Forgiveness

Such bullshit! My journey to discover the meaning of life began on 13 September 1971 aboard the Dehradun Express. It was fuelled by the extra pocket money I'd received the day before, on my fifteenth birthday. My plan was simple. I'd board a train to Dehradun and engage co-passengers in solo conversations to gauge if they were intelligent enough. Then I would spring my question on them: `What do you think is the meaning of life? I would restrict my interactions to older people who were travelling alone. Those who advertised their religion would give predictable answers and were eliminated from the word go. After some thought, I zeroed in on a man chain-smoking Charminar cigarettes. These articles will take you back to the fascinating discoveries of Charcot, Janet, and Freud in nineteenth-century Europe. Tragedies are not new. They permeate human history and have been acted out onstage and written about in epic literary masterpieces. Fortunately, they were balanced with levity in comedies for fun and relief! Somehow, childhood trauma was overlooked. It was even believed that infants couldn't feel pain because their nervous systems were undeveloped. It was common practice for heart surgery to be performed without giving a baby anesthesia until the late 1970s! It was once thought that trauma was the recall of images such as flashbacks and psychotic hallucinations that were limited to catastrophic events like war, major disasters, and rape. Then, with the rise of train travel, railroad spine became a new diagnosis after the discovery that high-speed accidents left more than broken bones and bruises. The shock of the impact left healthy passengers with panic attacks and other forms of distress such as nightmares long after their physical bodies had healed. As a child, you probably were told not to show or express emotions;

We want to erase those lessons and acknowledge the fact that emotions are natural, and so are the reactions that we have to them. You need to give yourself permission to delete all of that information from your childhood so that you can reframe and adjust your mind. The first step is always to be aware and allow yourself to feel the emotion. The key is to learn to control your reactions to the emotions that you are having at that moment. Just remember to identify exactly what you are feeling, which will slowly take power away from the emotion and allow you time to process what you are feeling. This helps in terms of being in control of the way that you react to difficult or stressful situations. Do Not Try to Control Your Emotions The most important part of processing difficult emotions is to stop trying to control them, but acknowledge them and feel them at that moment. You cannot control your emotions, but you can master them and learn how to control your reactions and responses to them. Neurons are the nerves in your brain that carry messages to its various parts. They are the reason we have coherent thoughts and are able to make connections between them. If we are exposed to information enough times and take it in, we can retain untold amounts of it in our minds. Of course, plastic is a material commonly used in the creation of something that is meant to be bendable. Together, the two words add up to the idea that it is possible to ply our brains to work in the way we want them to. If you did not know of this word before, but now understand what it means, then congratulations! You have already begun to practice the concept. You read a new word, processed it in your mind, and attached a meaning to it. You have strengthened your brain and increased your knowledge. If you do not think your mind is an amazing thing that has the capacity to grow into something more powerful than you could imagine, think about this. IF YOU'RE ON THE FENCE

It's quite okay to still be on the fence about productive disagreement. The fence is a safe place to be. You can look around right now, in fact, and see how most of us spend most of our lives on the fence, waiting to figure out what we should do and when we should do it. Cynicism, futility, and frustration aren't pleasant, but they're the devil we know. Before you get too comfortable on the fence, though, let me tell you one more thing that might help nudge you to one side or the other. The choice you have is not to (a) hide emotions or (b) show them. It's more like the choice Darth Vader gave Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode V--The Empire Strikes Back: We can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy. It seems tempting, right? Order, in the case of Darth Vader's vision of the Empire, is about establishing an unbreakable power hierarchy that puts the two of them at the top and everyone else below. When it was all over, Oprah made her closing remarks. I could barely concentrate on her message. I was so in my feelings. And anyone who knows me knows that I really hate feeling feelings. But while Oprah was speaking, I was regretting the fact that my mom and I never really experienced things like this together. At best, we'd watch T. Jakes preach that good word on Sundays during our Bedside Baptist worshipping. My mom hated planes and tried her best to not travel too far outside of that little Maryland town we were from. I just kept thinking about how much my mom would have loved to be there to witness Oprah and friends. My mom and I never got a chance to do any of the really cool stuff I was being afforded since I was a now this popular blogger/writer. Systems thinkers use scientific thinking to focus on simple numbers that are relevant to one another, instead of insisting on proving their models with exact numbers.

They put their models under a lot of pressure testing. Systems thinkers want to know when and why their models fail. Barry Richmond compared traditional thinking with systems thinking when he developed the thinking tools I mentioned before. Let's go through them one more time, comparing them directly: Static thinking that focuses on specific events vs. System-as-effect thinking--which sees behavior created by a system as driven by external forces--vs. Tree-by-tree thinking--where one believes that true knowledge means distilling every detail--vs. Factors thinking--where one thinks factors are the influencers or correlations with a certain result--vs. Linear thinking--where we see causality as a one-directional process where each influencing cause is independent from the other--vs. Here fear also dominates, in that if the girl does not carry out the command there will be some punishment (you cannot go to that birthday party, no TV for a week, and so on). However, there are cases where commands are given in a very gentle way. I feel this is the best for you. I just want to help you. I have seen many girls trying to please big boss mothers, but nothing will ever be good enough. I made friends on separate occasions with all of the three couples and we had meals together during 1 or 2 days until they left for the next destination. I was watching them during our meals and concluded that they never had anything against males (I am a pretty strong character and so far the real lesbians, the ones who openly say that they were born gay, didn't really like me, but these girls really loved me). I realized that they became lesbians as an opposing reaction to their bossy mothers (some girls start having sex with anybody coming their way. When I told them that I felt that both of them had a dominating, bossy mother whom they could never please, both of the girls looked at me, looked at each other and with a relaxed smile said . It is true, how did you know? He seemed to be in his own zone, transfixed by something outside the moving train.

His face was riddled with pain. He didn't notice me settle into the empty seat across his. Do you have more cigarettes? You are a child. Aren't you ashamed to ask me for a cigarette? They are bad for you,' he said. He reminded me of my father. He, too, had one set of rules for himself and another for us children. When I had slapped a classmate who was bullying someone from a junior class, my dad reminded me that it was the wrong thing to do. However, it wasn't until soldiers began returning from the Vietnam War and the dawning of the women's movement that domestic violence, neglect, physical abuse, and sexual molestation within the family began to be acknowledged as traumatic events. Although child abuse was considered medically diagnosable in the 1960s, mandatory reporting laws were not put into effect until the 1970s. Child abuse is more common in the United States than people care to believe. More than 3. Dr Lenore Terr's groundbreaking article, Too Scared to Cry, opened our eyes once again in 1990, showing empirical evidence for the first time on how trauma affects children. Her study of the twenty-six kidnapped students from the 1976 Chowchilla school bus hijacking dramatically highlighted the long-term effects of untreated trauma. When the American Psychiatric Association finally legitimized PTS as a diagnosis in 1980, it was perceived as an irreversible disease to be treated with medication and talk therapy. And, there was no specific diagnosis for children. The advent of the twenty-first century brought a major increase in the United States of foreign and domestic terrorist attacks, school shootings, natural disasters, and mass migration. More influential than ever is mass media and now social media, with graphic images that even very young children are able to navigate. When you are aware of the fact that you have something that you need to do, this does not mean that you will actually do it, especially if something stressful happens in your life, this can override your best intentions.