am in the process of sorting through and donating some old psychology and self-help books. I intend to jot down and share some interesting tidbits I come across as I do.
Shadow Syndromes by John J. Ratey, MD, and Catherine Johnson, PhD
People who suffer from ADD cannot filter stimuli from the environment. They tend to see everything there is to see all at once.
Social chameleon, person whose mood depends on what is going on around him or her at the moment
Anger can be a strangely soothing emotion. And an organizing one.
The ability to wish is fundamental to being well. A noisy inner state degrades wishing.
Children depend upon their parents’ good cheer.
Depression silences the soul.
Of all psychiatric disorders, manic depression (bipolar disorder) is the most genetic.
Bipolar people can feel like a completely different person from one day to the next.
Swing from low to high, one experiences realism of depression, and later the self confidence of hypomania.
Anger makes us feel full, depression makes us feel empty.
Gilligan concludes all acts of violence are motivated by profound and searing feelings of shame.
Rage provides a false strength.
Reptilian brain, seat of emotion. In a trantrum emotion hijacks reason.
Person can become addicted to rage.
Clinically depressed person is not responsive to environment.
ADD mother becomes addicted to the drama of a loved one. It organizes her life.
ADDers smoke 3X more than non-ADDers.
ADD causes the most trouble between the sexes because of adult hyperactivity and inability to pay attention. ADDer can’t sit still long enough to be intimate.
ADDer has a love of rule-breaking.
ADD can disrupt the development process of establishing an identity.
The ADD adult is buffeted by the newness of things. Overly dependent on the immediate environment to stay centered.
Being a prisoner of the present, the ADD adult loses the capacity to wish.
Seinfeld, an OCD world -- only funny. Obsessed with scenarios that should not be as threatening as they are made out to be. Primal emotion of shame involved.
OCD sufferer lives in a state of near panic.
---------------
there is a lot of wisdom there. thanks for sharing. the bipolar stuff is, sadly, right on the money. i'm grateful for the shining of the light on ADD. i find people with this disorder challenging. but i'm sure they see me the same way. and my manias probably clash with their hyperactivity. we probably bounce off each other. thanks for helping me towards that insight.
Theodora, thanks for sharing on this stuff. I used to buy a self-help or psych book always thinking all I needed was this one good and intense read and I would find out what was psychologically ailing me and ... voila ... I would be all fixed.
Don't ask how many I have collected.
But at least buying them showed i had hope and that wishfulness, at least some, mentioned in the notes above.
I think what was poignant for me today (wrestling with ADD without the H -- hyperactivity and with complex-PTSD, being an adult child of an alcoholic father and a borderline personality mother and whatever other shadow symptoms are lurking about in me) is that thing about the capacity to wish above.
PTSD has four dimensions, capacity to suddenly regress into a childlike vulnerability by being emotionally ambushed by someone or something threatening, psychic numbing, hypervigilance and survival guilt.
I think survival guilt leashes one to one's parents' pain and away from letting oneself dream, wish, visualize and explore. One feels one cannot reach for a level of happiness that one's own parents or significant others were not capable of.
And wishing cultivates a healthy ability to become disciplined, delay gratification, and build toward a future and break free from an unhealthy enmeshment with others or with a troubled past itself.
best, libby
Don't ask how many I have collected.
But at least buying them showed i had hope and that wishfulness, at least some, mentioned in the notes above.
I think what was poignant for me today (wrestling with ADD without the H -- hyperactivity and with complex-PTSD, being an adult child of an alcoholic father and a borderline personality mother and whatever other shadow symptoms are lurking about in me) is that thing about the capacity to wish above.
PTSD has four dimensions, capacity to suddenly regress into a childlike vulnerability by being emotionally ambushed by someone or something threatening, psychic numbing, hypervigilance and survival guilt.
I think survival guilt leashes one to one's parents' pain and away from letting oneself dream, wish, visualize and explore. One feels one cannot reach for a level of happiness that one's own parents or significant others were not capable of.
And wishing cultivates a healthy ability to become disciplined, delay gratification, and build toward a future and break free from an unhealthy enmeshment with others or with a troubled past itself.
best, libby
I know many people here, who desperately need these books, but they would NEVER put claim to them, because they are afraid to admit that they NEED them.
-R-
-R-
Mark, thanks for your continuing support on this stuff as well as the political stuff.
I realized after I posted my comment above, the term is "survivor guilt", not survival guilt. Ooops.
Before the politics got into my blood so to speak, psychology did. I was coping with surviving dysfunctional family conditioning. Re politics I now am focusing on surviving a dysfunctional NATIONAL family -- sick sick sick! Lots of parallels re denial, learned helplessness, minimization, Stockholm Syndrome, battered victim syndrome, narcissism, toxic-group-think, power and control addiction, gambling, codependency, etc. You get the idea!
best, libby
I realized after I posted my comment above, the term is "survivor guilt", not survival guilt. Ooops.
Before the politics got into my blood so to speak, psychology did. I was coping with surviving dysfunctional family conditioning. Re politics I now am focusing on surviving a dysfunctional NATIONAL family -- sick sick sick! Lots of parallels re denial, learned helplessness, minimization, Stockholm Syndrome, battered victim syndrome, narcissism, toxic-group-think, power and control addiction, gambling, codependency, etc. You get the idea!
best, libby
Thanks for this list. I never thought about the ability to wish. I'm going to watch for that. There is always hope.
soon no teacher was ready for the student, each phrase a possibility toward 1m light years of conjecture, the lot of it used to conform the aberrant '60's crowd-their predecessors, prodigy-in ordered reactions. Impulsive consumers smiling well aligned, behaving, precise statistical a-lie-nation, no betterment of man, more anticipated group speak and stiff arms; better not to think, I wish I were, exceptional.
Highly rated LLL. The full book, please. You know on this day in history, I seem to recall music improved.
Highly rated LLL. The full book, please. You know on this day in history, I seem to recall music improved.
I've never read much about these conditions so thanks for providing a look at something with which I was unfamiliar. Quite a bit about anger and rage.
"Reptilian brain, seat of emotion..." Actually most emotions originate in the Limbric Region of the human brain. The Reptilian complex is the origin of territorial impulse hence "fight or flight." R&R ;-)
Life is complicated. I don't think labelling behaviours is helpful. The fit may not be that good. R.
zanelle -- thanks for commenting, this particular book was thick, so my random and eclectic list inadequately skims over the depths the authors got into. Those comments were ones that jumped out at me with my own issues and interests. I appreciate that you and some of my os friends are willing to follow me down this particular short path of this focus.
Life can be an awesome adventure but sometimes it becomes a confusing and stressed out beyond belief gauntlet ... sometimes those gauntlet periods happen when we are innocent and impressionable and endure trauma. And when we have opportunities for the beautiful adventure of life we are shaken and reactive still to "gauntlet" mode. Guerilla fighter mode internally.
Dr. Phil talks about 9 or so basic defining moments in every person's life which set up a belief system for one that has incredible power in one's adult perspective and conduct. They can be responsible for at times irrational and automatic reactions that emerge later in life and can sabotage ease in living when negative. These defining moments can be toxic and invalidating to a child's spirit and then the adult has a tough time becoming aware of and turning a troubling belief system around from his or her early days of super stress. In the 12 step rooms people talk about our "defense mechanisms" as children can easily become our character defects as adults. Trust issues. Communication issues. Negative self talk.
Some things as the serenity prayer advises we have to accept what we can't change, but some things we can, and we need to measure when we are stuck in a diminishing returns scenario and when is courage called for to break through and take care of business.
A big part of the sabotaging conditioning of trauma as children is to become overly re-active to life experiences and not embrace our own potential empowerment and be pro-active.
Apparently, when elephants in captivity are young they are tethered by ropes around one leg to an object so they won't escape. The tethering continues as the elephant grows. An adult elephant could easily escape the tethering but does not even try because it does not believe it can do so because of its helplessness when young. It has been conditioned to not realize its own true power.
best, libby
Life can be an awesome adventure but sometimes it becomes a confusing and stressed out beyond belief gauntlet ... sometimes those gauntlet periods happen when we are innocent and impressionable and endure trauma. And when we have opportunities for the beautiful adventure of life we are shaken and reactive still to "gauntlet" mode. Guerilla fighter mode internally.
Dr. Phil talks about 9 or so basic defining moments in every person's life which set up a belief system for one that has incredible power in one's adult perspective and conduct. They can be responsible for at times irrational and automatic reactions that emerge later in life and can sabotage ease in living when negative. These defining moments can be toxic and invalidating to a child's spirit and then the adult has a tough time becoming aware of and turning a troubling belief system around from his or her early days of super stress. In the 12 step rooms people talk about our "defense mechanisms" as children can easily become our character defects as adults. Trust issues. Communication issues. Negative self talk.
Some things as the serenity prayer advises we have to accept what we can't change, but some things we can, and we need to measure when we are stuck in a diminishing returns scenario and when is courage called for to break through and take care of business.
A big part of the sabotaging conditioning of trauma as children is to become overly re-active to life experiences and not embrace our own potential empowerment and be pro-active.
Apparently, when elephants in captivity are young they are tethered by ropes around one leg to an object so they won't escape. The tethering continues as the elephant grows. An adult elephant could easily escape the tethering but does not even try because it does not believe it can do so because of its helplessness when young. It has been conditioned to not realize its own true power.
best, libby
james, interesting comment! I particularly appreciate "a-lie-nation".
We try to peel the onion of self-knowledge as individuals and we as a national community need those onion-peelers to reality and truth to help us as a collective national family fight back against not only economic but spiritual oppression -- a major tool of the oppressors is an amoral media that directs what is okay for us millions to focus on and what is to be collectively ignored or minimized and what disinformation needs to be embraced against our own interests and/or those of the rest of humanity.
It will be good to explore some of the essences among my mass collection of psych books each one devoured so eagerly long ago and ready to be passed along.
Alice Miller's books are incredible in writing poignantly and insightfully about trauma in childhood as well as collectively-embraced traumatizing belief systems of entire generations and/or countries that suffer and spread a "poisonous pedagogy" in which toxic conditioning of children flourishes and is passed on by its victims to the next generation of victims re over-identification with dangerous sociopathic aggressors. If you don't pass it back you pass it on. She particularly focuses on how Hitler came to power, what was there in the German culture that encouraged that.
When there was finally overwhelming protest about the Vietnam War there was collective maturation of the citizenry against toxic military industrial brainwashing group think. Too bad over 3 million violent deaths was it had to happen before American citizen "critical mass" pushed back against a deranged collective American exceptionalism EGO. Even Walter Cronkite finally said, ENOUGH.
Now our media is so fully captured by sociopathic corporatism the push back is so much harder. Grass-roots organization for truth and justice and humanitarianism has to fight mass media that ignores its accumulating forces and won't help with moral and realistic consciousness raising. Media encourages our consumer identity and discourages our citizen identity. best, libby
We try to peel the onion of self-knowledge as individuals and we as a national community need those onion-peelers to reality and truth to help us as a collective national family fight back against not only economic but spiritual oppression -- a major tool of the oppressors is an amoral media that directs what is okay for us millions to focus on and what is to be collectively ignored or minimized and what disinformation needs to be embraced against our own interests and/or those of the rest of humanity.
It will be good to explore some of the essences among my mass collection of psych books each one devoured so eagerly long ago and ready to be passed along.
Alice Miller's books are incredible in writing poignantly and insightfully about trauma in childhood as well as collectively-embraced traumatizing belief systems of entire generations and/or countries that suffer and spread a "poisonous pedagogy" in which toxic conditioning of children flourishes and is passed on by its victims to the next generation of victims re over-identification with dangerous sociopathic aggressors. If you don't pass it back you pass it on. She particularly focuses on how Hitler came to power, what was there in the German culture that encouraged that.
When there was finally overwhelming protest about the Vietnam War there was collective maturation of the citizenry against toxic military industrial brainwashing group think. Too bad over 3 million violent deaths was it had to happen before American citizen "critical mass" pushed back against a deranged collective American exceptionalism EGO. Even Walter Cronkite finally said, ENOUGH.
Now our media is so fully captured by sociopathic corporatism the push back is so much harder. Grass-roots organization for truth and justice and humanitarianism has to fight mass media that ignores its accumulating forces and won't help with moral and realistic consciousness raising. Media encourages our consumer identity and discourages our citizen identity. best, libby
abra, thanks for your comment and encouragement! So many years ago as a young adult I visited my first therapist and early on he said to me "Why do you keep focusing on your father's drinking? What on earth does that have to do with YOUR problems?" GOOD GOD!!! But times thank God have changed. There was big cognitive dissonance dealing with those sessions, but it was a beginning for me at least -- to begin to dare to face down something was desperately wrong with me and with my family system (I was becoming more and more depressed and enmeshed in my parents' extraordinary pain -- I felt like a prisoner of war in their marriage while my peers were passing into their own adult lives) and with the importance of letting out toxic secrets that would give me perspective and self-acceptance and self-compassion.
Many years after that first therapist I entered the 12 step rooms, first in Adult Children of Alcoholics, and was dismayed at the honesty and also at times the intense anger about childhood stress and events. I was REPELLED at first. Those poor people were so angry and did not have the happy childhood I was lucky enough to have had. But I was hooked and fascinated and slowly began to recognize similar scenarios that I had numbed myself to and they were un-numbing me as they unnumbed themselves. (And there were beautiful experiences and character building in my childhood, don't get me wrong -- my parents were wonderful but stressed out and thus troubled and wounded people, but there was a lot of pain and stress and spiritually oppressive and physically and psychologically threatening situations.)
Anyway, I kept going back to the rooms with those icky, angry people, even though for a while I kept assuring myself there was nothing for me there. There was. A realization that my dark and sad secrets were not unique and there was massive enlightenment to be had. That a lot of my self-anger and shame and confusion and frustration was keeping me locked in pain. Bill Wilson, founder of AA, was right, that people who have survived and recovered from physical (like alcohol) and process (like codependency) addictions are perfect mentors and teachers for those taking on a conscious struggle to overcome them.
I hoped reading and learning would make it easy to "fix" myself, but slogging one's way to recover isn't that easy. Sustained consciousness and will and courage and relating to people despite the Groundhog Day repetitions of less than mature scenarios is required along with the reading. And like peeling the onion, there are always more layers to be gone through. After years in the 12 step rooms, varying dimensions of them, I realized there was still something major, a puzzle piece, eluding me. Only relatively recently have I come face to face with my mother's border-line personality reality that alters all the framing I did of the stress of my dad's alcoholism being the core source of family pain and so many of my own challenges coping with the world and myself.
Being emotionally "dis-eased" meaning simply not being at "ease". And my recognition that so many of us are impression-managing our outer selves in the world while fighting a harsh inner fight for maturity and functionality and serenity and bliss. And often treating ourselves like a counselor in a book once said like a roommate we don't like!
One of my issues was and still is but not as intense at times having a glass jaw with authority or with anyone expressing anger or discomfort with me, legitimate or not, friend or foe, and my profound over-reaction to it. I was overwhelmed with shame and terror as a kid and still it can be like a trap-door opens beneath me and I lose my sense of an adult self. I go into fight, flight or freeze as jmac references reaction. Terror and shame inappropriate for someone at my age. I also conditionally assume and must fight the irrationality of it that the end has been reached, and instead recognize that it is merely an opportunity for important communication which can in most cases enhance my capacity for emotional intimacy with the other person.
The threat of a troubled parent alcoholic or borderline did not offer opportunities for healthy conflict resolution growing up and often in childhood scenarios asserting one's will and going through those maturing stages of needed life passages was just not bottom-line safe. One's will was the ENEMY of the parent, because it inconvenienced their own intense struggles for control and peace.
I read somewhere that saying "no" is "the cornerstone of identity." You can't say yes to life until you have learned to say no. Have boundaries. When toddlers go through that "no" period, the terrible twos, it is important for them to feel that rush of autonomy, begin to build on that. But when you grow up in an environment in which those early "nos" can not exist and later in adolescence when that necessary rebellious stage comes up again but is whammied unhealthily with near zero tolerance a child is robbed of a minimal sense of existential security even then to expand as a human spirit and being, and serious spiritual stifling has begun and necessary growth experiences are not gone through in a timely way.
As for anger and rage, someone in the rooms once told me that he thought "anger" that was emanating from ex-children of alcoholics and of coaddicts (that is important, too, the anger at the codependent parent) was a CONVERSION process that if one was lucky and earnestly consciousness raised one wouldn't stay stuck in but would pass through. Going through the necessary five stages of grief. Anger being a necessary one of them.
I think that is why there is focus on a Higher Power in the 12 step rooms. One is encouraged to take an inventory of one's parents' character defects, and then one gets to be brave enough to get through denial on one's own conditioned defects which are harder facing down. The ego has to let down its guard. And as one breaks through denial of one's parents as troubled and more toxic than one thought and to eventually forgive them for their conditioning one is encouraged to think of a Higher Power as the perfect and unconditionally loving and accepting super-parent of both you and your own parents and others. It helped and helps me still. And slowly those in recovery begin to shift their self-talk from a bullying prosecutor to a benign self-parent.
Listen to me go on and on! I guess I need to review it if I am gushing forth with it to you and others.
Thanks for listening, my friend!!!
best, libby
Many years after that first therapist I entered the 12 step rooms, first in Adult Children of Alcoholics, and was dismayed at the honesty and also at times the intense anger about childhood stress and events. I was REPELLED at first. Those poor people were so angry and did not have the happy childhood I was lucky enough to have had. But I was hooked and fascinated and slowly began to recognize similar scenarios that I had numbed myself to and they were un-numbing me as they unnumbed themselves. (And there were beautiful experiences and character building in my childhood, don't get me wrong -- my parents were wonderful but stressed out and thus troubled and wounded people, but there was a lot of pain and stress and spiritually oppressive and physically and psychologically threatening situations.)
Anyway, I kept going back to the rooms with those icky, angry people, even though for a while I kept assuring myself there was nothing for me there. There was. A realization that my dark and sad secrets were not unique and there was massive enlightenment to be had. That a lot of my self-anger and shame and confusion and frustration was keeping me locked in pain. Bill Wilson, founder of AA, was right, that people who have survived and recovered from physical (like alcohol) and process (like codependency) addictions are perfect mentors and teachers for those taking on a conscious struggle to overcome them.
I hoped reading and learning would make it easy to "fix" myself, but slogging one's way to recover isn't that easy. Sustained consciousness and will and courage and relating to people despite the Groundhog Day repetitions of less than mature scenarios is required along with the reading. And like peeling the onion, there are always more layers to be gone through. After years in the 12 step rooms, varying dimensions of them, I realized there was still something major, a puzzle piece, eluding me. Only relatively recently have I come face to face with my mother's border-line personality reality that alters all the framing I did of the stress of my dad's alcoholism being the core source of family pain and so many of my own challenges coping with the world and myself.
Being emotionally "dis-eased" meaning simply not being at "ease". And my recognition that so many of us are impression-managing our outer selves in the world while fighting a harsh inner fight for maturity and functionality and serenity and bliss. And often treating ourselves like a counselor in a book once said like a roommate we don't like!
One of my issues was and still is but not as intense at times having a glass jaw with authority or with anyone expressing anger or discomfort with me, legitimate or not, friend or foe, and my profound over-reaction to it. I was overwhelmed with shame and terror as a kid and still it can be like a trap-door opens beneath me and I lose my sense of an adult self. I go into fight, flight or freeze as jmac references reaction. Terror and shame inappropriate for someone at my age. I also conditionally assume and must fight the irrationality of it that the end has been reached, and instead recognize that it is merely an opportunity for important communication which can in most cases enhance my capacity for emotional intimacy with the other person.
The threat of a troubled parent alcoholic or borderline did not offer opportunities for healthy conflict resolution growing up and often in childhood scenarios asserting one's will and going through those maturing stages of needed life passages was just not bottom-line safe. One's will was the ENEMY of the parent, because it inconvenienced their own intense struggles for control and peace.
I read somewhere that saying "no" is "the cornerstone of identity." You can't say yes to life until you have learned to say no. Have boundaries. When toddlers go through that "no" period, the terrible twos, it is important for them to feel that rush of autonomy, begin to build on that. But when you grow up in an environment in which those early "nos" can not exist and later in adolescence when that necessary rebellious stage comes up again but is whammied unhealthily with near zero tolerance a child is robbed of a minimal sense of existential security even then to expand as a human spirit and being, and serious spiritual stifling has begun and necessary growth experiences are not gone through in a timely way.
As for anger and rage, someone in the rooms once told me that he thought "anger" that was emanating from ex-children of alcoholics and of coaddicts (that is important, too, the anger at the codependent parent) was a CONVERSION process that if one was lucky and earnestly consciousness raised one wouldn't stay stuck in but would pass through. Going through the necessary five stages of grief. Anger being a necessary one of them.
I think that is why there is focus on a Higher Power in the 12 step rooms. One is encouraged to take an inventory of one's parents' character defects, and then one gets to be brave enough to get through denial on one's own conditioned defects which are harder facing down. The ego has to let down its guard. And as one breaks through denial of one's parents as troubled and more toxic than one thought and to eventually forgive them for their conditioning one is encouraged to think of a Higher Power as the perfect and unconditionally loving and accepting super-parent of both you and your own parents and others. It helped and helps me still. And slowly those in recovery begin to shift their self-talk from a bullying prosecutor to a benign self-parent.
Listen to me go on and on! I guess I need to review it if I am gushing forth with it to you and others.
Thanks for listening, my friend!!!
best, libby
"I realized after I posted my comment above, the term is "survivor guilt", not survival guilt. Ooops."
The essence of the post still gets is clear.
The essence of the post still gets is clear.
jmac, that "reptilian" brain labeling makes me shudder it is so bluntly put. We all have that part. Knowing it gets triggered under undue stress is helpful. "Territorial impulse' is also a useful label! The "territorial imperative" I once heard referenced somewhere. Thanks. I eventually learned about THREE responses: fight, flight or FREEZE. I think the third was my usual growing up. Deer before the headlights. And the "freeze" happens still. The "hypervigilance" and "psychic numbing" and "infant state" of PTSD. I also realized that breaking through denial about family conditioning brought up extra pain. Was the numb state preferable -- I often thought that in the early days of those 12 step meetings. I decided it was a pain like the tingling pain of frost bite, a necessary pain, as the life returns to one's extremities, you need to go through the pain to get the LIFE back. But it is not a short journey, and all the onion-peeling along the way. It is one helluva huge onion! best, libby
Lyle, thanks. You make a good point. Sometimes with all the books I felt like one of those young med students who thinks they have every new disease they are studying about. After so many years of therapy, 12 step groups and reading I was stunned to recognize so late in the game the borderline stuff. That knocked me over and showed me how strong denial really can be.
I never trusted medication which may have been a huge loss for me at times but I think I was distrusting of "authority" even one educated to help those of us suffering so. And i do believe in genetic pass alongs in terms of depression, etc,., but i believe a lot of it is nurture not nature -- Alice Miller's "trauma theory" is basic and simple and makes sense. They say that after the blitz in London in WWII the kids who had trouble recovering from that trauma were not the kids who saw the worst violence but the kids who weren't allowed to process the horror and talk about it and receive comfort, they were told to get over it and keep a stiff upper lip, etc.
Finding out I belonged to a legion of adult children of alcoholics all fighting the good fight to recover was a real boost. And in those days we called non-ACOAs "civilians". Hah! That identification with "survivors" rather than thinking of oneself as a lone and confused "victim" helped enormously.
best, libby
I never trusted medication which may have been a huge loss for me at times but I think I was distrusting of "authority" even one educated to help those of us suffering so. And i do believe in genetic pass alongs in terms of depression, etc,., but i believe a lot of it is nurture not nature -- Alice Miller's "trauma theory" is basic and simple and makes sense. They say that after the blitz in London in WWII the kids who had trouble recovering from that trauma were not the kids who saw the worst violence but the kids who weren't allowed to process the horror and talk about it and receive comfort, they were told to get over it and keep a stiff upper lip, etc.
Finding out I belonged to a legion of adult children of alcoholics all fighting the good fight to recover was a real boost. And in those days we called non-ACOAs "civilians". Hah! That identification with "survivors" rather than thinking of oneself as a lone and confused "victim" helped enormously.
best, libby
thanks, Mark! :-)
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