Temperance

[nyuanshin]

"You know how I tend to go around giving the impression of being pretty much okay most of the time?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, most of the time I'm actually really really okay or really really not."

"Are you not okay now?"

"[shrug] Just found it odd that I've built a persona around equilibrating."

* * * * *

The shrug was genuine: when you combine

Comments

[selfishgene]

I think everyone is continually riding herd on their inner primate. Some people probably have to work harder at it than others. You may be an outlier on the curve. As long as nobody really notices, you are doing well. Evolution doesn't produce perfect animals - just animals good enough to survive.
The reading thing is probably no big deal (not that I'm a psychologist). Everyone learns via ad-hoc heuristics which slowly get refined into a solid understanding of the subject matter.
I worry that I am being too dismissive of your concerns. 'Suck it up' is usually a good answer but not always. Only you can judge if you need help.

[e4q]

did you pick up a copy of the kindly awareness meditation i posted earlier in the week? i think you would find it helpful. i do.

i already knew we had some overlap, but reading this is uncanny for me. i am still processing the stuff about reading. i could already read before i went to school, but i had a terrible time at school and spent a lot of time staring out the window.

do you know about scotopic sensitivity/irlen syndrome? i have yet to look into it properly (that's a sort of pun...) but will be getting the test in the new year. apparently this 'sensory overload' syndrome can leave people with a wide range of behavioural symptoms as well as fatigue. it is particularly associated with reading issues, though it can be associated with autistic type behaviours, particlarly rage.

[nyuanshin]

I didn't, but I'm on a kick about the control of attention lately and open to suggestions.

I looked into Irlen once and found it sort of interesting but not compelling. Might be worth exploring again with fresh eyes though (har).

Neurologically, my half-baked idea for what might be going on here is that the weird way I learned to sort visual information led to some funny wiring in my inferior parietal lobe, which is a high-level associative hub for sensory processing across all the major modalities (visual, auditory, somatic). If we think of pain as the somatic version of noise, then chronic pain could be an outcome of the same kind of foreground/background segregation problems that make it hard for some people to focus on a conversation in a loud party or ignore irrelevant aspects of a cluttered scene. Proneness to anxiety/irritation might be the somatosensory version of what gets called ADD when it manifests in the other two major sensory modes.

[e4q]

interestingly, fibromyalgia, http://homepages.sover.net/~devstar/phsympt.htm which is my overarching diagnosis, has as part of it a 'misinterpretation' of sensation, light, and sound *as* pain, which, unsurprisingly, overlaps with the migraines i get anyway. naturally, the psychiatrists think it is psychosomatic, and the idea that i could simply decide not to have the pain by going to a few psychotherapy sessions strikes me as hilarious.

getting this dog has brought up a lot of anxiety for me, but if i keep her i already know that she is going to allow me to have less overload, since i will 'have' to get back to the dog.

[nyuanshin]

Man, what a crappy kind of synaesthesia to have. Thanks for the thought-spark, BTW.

In a sense the psychiatrists are right, but like most medical professionals they can't think integratively about it: trivially, any perceptual symptom (including pain) is "psychosomatic", but that doesn't say much about the process generating it, let alone how one might fix it. e.g. it could be "top-down" or it could be "bottom-up", but unless you take both possibilities seriously you can't diagnose or treat sanely.

Psychotherapy is another one of those things that falls under the heading of "good idea, too bad almost nobody gets it right". Don't get me started.

[csn]

panic into manic, panic into manic..I keep saying that over and over in my head and chuckling because it fits so perfectly. Ah. We have so much to teach each other, my friend!

A small point (but big!) that I have been attempting to grasp, but think I am far from being able to do consistently, has to do with the word, "respond," which is problematic. I think it's a matter of perpetually shifting and extending focus such that there is no need to respond/react. But perhaps the intermediate step is what you're talking about.

Here's my theme song for the week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZM6A6AgeTA

[nyuanshin]

William James' dictum about our universe being what we agree to attend to has been looping through my brain lately. So many things seem to come down to control of attention . . .

[csn]

What we agree to attend to..yeah, I like that. Relevant for me right now. On the cusp of major change.

[csn]

Also, I don't know why this didn't jump out at me the first time I read this, but that dialogue really resonates with me. A persona around equilibrating. Hm. Yeah. I think that's also true, that temperance is one outcome (of many others) of right focus. Thinking about how over-focusing on certain points usually causes problems (or has, throughout my entire life, actually). More of a diffuse, constant focus, rather than the sharp, angular, oscillatory kind (but damn if it isn't addictive and hard to break).

[nyuanshin]

Yeah. That conversation took place in a context where the oscillations were becoming unusually fast and dramatic. Attentional control suddenly became palpably *vital*.

It also became clear that my usual strategy of pingponging around based on instinctive response to environmental cues works well enough when I have external freedom to maneuver, but fails miserably when I'm "boxed in" to a closed system, physically, socially or cognitively. I'm very poorly practiced at the kind of directed mindfulness that one needs in such situations -- transforming internally when external circumstances constrain you. I think this is at the heart of my difficulty functioning under the kinds of constraints that institutions (and relationships . . .) impose.

Makes me think of Avatar (the cartoon, not the movie) as a metaphor -- I've got mad airbending skills, but my mastery of the other elements still leaves much to be desired. Getting better, but fitfully.

[nyuanshin]

Of course the first step is realizing that the external/internal distinction is a hallucination to begin with. Liberation is about remembering what reality is in the absence of the constraints you've chosen to impose on it (and then forgot that you did so), then using that expanded awareness to form a different experience. But this is like grokking the principle of relativity vs. using it to help you explore space. . .