Saturday 6 June 2020

Block the bully and update your privacy settings

He told us through tears that he missed hearing her voice as much as we did. And that moment of great sadness in listening to Lauren's clear, strong singing voice, and the clip of her eliciting their baby boy's belly laughter as she described her joy, served to underline not only the enormity of our shared loss but also just how tragic the whole situation truly was. A baby without his mother, a husband without his young wife, two parents without their only child. The layers were thick and dark. Like the sweetness of that phantom whiff of baking, the very real smell of spring lilacs in the air alleviated our heaviness in the first days of mourning. If we completely psychologized away this religious element, we would be unable to appreciate the power with which Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote their dramas and even unable to understand what they are talking about. Aeschylus and Sophocles and the other dramatists could write great tragedies because of the religious dimensions of the myths, which gave a structural undergirding to their belief in the dignity of the race and the meaning of its destiny. The panel consisted of such insightful and stimulating persons as Joyce Carol Oates, Gregory Bate-son, and William Irwin Thompson. The audience was made up of seven or eight hundred eager individuals, expectantly set for an interesting discussion at the very least. In his opening remarks, the chairman emphasized the theme that the possibilities of the human being are unlimited. But strange to say, there seemed, as the meeting went on, to be no problems to discuss. The vast vacuum filling the room was felt by both the panel and the audience alike. All the exciting issues that the participants on the panel had approached so eagerly had mysteriously vanished. As the discussion limped along to the end of an almost fruitless evening, the common question seemed to be: What had gone wrong? I propose that the statement, human possibilities are unlimited is de-energizing. Often, your body may need to vomit. If that's the case, drink clear liquids to restore hydration, preferably sports drinks or other fluids that also restore lost salt. Nausea can be quelled through natural remedies such as chewing ginger or sipping ginger tea. essential oils offers another way. WHAT essential oils CAN DO: As early as the mid-1970s, researchers began exploring coffee products to address the nausea and vomiting that accompanies chemotherapy.

First trying caffeine, scientists found that it interacted with the endocannabinoid system's CB1 receptors--in the brain, gastrointestinal tract, and inner ear--to reduce the unwanted effects. More recent research finds that essential oils may help stabilize the off-beat feeling through 5HT1 receptors. One explanation is that it may block nausea-prompting serotonin released by these receptors. Sufferers of chronic nausea may be anxiety-ridden, knowing what's just around the corner. That, in turn, becomes one more trigger. Though Sigmund Freud typically gets credit for identifying the list of defenses we use today, another Freud deserves this distinction--his daughter, Anna. Her straightforward and groundbreaking manual, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, stimulated a shift in the field to understanding and categorizing the creative ways people ward off anxiety and conflict. Anna Freud, a psychoanalyst who began her career as a schoolteacher, found that engaging children in play helped them to express and work through fears and difficulties in their lives. It was through these play sessions that she noticed the defense of identification with the aggressor at work. In her work, Freud discussed a play session she had with a boy the day after he ran headlong into the threatening fist of his teacher. The boy had transformed his tearstained countenance of the previous day and came to her very erect and dressed in full armor, complete with toy sword and pistol. She observed, By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat. By aligning oneself with the aggressor, perhaps even becoming a groupie, we put ourselves in a safer position--on the side of power. According to Anna Freud, this defense is one of the ego's most potent weapons in its dealings with external objects which arouse its anxiety. Freud published her analysis just two years before the threat of Nazism forced her, with her eighty-two-year-old father and family, to flee their home in Vienna. She became a sought-after consultant to farms and zoos. She seemed to possess a sixth sense for the inner lives of the animals she dealt with and a remarkable power to calm them down. She herself felt that she had reached a point where she could imagine the thought processes of these various animals. This was based both on her intense scientific investigations and a great deal of thinking inside their minds. She determined, for instance, that animals' memory and thinking is largely driven by images and other sense traces.

Animals are more than capable of learning, but their reasoning process cycles through images. Although we might find it hard to imagine such thinking, before the invention of language we reasoned in a similar way. The distance between humans and animals is not nearly as great as we like to believe, and this connection fascinated her. With cattle, she could read their moods by the movement of their ears, the look in their eyes, the tension she could feel through their skin. In studying the brain dynamics of cattle, she had the strange feeling that they resembled people with autism in many ways. Even though we knew for a fact that the best part of our lives was ending, life began anew around us in the form of blossoms erupting on branches throughout a city known for its trees, flowers and landscaped beauty. I recall taking breaks during the preparation for Lauren's cremation and her memorial and strolling across the street from the funeral home to a little park dotted with fragrant trees. As I gathered the perfumed purple masses into my hands and pulled them to my face to take in their scent, I asked Rob how the world could be so beautiful and so awful. His answer? It always has been. Life itself. So much beauty, and so unimaginably awful. More than once on a long drive to or from Ottawa, I told Rob that had she died in the grey darkness of November, I don't think I could have survived it. The hope of spring helped carry me through that May. Now, though, May is a month so rife with razor-edged memories--not to mention the full weight of Mother's Day, whatever that's supposed to be to me now--that it brings more sadness than hope. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. You can only stand up and sing hallelujah and then go home. Every problem will sooner or later be overcome by these unlimited possibilities; Contrary to the chairman's intention, statements like his actually terrorize the listener: it is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing him out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, The sky's the limit. The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapably real limit is also the bottom of the ocean.

In these notes I shall explore the hypothesis that limits are not only unavoidable in human life, they are also valuable. I shall also discuss the phenomenon that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them. To begin with, there is the inescapable physical limitation of death. We can postpone our death slightly, but nevertheless each of us will die and at some future time unknown to and unpredictable by us. Sickness is another limit. In these cases, studies show that essential oils helps with the release of serotonin to deliver a calming, antianxiety force. Inhaled: vaporizing pen to quickly ease acute symptoms. A neurodegenerative disease begins in the brain. For unexplained reasons, neurons, or nerve cells, in the area called the basal ganglia degenerate; Unlike other cells, neurons don't reproduce, so once they are damaged or die, a person loses motor and mental function. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or Huntington's may follow. Symptoms for Parkinson's begin with lack of muscle control. A person may feel a tremor in a hand, which may progress to both hands, and then to their arms, legs, and head. While it may run in families, it may also be the result of environmental toxins or a severe disease like encephalitis. As it progresses, it may be accompanied by dementia. Jewish psychoanalysts had a painful front seat to the defensive management of victimhood. Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, imprisoned in a concentration camp, observed the ways that some Jewish prisoners identified with the Nazi guards. For example, he noticed that if an ornament or button fell off a guard's uniform, these targeted prisoners would wear or hold the item in a pocket--eager to share in a piece of the power. Some prisoners also became informants, or even executioners, on behalf of the Nazis. While there is a wide chasm between a verbally or emotionally abusive coach and a Nazi guard, both hold power and both arouse anxiety in those they lead.

In the extreme, betraying oneself may seem the only way to save one's own life. In both cases, standing by that authority allows the threatened individual to move away from anxiety and toward the source of power. Preserving the Bond Anna Freud's theory accounts for the self-protective function of siding with the bully. Better to be the aggressor than the victim. A scan of her own brain revealed that she possessed fear centers that were three times larger than normal. She always had to manage higher levels of anxiety than most other people, and she would see continual threats in the environment. Cattle, as prey species, were continually on guard and anxious. Perhaps her own enlarged fear center, she reasoned, was a throwback to the deep past, when humans were prey as well. These reactions are now largely blocked or hidden to us, but because of her autism, her brain had retained this ancient trait. She noticed other similarities between cattle and people with autism, such as the dependence on habit and routine. Thinking in this way led her back to her early interest in the psychology behind autism, and to deepening studies of the neuroscience involved. Her condition as someone who had emerged from autism to a career in science gave her a unique perspective on the subject. As she had done with animals, she could explore it both from the outside (science) and the inside (empathy). She could read about the latest discoveries on autism and relate them to her own experiences. But I do believe it will get easier. These are still early times, after all. That evening, after the memorial, we gathered at our hotel restaurant and bar on the outskirts of the city with a few close friends and co-workers who'd driven from Toronto to be with us on this difficult day. We ate a bit of dinner and shared a few inappropriate but blessedly welcome laughs. You can always count on radio people to make you laugh under the worst circumstances;

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