rapidly rise to consciousness, resulting in all manner of mental and physical chaos in which you have no clear salient idea as to the cause of your feelings and behaviors and all of the attempts by your frontal lobe (adaptive, thinking cap) to attain stability become fruitless endeavors magnifying your helplessness.

"When the time comes to physically act on a decision, various unconscious processes deliver their opinions to a central “hub,” like voters congregating at town hall. The hub listens in on the conversation, but doesn’t participate; all it does is provide a venue for differing opinions to integrate and decide on a final outcome. Once the unconscious makes a final decision on how to physically act (or react), the hub — consciousness — executes that work and then congratulates itself for figuring out a tough problem." LINK

The idea that you can literally "just ignore" past trauma (and everyone at some point has experienced trauma along a spectrum of light and dark based on inherent coping mechanisms) by simply refusing to "think" about it, can result in symptomatic behaviors that consciously seem to have no logical cause and effect catalyst or antecedent. Your confused and chaotic behaviors have no rational (conscious frontal lobe) activating event to logically identify as cause, even after years of attempts at trying to understand why you do what you do in specific situations.

A subconscious process may be provisionally defined as one of which the personality is unaware, which, therefore, is outside the personal consciousness, and which is a factor in the determination of conscious and bodily phenomena, or produces effects analogous to those which might be directly or indirectly induced by consciousness. LINK

Subconscious shadows can literally reinforce repeat performances due to scripted responses hardwired from chronic stress occurring at some point in your past. This hardwiring is not only a product of childhood stress, but also any long-term period of helplessness or hopelessness experienced at any time in your life. Consciously unidentified subconscious shadows can sabotage not just portions of your life, but the entirety of your existence by introducing chemical and behavioral addictions and dependencies as a means of self medicating psycho-emotional pain hardwired in your cortical and subcortical neuro-circuits.

Yet, there are ways of overriding the subconscious directives that impair mood and functioning, but they require time and persistence that not many in our quick-fix, take-a-pill culture are willing to consider.

The idea that the brain is plastic in the sense of changeable, adaptable and malleable is the single most important change in our understanding of the human brain in four hundred years. Neuroplasticity is that property of the brain that allows it to change its structure and its function, it’s a response to sensing and perceiving the world, even to thinking and imagining. Human thoughts and learning actually turn on certain genes in our nerve cells which allow those cells to make new connections between them. LINK

IDENTIFY and REPLACE: The chief function of recovery is to identify wounds and the second is to develop a recovery plan to heal the wounds. The idea that simply 'not thinking' about past trauma or emotionally intensive episodes is the primary means of relief can only result in a lifetime of suffering because the subconscious realm of mind pays no heed to you conscious directives.

Your entire life is stored within 100 billion neurons connected through 100 trillion miles of neural pathways and from this menagerie, you respond to your world and with each repetitive response, the pathway that controls that response is reinforced and eventually hardwired into the system. Yet, hardwiring can be redirected, pruned, diluted and basically shut down.

THE GOOD AND BAD CHILDHOOD

The Subconscious Life is not Worth Living

ACCEPT YOUR WOUNDS: Neurons that Fire Together, Wire Together

Confronting the Demon of Doom

COMPLEX PTSD: When Your Only Job was to Trust Them...

Your only job was to trust them. You had no choice. Their job was to feed you, clothe you, keep you safe and teach you how to live. All the core values that shape your 'self,' were neurally sculpted in your grey matter in the formative years of your childhood, based on genetic predisposition and external experience (nature/nurture). 

But if your primary providers did not have the skills to adequately impart those core values, due to untreated mental illness, behavioral and chemical addictions and/or their own acknowledged and untreated past trauma, your brain may have become neurally hard-wired to subconsciously rely on beliefs, thoughts, emotions and behaviors that severely impaired childhood mood and functioning, resulting in maladaptive and severely self-sabotaging behaviors in adulthood.

Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) is a condition that results from chronic or long-term exposure to emotional trauma over which a victim has little or no control and from which there is little or no hope of escape, such as in cases of: 

* domestic emotional, physical or sexual abuse
* childhood emotional, physical or sexual abuse, entrapment or kidnapping.
* slavery or enforced labor.
* long term imprisonment and torture
* repeated violations of personal boundaries.
* long-term objectification.
* exposure to gaslighting and false accusations
* long-term exposure to inconsistent, push-pull, splitting or alternating raging and
   and hoovering behaviors.
* long-term taking care of mentally ill or chronically sick family members.
* long term exposure to crisis conditions. LINK: OUT of the FOG

Complex PTSD differs from many forms of PTSD because it is not necessarily based on one specific episode of trauma (car accident, rape/assault, combat experience, etc) but on a cluster of traumatic events over a "long-term" period of time and any events repeatedly experienced over time can become subconsciously hard-wired (like driving a car, which requires little, if any, conscious thought) often resulting in impulsive reactive behaviors in which you cannot identify why you behaved as you did, but how you behaved causes chronic guilt, regret and remorse.

COMPLEX PTSD DEFINED

The violent communication you experienced in childhood, day after day, month after month, year after year (often coupled with other forms of neglect and abuse) has hard-wired specific neuro-circuits in your brain to direct current behavior in ways that can promote a living hell and when your brain functioning evokes psycho-emotional chaos, adult attachments become insecure, disorganized and wildly unstable, subsequently, promoting a negative, self replicating feedback loop of erratic thought-emotion-behavior reinforced by chronic habituation.

Psycho-Emotive Fragmentation eludes correction and healing because deep seated insecurities remain unacknowledged or denied. One who is psycho-emotionally fragmented denies that his/her inner world is in pieces and, hence, engages the external world from inner wounds which filters sensory perception based on maladaptive neural pathways. This orientation to reality places the burden of happiness on others, resulting in a string of failed relationships, because there is no other person in the entire world who is, or could ever be, responsible for your inner feelings and, hence, your happiness. Fragmented states that deny personal insecurities from childhood, filter out truth by relying on the false belief that inner states are dependent on other people, which defies the laws of physics.

Psycho-Emotive Wholeness fully acknowledges insecurities, based on childhood wounds, and actively engages the process of recovery which, subsequently, enlists brain changes through neuroplasticity (neuroplasticity: the way out of hell). This path places the burden of seeking happiness upon oneself in the ultimate realization that no other person is, or ever could be, responsible for your happiness. Such recognition results in neuroplastic brain changes over time that allows for a sense of personal freedom through personal responsibility and ultimately engages stable, loving relationships based on trust and security.

OVERCOMING CHILDHOOD

RATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: Subconscious Hell vs. Conscious Awakening

You drive to work with no conscious thought of driving whatsoever, since the neural-circuits that direct that action have dropped into a "subconscious" area of your brain, allowing you to employ your conscious mind in a million other forms of thought processing, while driving naturally occurs.

Much of your life is a daily sequence of repetitive habitualized behaviors that require little to any conscious thought and many psychologists claim that 90% of your entire life unfolds from subconscious habituated behaviors that require little, if any, conscious intention or deliberation.

Many subconsciously directed behaviors are healthy, tying your shoes, using a fork and knife, brushing your teeth (try brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand and become acquainted with the power of subconscious neuro-circuitry). However, other subconscious behaviors can be maladaptive and even destructive, like various behavioral and chemical addictions, anger/rage, poor eating patterns, etc.

Interactions with your spouse/partner can become subconsciously habituated over time, in which you literally become addicted to neurally hard-wired responses that continually result in chronic conflict and, like any addictive behavior, the drive to maintain the habituated response is often overwhelming (with urges and cravings), because it is continually justified by the addictive actions of the other (who is also responding from subconscious hard-wiring), which rigidly reinforces addictive interactions that are clearly eroding the quality of the relationship.

In relationships, any behavior/interaction repeated over time, no matter how delusional and destructive, drops down into the subconscious and becomes the expected reality requiring no conscious thought to become manifest behaviorally and, even though you know what will happen every time, you have relinquished responsibility to alter the outcome based on a similar relinquishment by the other. In response to the subconscious reacting of the other, you've surrendered to the addictive behavior/interaction and it becomes your mutual reality.

Hence, you have become literally addicted to the scripted dance of defiance, justifying your steps by the steps of the other and neither of you can break free of that dance because you see only the steps of the other.

Individual brains become "imprinted' by the behaviors/actions of others which subconsciously sculpts and molds their own behaviors ("mirror neurons" YouTube). Yet, neither seeks to identify and alter their own reactive responses since the justification of their reaction is projected upon the other with, "if he/she did not do that, I wouldn't have to do this..."

UNCONSCIOUS DECISION MAKING

The reason that you fail to take responsibility for your thoughts and behaviors, in moments of high-stress conflict, is that you have surrendered to automatic brain functioning, which negates the rational decision-making of the adaptive frontal lobe (just behind your forehead), resulting in impulsive scripted reactions that only make matters worse.

Afterwards, you experience a degree of guilt/remorse associated with your impulsive reactions but, because guilt is uncomfortable (it places you at fault, resulting in cognitive dissonance), you will then seek to alleviate your guilt by justifying your reactions as caused by the other, thereby, insuring that the impulsive reactions will be replayed repeatedly.

There is only one way to escape the subconscious hell of your relationship and that is by seeking a conscious awakening that overrides your subconscious hardwiring. Yet, this path cannot be mutually pursued together because the interdependent health of a union of two requires each individual accept responsibility for their own part, regardless of any acceptance by the other.

Like any addiction, the urges and cravings to return to the interactional behavior will seem overwhelming (dependent on how long the behaviors have been occurring) and relapses will be likely, but with conscious attention to YOUR behaviors only, abstinence becomes easier over time and you become habituated to more healthy adaptive responses.

Make no mistake, what you do not identify and accept responsibility for in your current relationship, that results in the destruction of that relationship, will become a factor in all future relationships.

CLASSIC: Healing The Shame That Binds You

"When you're shame-based you feel like your flawed and defective as a human being and so you have to develop mood alteration, because to be inside of me is just too painful, so I've got to alter my mood, and that's where you understand 'shame' as the basis of all addictions."

Guilt is about 'doing, shame is about 'being.'

Guilt corrects future behavior. Shame insures future mistakes. Guilt states "what I did was bad." Shame states "I am bad."

Guilt is solution-focused and problem-specific. Shame is nothing more than globally evaluating yourself as deficient, defective and dysfunctional and there is no solution to that problem.

Depressive Rumination: I See the Bad Moon Rising

Moods are fluidly nebulous states of being. You're never just being "you," but you are always being "you" in some mood of variable form and intensity that can change, often rapidly, based on changing internal and external influences.

Moods are affected by numerous factors and many are simply outside your control, because they influence subconscious neural pathways undetectable by conscious intent or even identified by conscious awareness, i.e., seasonal changes (winter!), weather, time of day, blood sugar levels, lack of sleep, bacteria and viruses, chemical and behavioral addictions, settings and events, bodily states, subconscious memory circuits, past trauma, etc, etc (which often brings up the question of how much free-will we actually have in determining our life's direction, when many of our decisions are born from subconscious circuits. But, save that for another post).

However, the one variable you can control is to avoid the capacity of your conscious mind to be dragged down into the subconscious cesspool that may be influencing the direction of your mood, resulting in symptoms of depression, anxiety and fear.

"In addition, a community survey Nolen-Hoeksema conducted on 1,300 adults, ages 25 to 75, backed those results. It found that ruminators develop major depression four times as often as nonruminators: 20 percent versus 5 percent. (The results were significant even for ruminators who weren't depressed at baseline). Many ruminators stay in their depressive rut because their negative outlook hurts their problem-solving ability, said Nolen-Hoeksema. According to her research, they often struggle to find good solutions to hypothetical problems. For example, if a friend is avoiding them, they might say, "Well, I guess I'll just avoid them too."  LINK

This means seeking diligently to avoid the depressive rumination that negative mood states can provoke and that, subsequently, intensifies the negative mood state by fueling it with negative emotion which intensifies the negative thought processes, further magnifying emotional responses, round and round, on and on, in a closed negative feedback loop that if allowed to progress for too long a period can result in chronically depressed mood leading to suicidal ideation.

The more that an individual’s thought patterns trend negative and slip into rumination—continually turning over a situation in one’s mind and focusing on its negative aspects—the easier it becomes to return automatically to these thought patterns. That’s not so great for our health. According to a blog post on Psychology Today, ruminating can damage the neural structures that regulate emotions, memory, and feelings. Even when our stress and worry is completely hypothetical and not based on any real or current situation, the amygdala and the thalamus (which helps communicate sensory and motor signals) aren’t able to differentiate this hypothetical stress from the kind that actually needs to be listened to. LINK

As a long-term sufferer of protracted Lyme Disease, I have the propensity to fall into the black hole of rumination due to the numerous physiological symptoms the disease provokes (in addition, to my natural tendency to over-think problems, ad infinitum). Yet, when I experience that bad moon rising, I vigilantly avoid falling into the depressive rumination that my current mood seems to demand, in the knowledge that what rises must eventually fall and such is the fluctuating rise and fall of mood states.

The human brain is genetically hard-wired to perceive threats more than it's wired to recognize rewards. This means that it is easier to become victim to a negative mood state than a positive one, demanding extra vigilance in thwarting or obstructing your genetic tendency to easily fall into a black mood whenever the bad moon rises.

According to Rick Hanson, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist, founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, and New York Times best-selling author, humans are evolutionarily wired with a negativity bias. Our minds naturally focus on the bad and discard the good. It was much more important for our ancestors to avoid threats than to collect rewards: An individual who successfully avoided a threat would wake up the next morning and have another opportunity to collect a reward, but an individual who didn’t avoid the threat would have no such opportunity. LINK

Chronic ruminators have become hard-wired to perceive and engage reality through a negative/pessimistic orientation. Hence, the work of neuroplastic pruning and rewiring requires vigilant effort, but can be successful. Just as a smoker can, through vigilant effort, shut down the electro-chemical current that demands the addictive act of smoking, so can the depressive ruminator shut-down the circuits that demand ruminating (every behavior has a circuit informing that behavior), simply by finding constructive ways to abstain from rumination.

                                          TED: Getting Stuck in the Negatives

You are genetically hard-wired to perceive threats in your environment. This hunter-gatherer instinct works overtime because now a whole spectrum of modern threats engage the mind and body as if they were life-threatening, resulting in a host of biopsychosocial related symptoms, disorders and illnesses.

Recognize that any bad moon rising is a product of your depressive rumination in which all your thinking can become overly fixated on catastrophic outcomes. Yet, this can be averted and redirected to a more balanced and realistic appraisal of events and situations by recognizing the internal cues and redirecting focus.

The more you fall victim to the bad moon rising, the more habituated you will become to the symptoms of that victimization and the less likely you will be to break free of your own self-constructed neural pathways, making everything in your world a product of catastrophe.

I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightnin'.
I see bad times today.

Don't go around tonight,
Well, it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad moon on the rise.

I hear hurricanes ablowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers over flowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

All right!

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we're in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.

- CCR

Escaping From the Mind...

The idea that one cannot love another until they love themselves is a good idea that seems to make sense. But what does that really mean on a practical level?

The relationship you have with your 'self' happens right up in the old noggin and nowhere else. What's going on in your head determines how you relate to everything outside your head. 

The thoughts in your brain are the cause of the emotions you experience and you cannot have an emotion without first having a thought that evokes that emotion (repetitive thinking results in repetitive emotions), other than neurochemical imbalances from a brain disorder. Yet, even neurochemical imbalances still allow for conscious deliberation of thought processes in the recognition that it is a brain disorder and not a conscious intention. Thoughts often arise with no conscious intent, but you are free to direct those thoughts down pathways of your choosing.

However, in the past 30 yrs I have met with numerous individuals who actually seek out every means possible to avoid the activity of their own mind and the thoughts that arise. They have abdicated choice through a belief that their mind is separate from their 'self' and outside the control of the 'self.'

Many will employ distractions at an addictive level, i.e., drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, food, TV, Netflix, music, exercise, shopping, food, etc, and even over-socializing as a means of becoming fixated on external actions to anesthetize the maladaptive firing of electro-chemical synapses (thought) that only results in negative mood states such as anxiety, depression, anger and guilt (The Big Four).

Mind runners tend to lack insight into the reasons they think and feel as they do and move through life on autopilot, reflexively reacting to external stimuli from emotional reasoning rather than rational deliberation requiring intentionally thought out responses. Hence, their lives tend to demonstrate a sense of spastic chaos, with relationships obviously spiraling out of control.

I have worked with individuals who maintain a constant state of external activity as a means of escaping the mind, only to be dropped to their knees in exhaustion, provoked by their own relentless effort at escaping their own mental schemas and narratives (internal dialogue). In the extreme, even the idea of sitting down to watch a movie results in a mild panic, because they eventually become enmeshed in spiraling thoughts of negativity making it impossible to focus and requiring they leave the couch and immediately engage in some activity that requires full focus and allows them to escape their own thought processes.

How can we expect to engage in healthy relationships when we fear the thought processes in our own head? If you cannot facilitate a positive relationship with your own brain, how in the hell can you develop a positive relationship with another brain (person)?

Thought processes emanate from beliefs and what you believe about yourself is exactly how you will think about your 'self" and it will be that 'self' that engages the world. If the beliefs are deeply dysfunctional and maladaptive, thinking will conform to those beliefs and direct your behaviors accordingly and you will project those thoughts onto other brains (people), with the understanding that if you think it true about your 'self,' others must as well and, hence, your interactions will suffer accordingly.

The point of therapy is to identify irrational, unrealistic beliefs about the self and replace with more realistic appraisals and perspectives as a means of improving your relationship with your 'self' and thereby, improving your relationships with others.

A Life Controlled by Subconscious Habituated Mental Scripts

I often meet with individuals who feel that their mind has a mind of it’s own and that they have no capacity to influence, redirect or change that mind.

They report, “my mind won’t stop,” or “my mind keeps thinking this...” as if their mind were a separate entity sitting next to them or floating somewhere outside their head, injecting jolts of negativity through the cranium, demanding that they engage only irrational and unrealistic thought processes.

You are your mind and your mind is you. You are, and have always been, in complete control. However, you can surrender that control to some separate entity you call "my mind," but that is a choice made totally by you.

You can differentiate between a mind and a body. If everyday you use your mind to negotiate your body through the world, how could you not be in control of all the thoughts in the mind? Or are you cherry-picking what thoughts you can control and what thoughts you have surrendered to some mysterious entity outside your control that you refer to as "my mind"?

The mind does not 'think' thoughts, you do.

However, over many years you have created mental scripts that seem so automatic as to be outside of all attempts to control. Years of anxiety producing thought/belief patterns, eventually exit consciousness and settle deep in the subconscious where they automatically arise without conscious intent. Like driving a car, there is little conscious thought involved, since the brain has habituated itself to the experience of driving. This type of automatic thinking is hard-wired into the brain and is referred to as "subconscious," primarily because it requires no conscious intention.

In the same way your brain has habituated itself to chronically repeat thought patterns that generate anxiety, depression, anger and guilt.

Neuroscience is showing us that experiences that impact us become wired into the neuro-circuitry of the brain and experiences that impact us daily become literally hard-wired into the brain, resulting in subconscious reactions and responses that require little conscious attention.

Habits are hard-wired, but the currents that keep them alive can be shut down. 

Because of the neuro-plasticity of brain circuits, we can alter the brain through habituating ourselves to new, more healthy, adaptive experiences. This means consciously redirecting our thoughts to engage more realistic interpretations of the self, others and the world and adjusting our behaviors to accommodate those thought processes.

A brain habituated to years of depression, anxiety and worry becomes prone to (literally hard-wired for) major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, intermittent explosive episodes, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc, etc.

You will often feel anxious or depressed and have no clear idea why, because nothing in your personal world has changed and no situation has occurred to which you could point to and proclaim as a cause of your bad mood.

The 'why' is subconsciously nestled in your neuro-circuits, unavailable for conscious evaluation, because for years the script describing 'why' was gradually etched deeply into the circuit board of the brain. You have essentially indoctrinated your 'self' to function through subconscious scripts that have little to no basis in reality, but that currently determine the desperation of your day to day moods.

All your internal criticisms, your thoughts of worthlessness, insignificance and failure, as opposed to scripts defining success, result in a subconscious default mode that afflicts you without your conscious intention.

Yet, due to the neuro-plasticity of the brain, through conscious intention you can gradually shut down electro-chemical current to emotionally contractive circuits and generate new circuits that promote more realistic assessments of yourself, your life, others and the world around you.

"There is nothing either good or bad. Thinking makes it so."
- Shakespeare

The Cognitive Hell of Cognitive Default...

It seems as though we may need to differentiate between pain and suffering. Of course, we often use the metaphor of "pain" to define suffering, however,  pain is immediate and non-volitional, whereas suffering has a degree of choice to it. This may be why we define emotional suffering as emotional 'pain,' because who would choose to suffer emotionally?

However, essentially, this is actually what we do.

If I stub my toe I will experience the immediacy of pain. If I choose prolonged complaining about the pain then I will 'suffer." In the experience of physical pain, I choose to reform the immediacy of the experience into suffering, by claiming to myself that "this should not have happened!" The time it takes is my choice and I can cognitively extinguish my suffering at any time.

Is a 'broken heart' pain or suffering? I may express it as emotional 'pain,' but inherent in the choice to love, is the choice to suffer. Pain is merely the metaphor for suffering and while I may refuse to express it as 'suffering,' deep down I realize I have chosen this experience and I can choose otherwise. If I stub my toe I cannot deny or negate my pain as it is unavoidable and in the moment. However, if you leave me for another, I can just as easily choose NOT to suffer, or even manage and modulate my suffering, therefore, proving that suffering is a volitional state of mind.

But in saying this, I do not denigrate or negate suffering, simply because to suffer for the right reason may be to reinforce growth. However, to suffer for the wrong reason is to repress growth.

COGNITIVE CHOICE

Of all the psychotherapies available (which have evolved from the psychological theories themselves), cognitive therapy has been proven the most effective, even rivaling psychotropic medications as far as longevity of effectiveness and limited risk of relapse or remission.

The theory of cognitive therapy is based on Shakespeare's famous maxim, "nothing is neither good nor bad; but thinking makes it so." The chief theoretical proposition is that "it is NOT reality that disturbs you (suffering), but your own unique interpretation of reality, that disturbs you." In other words, you disturb yourself, based on a unique interpretation you superimpose upon yourself, others and the world.

One can have a debilitating disease or even a terminal illness and still NOT suffer or suffer less than another with a less debilitating condition. The idea that there are certain situations or events that require suffering is just that, nothing but an idea that requires you choose to believe it. Yet, you could choose otherwise.

BUT IS SUFFERING RATIONAL AND SHOULD WE CONTROL EMOTIONS?

The studies have been replicated for the past 30 years and the results continue to demonstrate significant improvement through examining one's interior cognitive/thinking interpretations of life events, other people and most especially one's own self. I agree suffering may not be rational and is usually based on irrational interpretations, but either way it is a choice.

WE MAY HAVE MORE CONTROL OVER THE PAIN OF A STUBBED TOE THAN THE PAIN OF A BROKEN HEART

I agree it does seem to "feel" that way and society certainly tends to glorify suffering and sacrifice as the way to God. However, I tend to disagree and, in fact, hold the view that our conditioned need for suffering and sacrifice may impede spiritual correspondence.

POSITIVE THINKING IS A CRUEL IDEA TO LIVE UP TO WHEN ONE IS SUFFERING

I'm not sure what people mean by "positive thinking." Positive thinking has NOTHING to do with cognitive theory and this would be an oversimplification that minimizes from ignorance. (Seligman advocated a "positive psychology" several years ago but it is NOT based on cognitive sciences and has not made much ground since it is based on "happiness" )

Particularly in this society, we tend to experience our life based on our 'actions. We base our personal value on what we have done or have failed to do. We spend much less time examining our thought patterns, even though it is the thought processes and beliefs which define our world, other people and ourselves. Many live in "cognitive default" and fail to adequately assess the interpretations and meanings that they base their actions on (this is clearly evident just by watching the news). Stop living like other people and learn to live by your own creative interpretations, rather than the interpretations you are expected to experience.

People have a tendency to relate to others and the world from knee-jerk reactions based on unexamined assumptions/beliefs resulting in downright irrational and fraudulent interpretations.This I refer to as "cognitive hell" and you may know of many who live in such a state of being.

A cognitive therapist can aid you in identifying irrational beliefs that result in unrealistic interpretations of yourself, others and the world, causing unnecessary suffering, thereby, impeding the quality of your life and the quality of your relationships (which basically determines the quality of your life).

A Subconscious Life is NOT Worth Living

Thoughts generate emotions and emotion further fuels the thought patterns that caused them in the first place. With dysfunctional and unrealistic beliefs about your ‘self,’ this circulating vortex is often difficult to disengage, because we live through and for emotion and without emotion we would be nothing more than robotic automatons ruled exclusively by cognition (thought) alone. We wish to engage specific emotions, such as pleasure, love, satisfaction, contentment, etc. These are the emotions through which we measure happiness. 

Hence, we seek to avoid negative painful emotions as this is contrary to our goals of happiness or experiencing only pleasurable emotions. Such avoidance only reinforces the chronicity and reinforcement of painful emotions and your continually growing desire to avoid. This can become a circular hell.

All emotion is based in thought and thought is always a direct result of belief. Thought content which you do not believe, you do not think about except to consider as unbelievable or absurd. Belief directs your preferences and values because it is what you find important in life and worth having or achieving. It also filters your interpretations of the world, others and your ‘self.’

Yet, negative dysfunctional beliefs, pressed down into the subconscious, can obstruct from emotions of happiness. You were indoctrinated into many of these belief systems through childhood.

For instance, if you were taught by your father, whom you loved and respected, that all women were poor drivers, if not reinterpreted later this could influence your interaction with women. If you were to witness an auto accident involving both a man and woman driver, you might report to the police the woman was at fault. Even if this were not actually the case, your belief system would effectively filter our realistic actualities, which simply would not be processed by the mind. Beliefs influence thoughts and thoughts tailor our perceptions and interpretations of reality. In fact, our interpretations and perceptions ARE thoughts.

If you were taught in childhood that in many ways you simply were “not smart enough,” if not eventually seen as irrational and unrealistic, this evaluative belief about yourself might automatically tailor how you interact with others and the world. You might avoid those you evaluate as smart or you might avoid accepting jobs that required thinking abilities you considered beyond your childhood indoctrinated self-assessment. You might avoid reading books or engaging in any activities that involved more complicated thought processes, because you considered yourself "not smart enough." You might avoid seeking higher education or starting a business, because you believed you were "not smart enough." You might even find yourself resenting others from an interpretation that they are smarter than you and this could even result in outward conflict with others. You might find yourself always asserting that you are right as a means of compensating for your belief of “not being smart enough,” resulting in frequent unnecessary arguments and conflict with those you care for. You might find yourself avoiding mistakes at all costs, thereby, increasing psychological stress levels, in order that others not see that you’re “not smart enough” and every mistake made merely binds you further to your irrational belief about yourself.

From any one unrealistic self-evaluative belief numerous other beliefs and actions are hinged and originate. These kinds of core beliefs, which evolve over many years, no longer remain in consciousness, but quietly settle into the subconscious mind from where it wreaks havoc on conscious thought processes. You do not need to be conscious of a belief, such as “I am not smart enough” for it to impair your life seemingly from the sidelines. Yet, in order to change that belief it must be brought into consciousness and seen as irrational and maladaptive.

In this way our beliefs literally construct our world by filtering out data that would demonstrate the utter irrationality of many of our maladaptive behaviors which stem from dysfunctional thoughts based on unrealistic belief systems. Human egos are repetitive in functioning and repetition is always a product of core beliefs about your ‘self,’ others and the world.

Examine the patterns of your life for the subconscious material they represent. Recognize the dysfunctional nature of old worn out self-evaluations and replace with new more realistic beliefs. It will take time to replace dysfunctional core beliefs, but surprisingly less time than it took to construct them in the first place.