In the first part of this series, I raised the possibility of mindfulness helping with management of pain and sensory issues, focusing on Shinzen Young’s Break Through Pain. In the second part, I described how developing greater body awareness–and learning to be mindful of sensations before they get too overwhelming–is an important foundation.
One thing I forgot to mention explicitly in the last post was the way trying to ignore or block out pain and other bothersome sensations can backfire, and actually make the situation worse.
These sensations are kind of like little kids or animals: if they are trying to get your attention and you keep ignoring them, they will just keep trying harder!
Thinking of the potentially overwhelming sensations as little animals has helped me react less harshly to them! Try to cope with these sensations by ignoring them, and before you know it you may be in full meltdown or shutdown. In the case of physical pain, you may still mostly not register it as pain but find yourself suddenly throwing up, or the body part in question completely seizing up so that you can’t use it. (Yes, I had a problem with both for a while. In public, when I was really trying to clamp down on it to function.)
Even before I figured out that working on body awareness was necessary, I learned that just acknowledging the sensations helped a lot. “Hello, I know you’re there. Can’t do much for you until we get home, but I do hear you!” That can be enough to get the sensations to stop escalating to get your attention.
Moving on, in this post I would like to describe some ways of dealing with the sensations once you’ve developed enough body awareness to consistently recognize them for what they are.
The first thing I tried, since tight/spasming muscles were giving me fits, was just lying down and trying progressive relaxation. In my case, deliberately tightening them first was not a good idea at all, and I had already developed a decent sense for what they felt like when they were tight. Though I’ve been using it primarily for muscle tension itself, this technique does help with anxiety (along with a lot of headaches, etc.); the physical tension will only make you feel more anxious, and so on. After a while, I could relax muscles as far as they would relax that way, if I noticed they were tight while I was going about my business.
One crucial point: thinking in terms of forcing your muscles to relax does not work nearly as well as letting them know that they do not need to be tense. This may seem like a fine distinction, especially if you’ve gotten used to bulling through and trying to make your body do things it doesn’t want to, but it made a huge difference for me. Demand resistance probably plays in there, too. 
While that helped quite a bit, it did not completely do the job for me. Sometimes muscles are in such a state that they cannot relax, or they go into rebound spasm as soon as you start using them again. Sometimes you have types of pain which aren’t strongly mediated by muscle tension (though I have been surprised at how few I’ve run into, from an arthritic knee to migraines–more on the weird medical neglect of muscular causes of pain later!). Simple relaxation also does not directly address the way pain signals and other sensory signals will gang up and amplify any discomfort you’re experiencing.
When I was younger, I studied Buddhism pretty seriously for several years. (How I got away from that is a story of its own; in a way, it boils down to spending a number of years overwhelmed by dark night of the soul experiences.) I’m more than a little perplexed by the way I seemingly forgot that old Siddhartha’s teachings were all about suffering, and not having to suffer–more like, didn’t see them as relevant for a number of years there, being too caught up in suffering! A lot of other things have been built up around his teachings since then, but the very core is practical advice for dealing with suffering. At base, it’s more about pragmatism than religion as most people think of the term. Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs piqued my interest again (and helped work around the demand resistance!), though I can certainly see the point of some criticisms.
I got some obstacles out of the way, and–without calling it that–had been trying to apply mindfulness to my emotional states, which has helped me develop better emotional regulation and actually reversed some of the PTSD-related hyperarousal*. Becoming more mindful of your emotional reactions is another important prerequisite here. I had not been thinking of the body awareness thing explicitly in terms of mindfulness, either, though that was what I was doing. It finally occurred to me that explicit mindfulness might help with the physical pain I’d been unsuccessfully fighting; at least it couldn’t hurt!
With that in mind, I started doing more sitting/lying vipassana meditation, which has been helpful in multiple ways on its own. Once I felt secure in my ability to maintain concentration, I started focusing on the actual physical sensations, and the emotional reactions that wanted to go along with them. Just experiencing the sensations without overlaying all sorts of interpretations can make the pain and/or sensory weirdness easier to deal with.
Once you become aware that what you’ve been experiencing as pain and suffering is really made up of a lot of different sensations and reactions, it becomes harder for them all on to gang up you anymore. You can recognize when the fear, frustration, etc. kicks in, and see that it’s not an inherent part of the pain.
For more information on how this can work–and specific techniques–I would strongly recommend Shinzen Young’s Break Through Pain, which I mentioned and quoted from in the first post. C4Chaos also offers an excellent example in Open Practice: How Vipassana Meditation Relieves My Migraine Headaches.
As with the purposeful relaxation, it helped to stop and pay attention at first. If the sensations are overwhelming enough, or I’ve fallen back into trying to ignore them, sitting or lying down is still necessary. For dealing with a lot of pains and bits of sensory weirdness, though, after some practice I could deal with them better on the go. Just recognizing that your feelings of panic and frustration are reactions to these sensations–and can be separated–can help you get less overwhelmed.
Particularly where sensory issues or combinations of sensory issues and pain sensations are involved, this approach has worked a lot better for me than trying to stay semi-functional through taking a lot of Xanax or Klonopin, with very little understanding of what’s causing the problem! Or, as Bev points out in her recent Curing Autism post, the very common attempts at coping through alcohol or nonprescription drugs: “Sometimes the cure is worse than what one is seeking to alleviate.”
Learning to deal with these things better has meant that I don’t have to avoid as many stimuli, and it has also freed up more physical and emotional energy to do things. Recognizing the difference between sensory input and reactions to it–along with how the reactions can help further scramble sensory processing–I have been able to deal with more stimuli. Just gaining some awareness of how these things work together has made a big difference. If my back is acting up, I know that things are likely to get ugly if I also try to deal with noise and crowds; I am also better able to recognize when things are starting to get ugly before it turns into a full-out shutdown or meltdown. It’s been a relief, and it’s still early days.
Similarly, I have been able to cut back on pain medication after only a few months working with the pain this way, though it still comes in handy sometimes. Starting to figure out how to crack the pain amplification problem has helped a lot with this. There’s still a long way to go there, but again it’s a relief to know I’m not just interestingly “broken” in a way that I can’t do anything about.
Another point I didn’t address earlier: the “purification” aspect of Shinzen Young’s approach, which initially put me off reading the book! Even though he draws a fairly reasonable-sounding distinction between the potentially very harmful kind of asceticism and what he is suggesting, I am still very wary indeed. Especially if you’ve got a history of the harmful kind of ascetic behavior–which sure helped me get into such a painful state!–this may not be for you. Ignoring this aspect, which is not too intrusive anyway, it’s still a very useful book.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I was drawn to look into Taoist Water Method meditation, with its gentler Dissolving approach. (Thanks to Jane at Bipolar Recovery–which now seems to be protected–for mentioning this option!) This is an option for directly dealing with the connections between emotional and physical tension, and some of the patterns this can form after a while. The bit that seems perfect for me? Its emphasis on not forcing things. Given the habit energy I have behind forcing things–and the amount of damage I’ve done that way–it seems like a beneficial balancing approach.
I can’t think of much else to say on this subject right now, so I think this is the end of the post (and the series). I hope someone can get some good out of it.
_____________
* It’s easy to see the way physical/emotional factors are all tied together in hyperarousal! It can also cause pain amplification. One fairly good article on PTSD and Childhood Trauma describes part of this:
One last point to be born in mind in treating all victims of traumatic stress, whether the result is depression, anxiety attacks, or PTSD, is that the trauma is perpetuated in the body as well as in the brain. It is as if the body of the victim is perpetually on alert for the next blow, critical remark or sexual attack and is therefor held very rigidly. This is true even of depressed or anxious ballet dancers or athletes which Alicia and I have treated. These people are more prone to injury because of this ‘emotional holding pattern’ as I call it. They are also less likely to let go of the emotional impact of the trauma while this somatic pattern persists…
PTSD, like depression, can also be somatized. In an individual who was not allowed to express negative emotions as a child these emotions can be expressed as physical illness such as chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia
Hyperarousal is really hard on your body after a while, and the way it affects your nervous system can directly cause the fibromyalgia-type pain amplification. You can’t untangle one part of it without untangling the others. These are usually treated as unrelated problems in our society.
As the other article linked to earlier describes hyperarousal:
In the hyperarousal state there is a large increase of activity of the sympathetic nervous system resulting in increased blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, muscle tone, with a release of stored sugars, and a reduction of attention to non-critical information (Perry et al. 1995 ). This in turn triggers a release of adrenocorticotrophic hormones, cortisol and other stress-responses in the brain. The child may reactivate these responses according to Perry (1995) and his colleagues research, by simply thinking or dreaming about the trauma. Specific reminders (gunshots, loud noises or a stranger) may trigger the stress-response in the brain over and over again, even if the child is a distance from the original trauma. Over time the response, now may elicit an exaggerated response, causing a state of hyperarousal. Perry (1995) reports, in the long run these children learn a set of maladaptive emotional, behavioral and cognitive responses to perceived threats. Because physiological arousal becomes associated with traumatic memories in trauma survivors, any stimulus whether related to the trauma or not, can cause a flashback or reliving of the trauma. This can trigger an emotional overload, especially in adolescents with lower levels of serotonin or catecholamines, which interferes with a persons ability to regulate emotion, and can make a minor event into a major crisis to the individual (Wilson, 1986).
Something came up yesterday, and I thought I’d first throw in some clarification. It concerns demands.
What I wrote in the Psychiatry, freedom, and noninterference post applies across the board. The last thing I want to do is come across as telling other people what they should be doing; people in any kind of pain (physical, emotional, spiritual, or any combination) get enough of that already! Sometimes it seems that people come out of the woodwork just to tell us what we should be doing, while rarely offering any useful perspective–much less tools–to help us understand and cope with our suffering.
Meloukhia’s recent post on The ‘Sick Role’ and Perceptions of Disability helped me understand better what might be motivating a lot of people’s bossiness, not to mention their frustration at chronic conditions which they do not understand–and which do not magically go away. This approach pretty well precludes real empathy or compassion. It’s easy to see this play out in one piece a friend pointed me to yesterday. Again, knowing what’s going on can help us not let ourselves get sucked into the same mental patterns, and use them to further bludgeon ourselves.
On the other hand, after long enough experience seemingly trapped between “Just pull yourself together!” and “You’re broken, now do as I say and stop whining!” it can be very easy to develop demand sensitivity, along with its offspring, demand resistance. When the people around you come up with a lot of impossible and conflicting demands–particularly implied ones–looking hard for those demands is very understandable. I am trying to comb out a huge tangle of that one, myself, picked up while living in an emotionally abusive situation. While this is another type of suffering that mindfulness can help relieve, I really do not want to aggravate anyone else’s!
What I am hoping to do is, quite simply, share some coping techniques which have helped (not somehow magically cured) me. While a lot of people seem to be offering all demands and no practical tools, I’m trying to describe some of the tools I have found, for other people to do with as they will. I am specifically not trying to suggest that the exact same thing will help everyone, nor that they’re somehow Lazy or Not Trying Hard Enough if it just does not work–not to mention if they’re too overwhelmed to go rummaging for/machining more tools.
On to the intended post.
In the first part, I wrote about mindfulness and pain/sensory management in a more general sense. In this one, I want to move on to some specific practices which have helped me.
On the more clearly physical side of things, I recognized a need to work on body awareness. Mine was poor enough, from spending so much time and effort on blocking/ignoring body signals, that I could not even tell when my muscles were tight–much less what was contributing to making and keeping them that way. It led to further injury, so more blocking of sensations, and so on.
This is a fairly common problem, AFAICT. As Thich Nhat Hanh summed it up in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings:
The first establishment is “mindfulness of the body in the body“. Many people hate their bodies. They feel their body is an obstacle, and they want to mistreat it.
He also mentions the Kayagata-sati Sutta: Mindfulness Immersed in the Body, which might be helpful.
Ignoring and mistreating our bodies is encouraged a lot by our society. It’s way too easy to fall into treating your body like some sort of balky telepresence robot, for your mind to force into doing its bidding–sometimes to the breaking point. We are encouraged to ignore things like hunger signals, and push through injuries. Your body is not some kind of machine separate from the rest of you–and if you treat an actual piece of machinery like that, it will break down too!
This can be further complicated if you already have trouble sorting out and identifying the sensory signals, as addressed in Anne C.’s Feeling Hungry” (or not) – Body Awareness and Eating. It’s even more tempting to block off awareness of your body if you are already experiencing pain and other sensory issues.
The good thing here? You can learn better awareness, and teach yourself to pay attention to and interpret your body’s signals. Even after most of a lifetime spent trying to do the opposite.
I started out with trying to pay more attention to my posture and the way my body was moving: first becoming reacquainted with actually being mindful of body sensations, and then adjusting the way I held and moved my body accordingly. In the beginning, I could not even tell that I was going around with my shoulders slumped over most of the time, much less that it was leading to pain from abused muscles! I had also been ignoring huge muscle knots in my abdominal muscles, brought on by going around in public with my belly sucked in for so long that I didn’t even notice anymore. That was the situation all over when I started paying better attention, and progressively turning most things I did into moving meditation.
The same went for mindfulness of other body sensations, like hunger and the weird sensory stuff. After 25+ years of trying to shrink myself physically by purposely ignoring hunger sensations and my body’s indications of what kind of foods and how much of them it wants, that was a very important application of mindfulness. Despite some other assumptions which don’t work so well for me, I’d recommend Susie Orbach’s classic Fat is a Feminist Issue for more on how this dissociation can play out. Many of the same factors apply to mistreating yourself through compulsive exercise while ignoring your body’s signals.
Another recent post well worth mentioning in this context: Food isn’t poison: “When society has become so risk-averse that we can’t even enjoy food, you know something is terribly out of whack.” Also, as another thought-provoking post points out, “A society where women are applauded for their ability to become smaller, I have realised, is something that poses more danger than I would have imagined. It is thinness, not health, trimness, not intelligence, that is still portrayed as the true measure of success.” I was struck hard by similar realizations after losing an unhealthy amount of weight through illness, much like that author; however, I would stick to “smaller” rather than “thin” as the real goal there, since IME you can be visibly bony and still be too big for some people. It’s hard not to absorb some of these too-common attitudes, which encourage lack of body awareness around eating, all the way up to diabulimia and similar.
On the sensory sensitivity/disruption side, I started being mindful of what was going on before things reached the point of total overload. (And it became clearer how the pain sensations and other sensory stuff are interrelated.) Just learning that the sensory issues were real helped a lot, and allowed me to focus on what sensations I was actually experiencing rather than automatically try to cram them down, for more of the Tar Baby/thoughtlessly dammed river effect.
As I touched on before, after it got so that I could consistently pay better attention to what my body was trying to tell me–including what was causing/exascerbating a lot of pain and other sensory signals–then I could adjust what I was doing accordingly. I could pay attention to feedback telling me that I needed to avoid certain sensory stimuli and body postures. I was able to feel what body postures and movements were more mechanically sound, and less likely to abuse my muscles and joints. I became better able to say “Hey, standing up and washing all these dishes is not a good plan when my back is already tense, but not yet spasming.” (Yes, this step also applies to mental/emotional pain, in reaction to and exascerbating the physical sensations or not. It’s all related.)
In my experience, body mindfulness is very rightly described as the first establishment of Right Mindfulness. (It’s also the first thing to work on in Taoist Water Method meditation, which I am looking into now.) Only after working on mindfulness of body sensations, and generally treating my body better, could I pay proper attention to other things. Living in our minds all the time is just not tenable, nor is trying to maintain the false split between these parts of us. That’s dangerously unbalanced, with some very clear consequences at times.
At this point, you can pay attention to bodily sensations, and are probably starting to see how that affects your mental/emotional reactions to the sensations. Further exploring that interaction comes next. That’s what I want to write about in the next part.
This is another aside which has turned into a post.
Checking Twitter, I ran across a link to a great set of spotted hyena photos on the BBC site. (Another stunning one: Pieter Hugo’s series The Hyena & Other Men.)
What also caught my eye? The captions, based on research from Michigan State University. They cooperate, which is supposed to be astounding. But, they are not doing this because they care about their family members, don’t enjoy watching them getting beaten up by other hyenas, and life is much more pleasant that way; “They assist their kin in gaining a competitive advantage over other group members….Interestingly, hyenas co-operated to help both their maternal and paternal relatives during fights”. ‘[G]roups of hyenas that work together to overcome their enemies seem to have an “evolutionary advantage”‘.
Guess that’s all cleared up.
Interesting combination of sharply dividing other animals’ motives from those of humans (well, Real Humans), and projecting “barbaric” human motives onto other animals. Not that this is in any way unusual, unfortunately; this example was particularly eye-catching in contrast to what I was seeing in the photos. Sort of like the way Autism Speaks has presented photos and videos completely misreading/dismissing kids who were obviously trying to communicate nonverbally. This has been a long-running theme when I have been watching wildlife documentaries: preconceived notions getting in the way of even describing the behavior accurately.
I’m just waiting for some brain-breakingly recursive EvPsych interpretation of how these hyena observations further explain human behavior. Most of the stuff produced on cooperation and altruism is contorted enough already.
The weirdness gets even deeper, going to MSU’s Hyena Research Special Report site. Some observations from Establishing dominance:
Among hyenas, many traditional gender roles are reversed…
Females control the power in hyena society…
Female spotted hyenas are surprisingly “masculine” in their behavior and appearance…
A second hypothesis suggests that, instead of having an adaptive function, the female’s odd genitalia merely represent a side-effect of selection for other male-like traits in females such as large body size or enhanced aggressiveness…
[even though]
Unlike most animals in which dominance is determined by size, strength or the ability to gather food, hyenas “inherit” their social ranks from their mothers.
Yeah, Western gender roles are so applicable here. They are not “masculine” or “feminine”, they are hyenas. Female hyenas are female hyenas. Hyenas’ social roles are, barring obvious changes in behavior, “traditional” for hyenas. Hyenas in general are well known for being big and aggressive.
While the author does mention other mammals in terms of sex-based trends in size and aggression, human gender construction is the main thing that comes across. Confusing gender and sex is part and parcel of this.
This is, if anything, even more bizarre than one of the most blatant examples of trying to interpret things through your own cultural bias in Susan Powers’ Early Art of the Southeastern Indians: Feathered Serpents and Winged Beings–which, in general, is great for illustrations of artwork, but not so good for reasonable interpretation and analysis. Unfortunately, the couple of pages in question (pp.80-84) are not included in the Google Books preview. In short, the author–based on multiple crazy published analyses–tries to sex two deliberately ambiguous Bird (Hawk/Falcon/Eagle–interpretations mixed) Dancer figures on repoussé copper plates from Etowah–seemingly by the same artist–based entirely upon current Western constructions of gender and femininity.
What indicates that one figure must be female? The actual plate of copper used to make the piece is smaller, which makes the figure on it smaller. The possible depiction of social elites in art is mentioned; should we conclude this makes “her” less important, along with “feminine”? Almost undetectable details of proportioning are pointed out, including “the line of the jaw and neck, the tapering waist,” and a miniscule difference in their chests. (This is the “masculine” figure.) “But the most striking difference from the male plate is the overall femininity of 17b, which is reinforced by the revelation of female characteristics.”
It is not even clear whether these figures are even supposed to be humans dressed in bird costumes, or if they are transforming into birds through their dancing. At any rate, the gender ambiguity is deliberate and culturally appropriate, especially when other lines are being blurred; gender is less fixed than type of animal! Asserting “overall femininity” based on the standards of your own time, place, and culture does not mean that this piece of art was intended nor interpreted as such by the Mississippian artist in that time and place. Much less by the people not fitting your gender-based physical expectations s/he was living among and producing art for. If very few members of the group have what you would consider a “tapered waist” at all, it is not going to be a mark of femininity. And so on.
Trying to put pink rhinestones onto hyenas leads to even more serious fail. I was almost surprised they didn’t go on about the “masculine” female hyenas’ lack of delicate little paws and “softer” necks and jawlines.
It’s hard to see what’s really happening in front of you when you’re forcing all your observations through this kind of mental filter. It’s unfortunately common. As Barbara Mann put it:
Combing is not just an academic chore; it is a nasty challenge to the ego as well. Few are up to the ordeal. On a personal level, most folks are reluctant to recognize that cultural bias is precisely the stuff that feels so doggone comfy when they snuggle up to it. Discovering that their mattress stuffing is really a web of lies means that, to correct the situation, the stuffing must be knocked out of their comfort zone. An honest examination requires them to endure the personal discomfort of living without a buffer, while their new cultural mattress is on order.
From a New York Times article based on Dr. Holekamp’s research, Sociable, and Smart, we get into some of the human-applied speculations:
Throughout her career, Dr. Holekamp has remained vigilant against anthropocentrism. She does not think of the hyenas as long-eared people running around on all fours. But the lives of spotted hyenas, she has concluded, share some profound similarities with our own. In both species, a complex social world has driven the evolution of a big, complex brain.
That isn’t the really strange bit; some of the interpretations driving how evidence is gathered/evaluated are.
What makes the social complexity of spotted hyenas particularly enlightening, Dr. Holekamp said, are their relatives. They belong to a family of four species, and the other three live in strikingly different societies…
Brown hyenas, for instance, live in much smaller clans that range up to about 14 animals. Although scientists do not know much about brown hyenas, it seems that some clans live in a hierarchy, while in others, the hyenas enjoy more equality…Striped hyenas live in even smaller groups of a single female and no more than three adult males…A male and female aardwolf will live as a monogamous pair…‘It’s just what the social complexity hypothesis would predict,’ Dr. Holekamp said. ‘The hyenas with the simplest social systems have the tiniest frontal cortices. The spotted hyena, which lives in the most complex societies, has far and away the largest frontal cortex.’
The brown and striped hyenas, with intermediate social systems, have intermediate brains. ‘There’s a spectrum,’ Dr. Holekamp said.
Where have we seen this kind of societal ranking system before? Oh yeah! Though that link describes one 19th century version, this kind of thing is endemic to Western thinking. Relative equality == less “complex”/”developed” social system. And it’s another one of those assumptions which mostly goes unnoticed by now, falling into the Things Everybody Knows category. That’s even before we look at brain size and some of the ways it has been used. Complexity is another thing, but it is still hard not to be suspicious of underlying assumptions about significance, and the significance of comparisons to relative size of parts of human brains.
And none of the perceived “social complexity” could be based on cultural assumptions about how humans relate to one another and form societies, not at all.
BTW, that’s one of the reasons I don’t have much use for Marxism. It’s based in the same old Western cultural assumptions about Progress, which happens in inevitable universal stages which show the same outward forms everywhere. If you were talking about France under the feudal system, some of the interpretations throughout that art book, with the “feminine” Bird Dancer, might make some sense, based as they are in this kind of view of social development. Conflict, inequality, and hierarchical setups are inevitable and even desirable–as are larger groups living together, who fight a lot. This same old view of how the world works and humans must be organized is still very evident in archaeology, among many other fields. You can’t get away from it.
It’s also easier to see a lot of conflict if you are looking for conflict, and assuming you will see it. Ditto if you’re assuming that equality is impossible in practice; pretty soon a sachem speaking for a women’s council will become an emperor with his harem.
From my perspective, it takes a lot more “social complexity” in terms of interactions to keep more equality going in a society–not to mention for avoiding bloodshed and war. As John Mohawk put it in that context, “Progressive pragmatism ultimately is the most complex process devised so far by people who play politics.” That requires a very complex pattern of interactions. In a lot of ways, high-context cultures also depend on complexity of interaction, and some really funky “homogeneous, primitive” interpretations get put on these (non-Western*) cultures.
Frankly, it’s easier to gang up and mug other people (for springbok carcasses or expensive watches) than it is to figure out how to get along. I would be surprised if this did not also apply to brown hyenas, preferring to live in smaller groups or no. Larger group sizes do not necessarily mean higher levels of complexity in interactions, especially if you are not also paying close attention to the patterns of interactions among these smaller social units. In human terms, the very existence of villages has been missed–and population sizes underestimated–because dwellings were spread out in a different organizational pattern than the observer expected to find. Whole social/political institutions have mostly been ignored because observers were expecting a different setup, and so couldn’t see what was in front of them (including matrilineal inheritance patterns). And so on.
Yes, I’m rambling and throwing around a bunch of human ideas which very possibly don’t apply at all to hyenas’ social systems. Humans’ are another matter entirely, which is kinda the point. I’m probably talking through my hat, in a very anthropocentric way. At least I am very aware of this fact–and do not expect anyone to take it seriously!–unlike too many researchers putting interpretations on other animals’ behavior.
Edit: I didn’t even get into the very complicated projection of human gender onto pets, from associating different kinds of animals with different human genders to expecting the animals themselves to fit into human-constructed gender roles. I just ran across a good post on this at Critical Masculinities, Don’t emasculate your dog!, with the madness of Neuticles. And, for straightforward projection of human gender onto animals, just have a gander at PetSmart’s first page of dog clothes–with tutus, NFL shirts, “Top Paw™ Irridescent Butterfly Bows for Dogs”, and pink-or-blue Snuggies (pink on a miniature dachshund, blue on some kind of collie–again with the emphasis on size differences).
I had noticed this projection onto pets before–it’s hard not to, when you keep running across the material coding and people honestly considering it worse for a male animal to be nervous! But, this really jumped into focus when we adopted a ten-year-old male Staffie. Wearing a studded leather collar when we picked him up. Not only were people out and about commenting on how butch he is, he displayed a lot of the same spoiled behavior I have seen in male humans. Impatience, hollering, being pushy, whining until he got what he wanted, etc. were obviously not discouraged when he was growing up. I seriously doubt a lot of this would have been tolerated if people had been projecting femininity onto him; instead, they’d have probably encouraged his tendency toward timidity more. With some consistent feedback, he is now behaving less like a spoiled frat boy/lager lout. Oh yes, he was also never neutered, and had a bad habit of trying to hump people’s legs every time he got excited. Not fun, dealing with a generally excitable dog. This has also mostly improved with consistent feedback! It’s interesting, and disturbing, how much humans will project.
_____________
* Again with the hierarchical presentations! AFAICT, Cherokee culture (to use a familiar example) is only lower-context than Japanese or Chinese cultures in that it’s much more egalitarian, and there are fewer rules to navigate social hierarchies. African-American culture is only ranked above (monolithic) Native American cultures–as opposed to “North American”–thanks to the linear presentation. Were I coming up with a graphical representation, I would be more likely to devise groupings in a more radial setup, even with high–>low context as an organizing principle.
And yes, I am married to a Swede, on the other end of this scale. This has proven interesting at times.
In a recent post, I mentioned wanting to write about some ways of dealing with chronic pain and sensory issues which have helped me, and I am getting around to it now.
At least in my case, the sensory sensitivity/disruption and chronic pain seem to be all tied up together, coming out of a nervous system which appears to be cranked up at least three notches above most people’s. This connection first became obvious to me in the context of pain amplification, but it would also explain why so many stimuli which wouldn’t be painful to most other people can become very painful indeed. Just as certain sounds can make my skull feel like it’s shattering into tiny fragments and unexpected light touch can make my skin crawl painfully and set off muscle spasms, a scratchy piece of clothing can make my auditory processing go screwier and physical pains will blend together and start into improv sessions, creating new and interesting patterns of pain and electrical sensations. Pain perception is just another sensory perception.
Acquire further difficulties with muscle tone so that your muscles will go into spasm, lots of accumulated muscle injuries (really easy with hypermobility and dyspraxia), and trigger points developing at the drop of a hat, and things can get interesting. It’s been years since I’ve had a pain-free day, and when stress and diabetes-related nutritional deficiencies temporarily made things much worse, pretty much my whole body went into painful spasm and twitches, so that it was almost impossible to sleep (lack of sleep then aggravated it further). Near-constant migraine/cluster headaches set in. Picking up other people’s pain in sympathy does not help. And, when this happened while I was back in the U.S., I had no access to pain relief (ah, “hillbilly heroin” hysteria!), even once one of the hospice nurses found a doctor who would see me without insurance*. Not too surprisingly, I kept getting suicidal urges just to escape. Thank goodness I could see them for what they were, and had a lot of clear responsibilities during the worst period.
I’m not mentioning all this for sympathy, or anything like that, just clarifying that I do know chronic pain well. Again, something Amanda wrote at Ballastexistenz came to mind: “I bet if the people who have trouble believing this is ongoing, had to live in my body for one hour, they wouldn’t be able to function. At all.” After a while, you get used to things, sometimes too used to things.
Though I’ve gotten it calmed down a lot since then–and the couple of months’ reprise I’m just coming out of–I still have pain every day. Along with the sensory weirdness inherent to the way my nervous system is set up. The big difference? Pain and suffering do not automatically have to go together. This still amazes me, considering how I used to live and have watched too many other people live.
A while back, I mentioned ordering in and reading Shinzen Young’s Break Through Pain. His central thesis is important here: “What people call “pain” is actually a combination of pain and resistance…The distortion in perception and behavior can be a big part of the horror of the pain” also expressed as “suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance”.
Just by applying basic mindfulness, I had already started using pretty much all the techniques he suggests. (Along with some others; going into what has worked will probably turn this into a multi-part post.) This book would be a pretty good introduction for people who need more of an introduction to mindfulness, and he emphasizes that these are techniques which work, without depending on any specific belief system. I like Shinzen Young’s work, anyway, for a lot of the same reasons C4Chaos expresses. He also strikes me as geeky in a very good way.
I may have figured out a lot of basics on my own, but sometimes a teacher does help. While reading this book, some things clicked in a way that they hadn’t before, and things are not flaring up so much that I’m needing to take pain meds every day.
I still haven’t listened to the CD, since I have found guided meditation distracting; it might be very useful for some people. I’ll probably listen anyway, just in case there’s more useful info on there.
One excellent point he reinforced for me? The trouble with begrudging downtime, and causing yourself further problems by trying to push yourself too hard based on expectations. “If Nature has given you so much pain that you cannot do anything else other than be with it, then there is a message here: you are not expected to be doing anything else!” Yeah, I kinda | knew that social programming was hurting me there, but having it pointed out explicitly in this context helped.
BTW, that’s another case in which my Papaw’s more traditional Tutelo/Cherokee family got it right: if you have a splitting headache or a leg trying to spasm out from under you, for goodness’ sake go and lie down! You’re not doing anybody else any good otherwise, much less yourself. I’ve been doing a little better with this, but still have a lot of habit energy behind bulling through.
While I’ve still got Break Through Pain in front of me, I’ll quote a couple of very relevant passages:
[W]hen those qualities would occur together, he now experienced them as merely adding to each other, rather than cross-multiplying. Let’s say that a person dying of cancer has ten units of exhaustion, ten units of tumor discomfort, ten units of nausea discomfort, ten units of anger discomfort and ten units of fear discomfort. By what mathematical formula do we compute their total suffering? Under ordinary circumstances, because the sensations reinforce each other, the formula would be something like ten times ten times ten times ten times ten, which equals one hundred thousand. No wonder people say, “Please let me die, I can’t stand another moment…” If they had perfect mindfulness skills, they would not say that. Their total experience of suffering would be exactly what is there: ten plus ten plus ten plus ten plus ten, which adds up to fifty…
Because each of these sensations was clear and distinct, and because Gene had worked hard for five years with his meditation practice, he was readily able to “deconstruct” his suffering.
You don’t have to be dying from cancer, as in Gene’s case. The same thing applies to any combination of sensory weirdness, pain sensations, and getting upset about/scared by them: pretty soon things can amplify to the point that you’ve got some serious sufferering going on, with more pain and sensory scrambling than you started out with. (Meltdown/shutdown time.) And it doesn’t take five years’ practice to get some relief from that, thank goodness. Once your mind learns to notice each sensation separately, and not to catastrophize so much, things become much easier to handle. If you keep with it, things will get better.
From another case study:
With this kind of pain, there is often a high probability that people will take their own lives. I suspect that we are hardwired to move in this direction if there is nothing but pain day after day. The horrible part of chronic pain is that the more it hurts, the more sensitive you become to the pain. Your pain circuits become pain magnifiers, so that even ordinary sensations are experienced as painful.
I would not have thought it possible–indeed, was pretty skeptical going in–but this does seem to be yet another of the wonders of neuroplasticity: what is trained can be untrained, or more like trained in another direction. I suspect that this is what is happening when the pain/sensory scrambling amplification reduces over time. After just a few months of serious practice, mine has become much less troublesome. Just having some kind of reasonable hope that your life is not falling into some kind of pit of monotonous awfulness helps a lot!
One of the major points I needed to have reinforced? Working with a goal of making the pain go away is an obstacle–even when it’s just lurking in the back of your mind. It’s like fighting the tar baby, or even damming up a river without providing floodgates. What really helps is learning to recognize the sensations themselves for what they are, and recognizing your reactions to those sensations for what they are. If you can distinguish between these things, and recognize them as they’re happening, the whole experience is not so overwhelming.
The same thing applies to more clearly mental and emotional sufferering, which is not a separate thing. A recent article, Learning to Sit with Depression: The Boulder Center for Mindfulness Psychotherapy, presents some excellent points in an accessible and practical way:
We develop a plethora of secondary reactions of avoidance, resistance or plain resignation. We busy ourselves in activities, anything to avoid facing the inner reality…
Mindfulness of our emotions is not the same as acting out the emotion and it is not wallowing in feeling bad. It is the process of literally “sitting” with the emotion: nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to fix, just being 100% present with the emotion as an object to observe and investigate with care.
Since this is running long (surprise!), in the next part of this post, I will describe some of the practical techniques which have helped me so far.
_____________
* This time, I was uninsured because I have been living out of the country, and was lucky enough to be able to pay $120/visit out of pocket and still afford essentials. (That doctor kept me going off drug samples, or it would have been a different story.) They make you pay up front, anyway, so I find that disregard even more appalling. It had been years since I was uninsured thanks to parental job loss and poverty, and I was shocked at barely even being able to find a doctor who would see me. The problem before was figuring out how to pay them. Then people complain about poor people tying up emergency rooms…
One point became very clear indeed to me just a little while ago, while I was musing on how much better my “unruly” hair treats me when I get past the self-hatred and treat it with kindness, instead of trying to whip it into the kind of shape I have been led to believe it should have. This concerns a face of racism that is so common by now that very few people even recognize it as such.
When you insist that everybody inhabiting an entire continent surely looks the same, that is racist.
It also makes no sense whatsoever. All of North America’s native inhabitants would not have the same skin tones, hair textures and colors, facial features, etc. any more than all of Europe’s or Africa’s. When you also lump in Central and South America, that becomes at least as absurd as conflating all the people in Eurasia. It makes no sense, and an ability/willingness to swallow that one whole indicates deeply rooted privilege and racism.
When you come up with crazy-assed Eurocentric explanations for people who did not look the way your ancestors expected when they first came into contact, that is absurdly racist. When you try to claim these “unusual looking” people as your own long-lost relatives (“Welsh Indians”), and use this an as excuse to abuse/dispossess (“Effects of alternative explanations”) the Othered indigenous group based on their taking over and tearing up “your” stuff, nobody should ever take what you have to say on this matter seriously ever again. Ever. Even without Joseph Smith and his Amazing Golden Tablets thrown into the mix.
When you base these physical criteria on the writings of colonial scientific racists, trying to cram different “racial” groups into hierarchies–not so long ago–many of whom had never even clapped eyes on most of the people they were purporting to describe, that is even more ridiculous. If you cannot or will not admit that an awful lot of the evidence you rely upon now was produced by genocidal racists masquerading as impartial scientists–and others basing their work on those conclusions–you are teetering on the edge of similar moral insanity.
When you compound this by positing genetic bottlenecks as an explanation for people all being the same (whether they really are or not), that is an even better indication of racist attitudes. Again, even more so if you are pushing this as the only possible explanation among right-thinking people, and are basing this insulting house of cards on politically (and religiously) convenient ideology-driven assumptions*. When you refuse to see that this could possibly be dogma at all, you should not be taken seriously. Ah, dogma and serious inbreeding! You are still trying to own other people and their ancestors.
Unexpected mtDNA groups or perceived physical appearances dated from 9300-36000 years ago do not give you any more claim on them or their ancestors. Really.
When you further compound this by insisting (again, politically conveniently) that anyone who does not fit your preconceived notions of how a member of a particular group must look, must be lying about who they are–nobody with any critical thinking ability should take you seriously. For all the great benefits, or something like that. Cui bono?
When you feel entitled to define the identities of whole groups of people for them, that is just about as racist as you can get. When you compound this by continuing to base “legitimate” membership–in your eyes–on things such as “blood quantum” (A Relic Of Racism And Termination), that is genocidal racism. Similarly, when you think in terms of people having “Indian Blood” (in their veins? carried in a bottle? on someone else’s hands? by transfusion?), that’s based in some pretty dodgy concepts. Again, cui bono? (That really is an excellent piece.)
When you feel entitled to interrogate complete strangers, insisting that any member of a certain ethnic/racial group must present convincing evidence that they do, indeed, belong to said group, that is racist. When you further get to judge what qualifies as “convincing”, that is also genocidally racist. Even more so when your ancestors compared their ancestors to wild animals, and tried to wipe them out–on paper, through pen-and-ink witchcraft, when it did not always work as well as they’d hoped in reality.
If you feel entitled to do all this, you are behaving genocidally yourself.
When your own internalized racism brings you to swallow any/all of this stuff hook, line, and sinker–without thinking, “gee, maybe we should look at this critically; these folks aren’t known for telling us the truth!”–at best you are confused and unintentionally helping crush other people in similar boats to yours. It’s probably time to wake up and stop helping with the Divide and Conquer. You’ll be happier for it, as will more other people than you have been led to believe even exist.
_____________
* From another post: Ah, Beringia! You’ll find gratuitous references in articles on contemporary Native artists, even. Repeating the hypothesis ad nauseam won’t produce any more evidence that it really happened as described. To quote an endnote to a recent post:
“This idea is what got the whole Beringia ball rolling. Really. The Lost Tribes reverted to a state so “primitive” that they forgot how to build boats. It’s still politically convenient, even if the Lost Tribes have mostly turned into Central Asians.”
This started out as an endnote to another post I’m working on, and kept growing. It’s important enough stuff to move over to a post of its own, anyway.
Diabetes can lead to lots of nutritional deficiencies, through obvious mechanisms such as peeing out lots of vitamins and minerals. Very few doctors seem to even think about how frequently this happens. I had to figure out and correct these deficiencies on my own.
Polyuria will pretty obviously mess up your electrolyte balance–a lot like a stomach virus, or sweating really heavily–and you also pee out an awful lot of water-soluble vitamins. The more you drink to make up for losing fluid, the more vitamins and minerals you end up losing in urine. Apparently, “thiamine concentration in blood plasma was decreased 76% in type 1 diabetic patients and 75% in type 2 diabetic patients”, regardless of blood glucose management. Diabetic kidneys are a little too good at filtering it out. I would be amazed if other B vitamins were not similarly affected. Being low on B vitamins will also make you depressed and tired all the time.
I got symptoms of more than one B vitamin deficiency (there’s a lot of overlap in symptoms, and they work togther a lot), including signs of full-blown “dry” beriberi: “However, because doctors may not consider beriberi in non-alcoholics, this diagnosis is often missed.” As another overview points out: “Probably the best diagnostic test is a good clinical response to administration of thiamine.” I feel confident saying that this was the problem, because my system did respond quickly to thiamine supplementation.
Like with potassium and especially magnesium, getting low on B vitamins can make your blood glucose control much worse, setting up a vicious cycle. Lack of all these nutrients will also cause muscle spasms/pain/weakness, besides hypertension and any number of cardiovascular and neurological problems generally written off as diabetic complications. Making sure you have enough thiamine can fend off all kinds of cellular damage from high blood glucose. Low magnesium and potassium levels are risk | factors for developing Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in the first place, and are also implicated in any number of “diabetic complications”. Besides hideous muscle cramps, I started getting disturbing heart arrhythmias which went away within an hour when I took in enough combined potassium and magnesium.
Here’s one interesting article I ran across, illustrating some connections: Hypertension, Hypokalemia, and Thiazide-Induced Diabetes: A 3-Way Connection:
Hypertension treated with thiazides [diuretics], especially in higher doses, can cause hypokalemia. Hypokalemia, in turn, can aggravate hypertension and also lead to diabetes mellitus via mechanisms discussed in the text. Diabetes, in turn, can cause hypertension, and people with hypertension are more likely to get diabetes mellitus. Correcting potassium stores may, therefore, be beneficial for both diabetes mellitus and hypertension.
From another article, “38% of diabetic outpatient clinic visits involve hypomagnesemia”. “Also hypomagnesemia is related to thiamine deficiency because magnesium is needed for transforming thiamine into thiamine pyrophosphate.” It’s all connected. You can substitute magnesium in that above study, just as easily (there has been similar research). Also, if you are low on magnesium, you can’t use your potassium properly; this happens with other nutrients, too, like a chain missing links. Being low on potassium will also make you insatiably thirsty, which will make you pee out more nutrients; it’s also easy to blame on the diabetes itself, and took me a while to figure out.
This is one of the reasons the renewed all-or-nothing sodium hating here in the UK appalls me; it’s all about balance between electrolytes, and the ones trying to scare people away from sodium bloody well ought to know this by now. My mom almost killed herself ca. 1980, when they were still pushing this approach back in the US: she was told “cut out the salt, or DIE!” and wound up in the hospital over it. She took the ill-considered advice seriously and stayed away from things like tomatoes (high in both sodium and potassium!), and baked her own salt-free bread; high doses of diuretics probably helped, as well. ´Most of the seriously impairing “side effects” she experienced later, for many years, can easily be attributed to serious dehydration and electrolyte imbalances–no doubt lack of some vitamins, as well–from the combo of diuretics and increasingly-difficult-to-manage diabetes.
That includes the same near-constant feverish feeling and flu-like symptoms I also experienced for nigh on 15 years. I assumed I just had a lousy immune system (like my mom’s) and kept catching colds and flu, until I replaced some minerals. So far this winter, I have had one cold.
Even without diabetes to make people excrete more magnesium and reduce their stores, a lot of people are low on it. Intensive farming practices without proper replacement have led to serious soil depletion of a lot of minerals, so we get much less in foods than was the case even 50 years ago. Note how over this same time period, a number of chronic illnesses, including diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and osteoporosis have gone “epidemic”. In the US, “According to recent USDA surveys, the average intake of magnesium by women 19 to 50 years of age was about 74 percent of the RDA. Men of the same age got about 94 percent of the recommended amount. About 50 percent of women had intakes below 70 percent of their RDA.”
Looking at the UK, “Dietary intakes of magnesium in the United States have been declining over the last 100 years from about 500mg/day to 175–225mg/day (10) and a recent national survey suggested that the average magnesium intake for women is as low as 228mgs per day (11). But since this figure is derived using a one-day diet recall method, it may actually be an overestimate of actual magnesium intakes (12). Meanwhile, the UK’s Food Standards Agency estimates that the average daily intake of magnesium in Britain for both men and women is just 227mgs – only two thirds of the US recommended daily amount (RDA).” The picture looks similar elsewhere, from quick glances while looking for those figures.
Diabetes is associated with a disturbingly long list of complications. That’s what will reduce your lifespan. Having seen how this played out with relatives and other people she knew suffering a lot, and then dying early, was what made my mom’s diabetes diagnosis more frightening than the later cancer one; she was suicidal for weeks after hers got diagnosed. (If you think you’re inevitably going to get serious neuropathic pain, lose your feet, and die of a heart attack if you’re lucky, why not?!) Most people–including medical professionals, who should know better by now–just think of these complications as the unavoidable wages of diabetes. (This is also related to the atmosphere of blame around Type 2 diabetes, but that is a different story.) From the research I have done, it looks as though pretty much all of this suffering is preventable, and I can’t help but get frustrated and sad about how little attention this gets in the trenches.
Throw in malabsorption from Glucophage/metformin, and you can quickly have a real mess. It can also interfere with thiamine, and given that a lot of the malabsorption is caused by chronic | explosive diarrhea, fat-soluble vitamins are also affected. Metformin carries warnings about B12 and folic acid deficiency–and the rest ought to be obvious!–but not many doctors even seem to be considering this when people come in with blatant deficiency symptoms. I know this firsthand. Not only was I sick the whole time I took the stuff, to the point that I almost stopped leaving the house, my glucose control got really horrible–and the GP kept telling me the “side effects” would subside with time.
Right now, I’m making sure to eat enough salt (got headaches, nausea, and strange dreams before thinking of this!), drinking a lot of tomato juice with a pinch of Epsom salts and KCl salt substitute added, and taking a lot of supplements. Benfotiamine (“a fat-soluble composition and is better absorbed and utilized”) seems to be the way to go if you think you’re low on thiamine–which you probably are if you’re diabetic. I also take a mutivitamin and high-potency B complex, just in case.
Not surprisingly, I’m feeling a lot better in general these days. It’s only been about a month since I recognized the need to get more potassium and (even more) magnesium, and that greatly improved the hideous leg/hip muscle spasms I’d been getting again (much like what Kaninchen ZERO describes as “turning to stone”). The difference was clear: drink some doctored tomato juice, be able to go lie down and go to sleep within an hour! I remembered to order in more benfotiamine last week–having stopped taking it because things had improved so much before–and by the next day after taking it again, a lot of the residual leg/hip cramping was gone. My mood started improving, too, and I’m experiencing much less fatigue and brain fog.
Also see The Role of Magnesium in Fibromyalgia, and Association between magnesium intake and depression and anxiety in community-dwelling adults: the Hordaland Health Study. I also wonder about how much muscle wasting–especially involving limbs–among diabetics is really coming from nutrient deficiencies known to cause this. I am hoping to be able to get back some of the muscle mass I’ve lost, now that I’m not seriously malnourished.
At this point, I am wondering whether I ever had “mild” generalized tardive dystonia, or whether the problems with muscle tone and spasm–which started when I was on medications known for doing that–have mostly been coming from drug-induced diabetes. Time and continued improvement of my nutritional status will tell.
Edit: A very relevant link I ran across a while after posting this: Diabetes on rise in young aboriginal women:
“Diabetes is a disease of young First Nations adults with a marked predilection for women; in contrast, diabetes is a disease of aging non-First Nations adults that is more common in men,” Dr. Roland Dyck of Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon and his coauthors wrote…
A tuberculosis survey of 1,500 First Nations people in 1937, for example, did not detect diabetes. By 1990, almost 10 per cent of the province’s native people had diabetes, and by 2006, 20 per cent did…
“What is clear is that the rapid appearance of Type 2 diabetes particularly among First Nations people and other indigenous and developing populations has been precipitated by environmental rather than genetic factors,” the researchers said.
Eating a more traditional diet seems to help. The Tohono O’odham on the U.S. side of the border are well known as the group with the world’s highest rate of Type 2 diabetes–estimated at 80%–while their relatives on the other side have a fifth the rate. A lot in the U.S. are also fatter than they used to be. The apparent difference? Living more traditional lifestyles, with access to more traditional foods. I can’t find the reference right now, but I saw one study admitting that “you’re fat and diabetic because you’re lazy and don’t go to the gym” was a very bad (and lazy) assumption; someone working at the health clinic bothered to find out what people were actually doing, and most were pretty physically active in their everyday lives–doing heavy gardening work, walking some distance to go fishing, etc. If there had been a gym readily available there at that point, they’d have been too busy working their asses off to go there! (In other words, about what I would expect.) The kneejerk blaming is persistent, though, as ideology-based approaches to the world usually are.
As far as I can tell, the current “more saturated fat leading to obesity and heart problems” dogma (not necessarily based in reality, when people were eating a lot of fatty foods before!) is far less applicable here than the fact that traditional foods are much richer in all kinds of nutrients. There’s also the slow-release carbohydrate factor from whole grains and tubers to take into account. Tying back in well, beans, nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, fruits, and assorted green leafy stuff will give you an awful lot of magnesium and potassium–among other good things!–and I have been eating more of all of them. They’re also delicious.
There’s an amazing variety of nuts back home –even after the chestnuts got blight, and many kinds of nut trees plundered for timber–and they used to be a staple. Now they are very expensive if you can’t gather them yourself, so people eat other things which are not nearly as nutritious. Nuts are just one example.
And, in another example of truly wrong-headed advice, the NHS diabetic nutrition sheet I was given (which did not even distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2) warned people to eat things like nuts and salmon maybe once a week if they must eat them at all, because of the (rich in omega-3) fat content. Thank goodness I knew better, in general; it made me feel sorry for the majority who wouldn’t.
I had a post lining up about some of the things I have found very helpful lately for dealing with sensory issues and chronic pain (frequently connected, for me), but got onto another track for now.
Last night, I followed a disturbing ScienceDaily link: Do Fish Feel Pain? Norwegian Research Suggests They Can, which includes the stunning observation that “pain is a serious threat to animal welfare”.
Sometimes other humans scare me. As mentioned in a couple of recent posts, we’ve already seen more than enough of the sociopathic side of Descartes’ legacy (and the ways of thinking which influenced his conclusions). Taking seriously the idea that maybe other living beings cannot feel pain relies on certain low-empathy ways of thinking, even if you’re not actually saying the words “soulless automata” anymore.
Fish are frequently considered pretty low down the scale of living beings who have much in common with us, as has come up multiple times on one forum I frequent, The GAB. To a scary number of people, they don’t even qualify as Real Animals, whether as companions or as something vegetarians are assumed not to have a problem with eating. Because they live in a very different environment, a lot of people have trouble empathizing with them.
And, yes, I do think this has a lot to do with frequent human levels of indifference about water pollution, until the situation gets bad enough that they’re poisoning themselves and other “cute” furry animals. (Amphibians such as river dogs rank even lower in these bogus hierarchies, sensitive as they are to pollution.) Getting to know fish made me very hesitant indeed to put toxic cleaning products down the drain, and careful not to use more detergents than necessary. One drop of dishwashing detergent in a tank can suffocate fish, as the surfactants mess with their gill function. This kind of thing also brought home the idea of how “water conservation” can apply where there is abundant surface water; the less you filthy up and put down the drain to be treated and discharged back into waterways, the better.
As a kid, I was lucky enough to spend time with adults who taught me some good lessons in this, of the “Don’t poke at that river dog with a stick! How would you like it if a giant one cornered you and poked you with a stick?!” variety. Still, even having alway felt a connection with animals, and having kept fish (rather badly) before, I didn’t see fish in the same way as cats or dogs (much less humans) until a bit under six years ago. The first week after I moved here, I walked to the nearest Big Box pet store, and brought home a tiny comet shubunkin and a tiny tank. (I did at least know to get a filter!) Nigel named her Skate, because she didn’t resemble a skate.
It’s amazing the poor thing made it; in fact, she died of an illness I couldn’t treat effectively (not great vet or medication access for “just fish”, especially medications in the UK) last month. At least I was aware that the filter needed to cycle, and I needed to change water frequently and use ammonia neutralizers until it did. Still, she spent her first year in a 6L tank. I learned better, and she got a 60L tank and two tankmates then. After another year and a half or so, I learned much better from The GAB, and they moved into a 180L tank. Skate outlasted both of them–disease, again.
There is a lot of really bad information out there, especially regarding goldfish, which are actually one of the more challenging mostly herbivorous freshwater fish you can keep in a tank–at least foot-long, messy carp who have to poke their noses into everything, and who live 20+ years under good conditions. I loved one GAB thread, How to keep a goldfish in a bowl…. GRRR:
Drawtaru: It’s a well-known fact that humans only need a 4×3 foot space to sleep, so don’t worry about getting a queen- or king-sized bed, as it’s not neccessary. A hard floor is fine, so don’t go wasting a lot of money on an expensive mattress, box spring, or pillows. Just a blanket to keep them warm is plenty.
Louiedee83: … and then cram into that 4×3 foot space your dining room and toilet and you’re living the life.
Drawtaru: Exactly!
It’s easy to get diverted by the prevalence of unthinking cruelty, but my main point here is that I got to know Skate and, later, her buddies. I could not ignore the fact that they were people, a lot like me. I spent time observing them and figuring out their body language, tried to figure out what they needed and wanted, and tried to make sure those needs were met. I developed real respect for them–and was more than a little amazed and ashamed that I’d not had it before.
Skate ignores her fourth or fifth pea, and gets petted instead. She got bigger than in this video, but still about half her potential size.
This learning process went multiple ways, as the most valuable ones do. I can’t know what the fish learned from dealing with me–other than that food and attention might be forthcoming!–but I learned more about compassion in general from them. And the lessons kept changing and getting deeper.
One day I was giving Skate’s tank a thorough cleaning, after her tankmates were gone. She was particularly seeking attention that day, bumping her head up into my elbow and nibbling at my fingers until I stopped scraping at the algae and paid attention to her. No wonder, not having been alone in there for long; goldfish are very social creatures. Before long, I moved one of the small raised-from-eggs goldies in from the pond to live with her. After I gave her some affection, she was happy as a clam, Skating around the tank and nibbling at the plants. Tank cleaning and water changes were exciting; she got attention, clean water, and a good feeding afterward.
I’d already thought along similar lines, but that experience really brought some things home to me. Skate had certain needs: clean water with loads of filtration, plenty of swimming space, good food, lots of plants for an all-day salad bar and entertainment (and to keep the water quality better!), company, attention and affection. When those needs were met, she was happy. The main way in which they differ from basic human needs is obvious: the fish do live in water rather than air.
If Skate’s needs were not being met, I would not expect her to be happy. I would not blame her for not just bucking up, and ignoring that she had any basic needs at all. I would not rail about her being an ingrate and cause of many problems to other people, because her needs and my ideas of what her needs should be did not match up. I would not suggest that there must be something seriously wrong with her, that she express unhappiness under less than ideal conditions. Instead, I would (and did) look at how well I was understanding and trying to provide for her needs; she communicated them clearly, once I learned how to interpret what she was saying. I was very aware that I had a heavy responsible for making sure her basic needs were met, and would have expected some pretty odd behavior if they weren’t.
Then it really struck me: I had been treating myself in a completely different manner. Instead of applying the same kind of compassion and understanding to myself, against all reason, I’d continued the blaming–along with the deep perception that I must be wrong even to have needs which did not match other people’s expectations. That’s pretty screwed up.
It also struck me, on an even deeper level, how ridiculous and harmful an approach based on preconceived expectations of other peoples needs and wants, rather than on attention and communication, is when dealing with adult humans, much less young ones who are very dependent upon others. I would never blame a child for reacting to a bad situation in “strange” ways which are very obvious when you stop and think about it for even a minute. Why would I continue doing that to myself?
Particularly in this context, I found one bit of advice very helpful indeed when starting back more seriously into mindfulness meditation; I believe it was from Wildmind, but can’t find it right now to quote it. To paraphrase from memory, when your mind starts wandering, gently guide it back like you would a baby animal. That analogy works for a lot of things. Why would you treat your own self more harshly than you would a kitten? Not to mention that annoyingly misguided coworker?
Another excellent post from The Tao of Chaos applies very well here: Take My Ego… Please!, with discussion of anthropomorphization (closer to my take than the usual) and other forms of projection. Ego substitutes for compassion and understanding, and gets in the way of our attempts to understand other animals and humans. Some people get so caught up in that kind of shadow boxing that they don’t even try to get past their own projections.
Yes, this is very relevant to the Dread Autism Epidemic, “childhood bipolar” epidemic, the way “mental illness” is viewed in general, and the urge to find “cures” all around. (That “The Hunt for an Autism Drug” article just has so many things wrong with it, and reflects so much potential for real harm.) It also leads to a lot of abuse and neglect.
Near the extreme end, it can lead to this kind of attitude: Empathy: not your strong suit.
Another example along the same lines, on learning from animals? The Cats, and disability post I wrote a while back.
I keep coming back to one observation from Geswanouth Slahoot (Chief Dan George), of the Coastal Salish:
If you talk to animals, they will talk with you and you will know each other.
If you do not talk to them you will not know them, and what you do not know you will fear.
What one fears one destroys.
And, like Autism Speaks and the parents attracted to that organization, you might start thinking of certain small humans as “soulless automata” who cannot communicate meaningfully, much like those “lower” animals.
Yesterday, I ran across an excellent post at The Fat Nutritionist: If only poor people understood nutrition!. The main thrust:
Because obviously they just don’t know what they’re doing. And that’s why they eat so badly, and hence, why their health tends to be poorer!
And eureka! — you have a tidy solution that not only absolves financial and economic guilt, but, as a bonus, allows richer, more-edumacated people to assume the role of benevolent experts…
The reality is that people who don’t have enough money (or the utilities and storage) to buy and prepare decent food in decent quantities, cannot (and should not) be arsed to worry about the finer nuances of nutrition.
Because getting enough to eat is always our first priority…
The idea is that, before we worry about nutrition (i.e., “instrumental food”) we’ve first got to HAVE food. Enough of it. Consistently.
Word. So much for that particular brand of “Less Virtuous Others” condescending, privileged BS, which has infuriated me so many times.
I’ve been poor. For a scary period of time, my parents had no income whatsoever, thanks to job loss, illness, and disability. Still, reading Michelle’s post, I was struck again by how fortunate we were to be “small town in a rural area” poor, rather than urban poor. There was a lot more fresh food readily available (and space to grow some). We were also lucky in a way to be coming from a cultural background which still pushes gadugi and sharing what you’ve got. Staying well fed is a lot easier if other people give you bags of stuff from their garden and “extras” from hunting and fishing, knowing that you’d do the same if you were able to right then. Especially with family helping a lot, we never really experienced food insecurity.*
Urban poor people don’t have the same food security safety nets, especially if they’ve been poor for a long time and most of the other people they know are in just as bad a shape. That’s a special kind of poverty, probably even harder to deal with than the “Fourth World” kind my family has found itself in.
Another excellent point from that post:
The following quote from this book sums things up nicely as it relates to what people really need when it comes to nutrition, and how nutritionists, dietitians, and social workers can best help:
Is it our role to teach the poor how to live quietly on less than minimum standards of health and decency and how to starve on minimum wage? Do we teach them how to budget malnutrition more neatly? Or is it our job to struggle for those minimum standards…?
I wouldn’t say that this concern even primarily falls on professionals, though they should certainly set their classism aside and find out what people really need. This is another area in which we need some real responsibility. While there is still this level of inequality, we do need to find/figure out what is really likely to help (and that’s not organic baby food).
One thing that you can do, on an individual level, is leaving bags of food on the doorsteps of people you know are having a hard time. Even if you do not have a lot of money yourself, you can share something. That avoids a lot of the “charity”-related awkwardness on both ends, and you know it’s getting where it needs to go. People who would be ashamed to go to a food bank or similar will benefit from this. Besides staples and fresh fruit/veggies, I have also included personal care products, herbs and spices, and a few “luxury” food items, like sweet baked goods and mushrooms–luxurious when you’re seriously poor, that is, the kind of thing that will get you filthy looks and comments when you dare to buy them with food stamps.
I am aware that I’m coming from some position of privilege here, but did come up with some suggestions on how to get enough healthy food for very little money–lots of personal experience with that, based on generations more! As Tonia Moxley half-jokingly put it, “In the Southern Appalachians, a sack of corn meal and a sack of pinto beans have sometimes been all we possess”. I tried to adapt this to urban conditions as far as possible, since there are some differences in what’s feasible. I do not want to come across as another condescending “you can do better, stupid!” voice with this. But I know very well that when you’re being worried like a rat by economic problems (and the health and other problems coming out of that), it can be hard to see anywhere near a full range of options. I doubt that many people who are in serious poverty will be reading this and picking up ideas, unfortunately. It might give some ideas to someone who’s more temporarily down on their luck, the way economic conditions are right now. This is more a mental exercise than anything else, to show that it is just about possible!
1. Buy as big a bag of beans as you think you’ll be able to afford and store. Be sure to check price per unit, but usually beans are a lot cheaper if you buy 10 lbs. or more. I’ve seen a 20-lb. bag of pintos run the same price as a 5-lb. one.
2. Do the same with rice and potatoes, and cornmeal and/or grits if you like it. Ditto for sweet potatoes. If you don’t have a car, this will take multiple trips, but you won’t have to lug more home for a while.
3. If you don’t already have one, pick up a Crock Pot (or other brand of slow cooker!). Thrift stores have them a lot, and new knockoffs are not that expensive. It’s an excellent investment, especially if you’re working all day and don’t feel like cooking when you get home. Beans are super easy to fix if you’ve got one. You can get by with a slow cooker and a microwave.
4. Look for sales on frozen and canned vegetables. Frozen ones are as nutritious as fresh, taste pretty good, and tend to be much cheaper–assuming you’ve got freezer space. When I was back in the US, Kroger kept running mix-and-match “10 for $10″ sales, which included most of their store brand frozen veggies; you may be able to find something similar. Canned is much better than nothing. Stock up on canned tomatoes, green beans, greens, etc. Consider getting a lot of cheaper fresh veggies, such as cabbage, if they’re not too ridiculously priced.
5. Buy onions, fresh or dried/powdered garlic, seasoning meat for the beans (average piece goes a long way!), good-tasting cooking fat, and whatever other seasonings you can afford right then which will help jazz up your rather limited ingredients. Again, most supermarkets have a cheap range of seasonings for $1 or less, and you can pick up a bottle a week if you have to. Also check dollar stores. Bouillon cubes or powder add a lot of flavor for not much cost.
6. Buy smaller bags of different kinds of beans, pasta, etc. as you can, for variety. Ditto for things like carrots, peppers, and celery. Also cheese, butter, etc. The last thing you need to be worrying about is using real butter and the like, which are nutritious and add a lot of needed energy to your diet.
7. Check the reduced sections of stores regularly. It’s an excellent way of picking up things like meat and fresh fruit and veggies that you couldn’t afford otherwise. Variety is good. Be flexible, and plan around what’s cheap. Soups and stews are your friends.
8. Another way of getting more fresh stuff is to ask the produce manager what they do with leftovers. Some people might be uncomfortable with this, but my stepdad got an amazing amount of free fresh stuff that way; he said it was for the rabbits, but we ate most of it. Same with day-old bread and the like. Otherwise, it would just go to waste, and a lot of people are happy just to give it away.
9. There is also the option of dumpster diving for fresh produce, baked goods, and other stuff that’s not quick to spoil. This may sound like a demeaning suggestion if you’d be doing it out of real need, but again, my stepdad did it when we had no income whatsoever for a while. I helped on the ground. It’s a sin and a shame how much useful stuff is just thrown away when so many people could get some good out of it.
10. Grow fresh food. This can be less practical in urban environments, which is why it’s so near the bottom of the list. But, if you have a sunny window, you can at least grow a potted tomato or pepper plant–or some herbs–without much time and energy required. It works OK to just save seeds out of something you eat; you may not be sure exactly what kind of tomato/pepper/whatever you’ll get, but it’ll taste a lot better than the one from the store! If you have the space, try at least one summer squash plant, which will give you an amazing amount of food. Even if you can’t grow much, this can help break the monotony some, and it just feels good to eat something you’ve grown.
Even back home in Southwest Virginia, where people have spent an awful lot of time living off dry beans, a lot of people now think of cooking them as too long and involved a process when they’re working their asses off already. They do take a while to soak and cook, but they don’t need a lot of attention while they’re doing it. With a slow cooker, they need even less attention, and can cook unattended during the day.
Before you go to bed, sort and rinse some beans and leave them to soak overnight. Drain, rinse, and put them in the slow cooker before you leave in the morning. If possible, add boiling water and let them cook on high for a while before turning the pot down to low when you leave. Add onions and other seasonings after you get home, and let it go while you cook the starchy stuff and veggies. Supper will be ready in about half an hour. There are a surprising number of variations possible with just those ingredients, and you can get a lot more variety through reduced/free stuff!
For example, you can cook your rice with fried onion, bouillon, and the veggies. You can throw frozen spinach and cumin in black beans, near the end. With a bag of cornmeal, you can quickly make bread, dumplings, or just plain mush (“polenta”, if you must *g*). You can bake potatoes in the slow cooker or microwave, beside boiling, mashing, or frying them. Make chili or curried chickpeas or other beans. You can fry an onion and add seasonings to make canned greens a lot more interesting. Or cook frozen vegetables with onion, a can of tomatoes, and some seasonings. And so on. You can figure out specifics based on your own taste and cultural background.
This approach is cheaper and much more nutritious than the cheap hamburger and white bread or pasta approach it’s temptingly easy to fall back on these days. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t suggest the “look for chicken legs on sale” approach. You can do that too–not a bad idea for variety, if you don’t mind the way $0.79/lb. chickens were raised–but it’s not the best quality food you can get for the money on a regular basis. I have been feeling a lot better overall with the older “beans and taters and greens” approach.
I’m not poor now, but still eat pretty much this way; it just makes sense to me in a lot of ways. We can just afford more extras these days, and don’t have to buy as much in bulk, which is handy with no car! It’s a shame this style of cooking has gotten a kinda bad “poverty food” reputation.
————-
* This reminds me of one paper I found interesting: Net Nutritional Success on the Great Plains: The Remarkable Heights of Equestrian Nomads in the Nineteenth Century. (There’s data on them, while if anything folks back home were taller AFAICT). Not too surprisingly, the author points to egalitarian social setups as a factor; everybody had access to a “rich and varied diet”. Also that “women were about the same height as men relative to modern height standards”; I’d add that this probably had something to do with consistently having enough food and no incentive to starve themselves or their girl children!
It is possible that greater inequality among whites adversely affected their health relative to Native Americans. Height and health are known to be sensitive to inequality.86 Hunter-gatherer and the Plains equestrian societies were known for their egalitarian practices of sharing food and shelter, and for their communal efforts in caring for the sick or wounded.87 As small communities of similar ethnic heritage where people knew each other well and misfortune was readily distinguished from shirking, sharing and helping others in need was a form of social insurance.
Fancy that!
I started reading Shinzen Young’s Break Through Pain this morning, and it got me to thinking again about something I’d wanted to write about earlier: perceived locus of control.
In psychology, locus of control refers to where you perceive control of your life circumstances as lying: within you, or outside yourself. This concept relies on the perception that there is some clear “in here” and “out there” division of the world, which is a subject of its own! Considerering that most people do view the world through this kind of duality filter, it’s a very useful concept indeed.
What got me thinking about this again, in personal terms, was recognizing that I’d been somewhat resisting starting into a course of meditation specifically for pain management, even though I’ve been having trouble dealing with chronic pain. For similar reasons, I have had trouble sticking with a DIY myotherapy/rehab routine. The conflict I’ve set up for myself here? Doing extra things when I am in pain and exhausted from it feels unfair sometimes, almost like punishment. At some level, I have also been afraid that it won’t work, and that would be something else I could be blamed for Not Trying Hard Enough with. Of course, I notice that I start blaming myself for not Doing All I Can. Not only does the pain take on a life of its own, I start feeling a need to somehow bash it into submission. In the meantime, I am still suffering from pain.
These mental scripts make no real sense, but these things rarely do. By now, they mostly start playing in my head when I’m tired and suffering from the pain. I have gotten better at recognizing them for what they are, and not buying into them. And then I realize I’ve put off acquiring a book which might help with insight. 
No, this is not directly a post about the chronic pain I’ve been experiencing on a personal level. It is about some of the suffering we can cause ourselves–and the rest of the world–through dodgy assumptions about locus of control in our lives.
On the personal level again, a lot of this struck me while dealing with my grandmother. She obviously believes that she has very little control over her own circumstances, with plenty of learned helplessness going on. Her emotional regulation is virtually nonexistent, since she does not believe she has control over her own life even to that extent. She openly blames the people around her for the problems she experiences, to the point of being very emotionally abusive; she also relies on others for validation, and will become very angry indeed when what she gets in that department does not match her unspoken expectations. She is also terrified of almost everything–from electrical appliances to fat park squirrels–and tries to gain some illusion of control over her circumstances through ritualistic obsessive-compulsive behaviors, disordered eating behaviors, passive-aggressive and otherwise manipulative dealings with other people, obsession with fighting germs, and similar. She is a very unhappy person, who strongly resists the idea that she could possibly be happier short of miracles happening around her.
I still feel somehow disloyal, describing my own grandmother’s behavior in those terms, but that’s what I see. In spite of–or possibly because of–all the the difficulties she throws up in front of the people around her, she also helped me learn compassion. The world she lives in, though it exists only in her own head, is a truly terrifying place. It may not be fun for anyone to deal with, but I can see exactly why she behaves in some of the ways she does, based on those perceptions of how things work.
It’s also not hard to see how far from unusual this approach to the world is. She takes it to extremes on an individual level, but our society deals heavily in many of the same perceptions. So do a lot of others, around the world.
The external forces controlling our lives are seen in a variety of ways, and go by a variety of names. If you’re not directly attributing events to god(s), other godlike forces will do. That’s how we get the excesses of “Good Body” asceticism (not so different from more overtly religious styles of it), brutal status quo-propping evolutionary psychology, strict biopsychiatry, orthorexia, lifestyle activism, exaggerated fearmongering, reliance on government and other institutions to “do something” by controlling other people, and authoritarianism in its many other forms.
When we don’t believe that we have much control over our lives, we are far more likely to try to assert control over what we think we might be able to. Sometimes this is cloaked in terms of appeasing the forces which are really in control. We may scapegoat other groups of people as needing to be controlled, lest something horrible happen. We may blame other people for any misfortune that befalls them–disability, poverty, etc.–in hopes that the Unknown will not take notice and do the same things to us.
V.S. Naipaul, among others, has pointed out how this has played out with control over women’s lives in Pakistan: things are not going well, God must be displeased, we must not be following the rules strictly enough, surely exerting tighter control over women will make God happy again. We can see how this is playing out now, all over the world; that is just one extreme example. Another extreme example from a couple of days ago: Pope says gay marriage threat to creation. Then there’s the Stupak madness. I could go on.
This way of thinking encourages all sorts of extremism.
We can also see how similar scapegoating keeps playing out along racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, immigrant status, physical size, age, neurological, and other lines–basically, involving any way we can set up categories based on perceived differences. We get to dissociate ourselves from the people perceived to be causing problems, while controlling/abusing/killing them in an attempt to appease whatever higher power is perceived to be making life difficult for us.
This is one of the strands of wétiko thinking which has logically led to all manner of atrocities and exploitation. John Mohawk sets it out very well in his Utopian Legacies; he illustrates how this has continued to play out for millenia, at the very least. Jack Forbes approaches this from a slightly different angle in Columbus and Other Cannibals.
The complications of a perceived external locus of control is at least implied in all of those. In typically twisted fashion, the more strongly we perceive ourselves to be split off from the rest of a crushingly powerful universe, the greater lengths we will go to in order to establish and maintain some semblance of control over something.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a lot of ways. To try to hold off the Unknown, we can set up all sorts of hierarchies and institutions so that we really do have little control over many things in our lives. Including Kaosu’s excellent example in a comment on an earlier post:
the traditional avenues of resistance (street protests, writing letters to Congress, mass movements, etc) have become totally impotent and ineffectual. There is often an extreme sense of powerlessness, and it becomes very difficult to see what else we can do on anything other than a personal level. And while I think making personal changes is a positive and necessary first step, we can’t just stop there. And have to keep asking tough questions, we have to think outside the box the system has handed us, and we have to be willing to face the frightening reality that in spite of all our “lifestyle changes” the problems persist and may be getting worse. That’s not “negative energy”, it’s just reality
This kind of system based on external control as the proper order of things encourages individuals to focus on minutiae in order to feel like they’re making a difference in their own lives, and in the wider world. Whether that is writing letters to Congress, obsessing over what we’re eating on any of a number of grounds, or doing beauty drag to be vaguely socially acceptable–people need to feel like we have some kind of control over our circumstances. The really sad and frustrating part if that these “options” offer an illusion of control, at best, while sometimes doing a lot of harm. These readily available “choices” are a very poor substitute for real freedom.
A lot of other false dichotomies are directly related to this one. Kaosu’s recent Activism and Mind/Body Dualism post goes into some similar implications, as does shiva’s Drugs, anti-psychiatry and cognitive liberty: transcending “social vs. biological” post I linked to yesterday. These delusions are interconnected. Thich Nhat Hanh, along with other Buddhist teachers, offer an awful lot to consider here.
As (the highly recommended) A Basic Call to Consciousness points out with many “real world” examples, things do not have to be this way. We do not have to keep perpetuating our own suffering, much less projecting and perpetuate it on other people.
I was just reading another thought-provoking post at Biodiverse Resistance, in which shiva offered some good observations on Drugs, anti-psychiatry and cognitive liberty: transcending “social vs. biological”. I commented there:
Some excellent points here!
In fact, as a generalised maxim, about the only thing [or class of things?] that i think is inherently “wrong” is that which is done to sentient beings without their consent. I also think that’s about the only usefully workable definition of the concept of “evil”.
Well stated. Humans have been entirely too good at creating “evil” for themselves. Trying to jam reality into a near-endless set of false dichotomies only helps with that. :/
This reminds me of Kaosu’s recent post on Activism and Mind/Body Dualism. That seems to tie in with (and help underpin) the “social”/”biological” one. People relying on these fall into very similar cognitive ruts.
From the focus I’ve taken in my blog so far, it might be easy to mistake me for one of the anti-drug True Believer crowd. What really bothers me is coercion, rigidity (on both sides of that dichotomy), and lack of true informed consent. Thus the observation that critical thinking is good, if exceedingly rare in this case.
I thought I should also clarify my thinking here.
I’m largely opposed to the way psychiatry has been operating, not because of the drugs themselves, but because of the coercion and the way pretty much all aspects of human behavior get pathologized. I get very frustrated and sad that so many people do not know that there are other options, sometimes far more effective ways of dealing with their emotional distress. I think that a lot of very understandable–and potentially useful–distress from social conditions is treated as an individual problem, to be medicated and/or talk-therapied into submission, and that this saps a lot of strength and attention away from the need for real change.
Shiva linked to a Ballastexistenz post which also deals with this: “Basically, this ‘therapism’ has taken over mainstream American culture to the point where everyday situations are becoming more and more medicalized over time, and solutions of course, are more and more individual and less and less political.”
In my own case, psychiatric medication did harm, and I have been focused here on trying to let people know that there are other options.
Like the penicillin example from my Biopsychiatry and critical thinking post, some people may well gain benefit from psychiatric medications, in certain circumstances.
The important bit? Everyone should be able to make an informed choice. Each individual person has to decide what really works for them–and have the freedom to figure this out on their own. I don’t have any more right to decide for them than someone else has to inject them with Haldol. Or to tell them horror stories about what will surely happen if they don’t do as someone else wants, which can happen on either side of this false dichotomy!
This also applies to any sort of self-medication, as another commenter there pointed out. Everybody has to evaluate risks vs. benefits for themselves–based on accurate information about the different options–and find what works for them. Look at the long-time ridiculousness and arsiness over the medicinal use of cannabis, for example of ideology trumping reason.
It’s hard to make responsible decisions if other people try to take away your capacity for informed decision making–not to mention clouding real responsibility, which is based in freedom. Even with good intentions, that can be very disabling.
For me, it all comes down to not interfering with other people’s will. Michael Garrett summed this up well in The Cherokee Full Circle:
The highest form of respect for another person is respecting his or her natural right to be self-determining. This means not interfering with another person’s ability to choose, even when it is to keep that person from doing something foolish or dangerous. Every experience holds a valuable lesson–even in death, there is valuable learning that the spirit carries forth. Noninterference means caring in a respectful way. And it is the way of “right relationship.”
Interfering with the activity of others, by way of aggression, for example, cannot and should not be encouraged or tolerated. This is not only disrespectful, but it violates the natural order of harmony and balance in which each being has to learn and experience life in his or her own way. Each person, each living being on Mother Earth, has his or her own Medicine that should not be disrupted or changed without that
person choosing it. . .“Pain” is really nothing more than the difference between what is and what we want it to be. To be respectful of all things, we often must sacrifice expectation. This is the real beauty of noninterference. It gives us the ability to release some of the things that would otherwise bind us or weigh us down and disrupt our own natural flow…Besides, what others choose is none of our business, and we should never assume that it is. This shows lack of wisdom and respect. It also shows a lack of trust in others’ ability to choose, to experience, to learn.
Here, the author is not talking about not warning someone they’re about to step off a cliff, nor failing to keep a child from toddling into a fire. If we see someone engaging in potentially harmful behavior, all we can do is point out that it might hurt them, and that there are other things they could do instead, and different ways of doing almost everything–in fact, that’s a responsibility. We have a responsibility to keep them from hurting other people through the least restrictive means. That includes the responsibility to keep other people from hurting them. We don’t have a right to stop them nor otherwise control their behavior “for their own good”.
This is another example of how pragmatism and a balanced approach to life are crucial. Otherwise, people can get snared in oppositional dualism, which just doesn’t help.
I also just found a post which illustrates some of the further lunacy inspired by Cartesian duality: The Sociopath’s Guide to the Universe. Part 2. It ties in.
My second comment to shiva’s post:
Oh yes, I have also been disturbed by the ways I’ve seen blanket anti-drug folks treat autism. Just as much so when it’s treated as somehow completely different from “mental illness”.
Just a few days ago, I got particularly frustrated by an example of cognitive dissonance there. Amongst some very reasonable observations on the “epidemic” of childhood bipolar diagnosis, the same blogger regurgitated environmental-toxin “autism epidemic” stuff. (Huh?!) The same person went on to blame childhood bipolar, ADHD, etc. diagnoses on bad parenting. Autistics are just brain damaged, apparently. Same dichotomy, only throwing in an extra dose of Us vs. Them.
Feeling very little urge to poke at a hornet’s nest in someone else’s comments, I’m not linking there!
Again, try to cram observable reality into a set of false dichotomies, you quickly get cognitive dissonance going.
I am still not linking there, because the original posts are not the important bit. Letting Divide and Conquer cloud our judgments is.
Edit: Not long after posting this, I saw a link to an excellent piece at Beyond Meds: Will Hall on psychotropic drug use, applying more pragmatism to the “is this particular choice the necessary one?”. All we can depend on is experience, and relative usefulness in a given situation.
