Month: March 2012

When I Feel The Lowest

Apart from a major freakout at 4:45 am a few weeks ago when my brain finally let go of the possibility that my dad was just on vacation somewhere and accepted that he had died, I feel the absolute worst after I workout.

This makes sense because I train really hard and do not to take long rest periods. I’m burning through a bunch of sugar which paradoxically is needed to keep the brain going. Once the blood sugar level drops, the emotional system takes over and my ability to manage my thoughts begins to degrade. I leave the gym crying 100% of the time now. Not sure if people ever get used to seeing a grown man cry, but since I’m not pretending to be a grown-up, they are free to not get used to it. But the emotion needs to be burned out and given my emotional affect, it could be a very long time before that happens.

I really miss my dad like crazy. This is now the longest that I have gone without talking to him and with each day it doesn’t really get any easier, just different. Dead is really gone, not gone like yesterday, it’s gone like my youth.

Food, exercise and sleep are all better than they have been in a very long time so I can only imagine the bag of toys I’d be if I was still just scraping by feeding on the bottom. This is probably a brighter hell than it would have been a few months ago.

Great pdf About Coping With Fears After A Traumatic Event

GoodLife Fitness is a big organization that has a vested interest in keeping their staff healthy and happy. As one of the Canada’s biggest employers they have a strong HR team that work tirelessly to help each of us excel at whatever role we play within the organization. To this end, I’ve reached out to them in an effort to get something to help me move through this transitional phase of my life as quickly and smoothly as possible.

I found a document on their intranet sites that is also available online publicly – Coping With Fears Following A Traumatic Event {NOTE – the original link is no longer active}. Below is an interesting section that helped me feel a little more normal today.

Coping with fear and anxiety after a trauma
It’s normal to feel fearful for weeks, months, or even years after a trauma. If you experienced a personal tragedy or hardship, such as the death of a loved one, difficult emotions can feel even more intense. Here are some ways to cope:

·  Remember that most people are not quite themselves after a trauma. It’s normal to experience some or all of the following symptoms for some time following a trauma:
– sadness and crying
– inability to concentrate
– fear and anxiety
– sleep problems
– distressing dreams
– a general sense of uneasiness
– outbursts of anger
– depression
– irritability

·  Realize that your mood and feelings may be intense and constantly changing. You may be more irritable than usual or your mood may change dramatically from one day to the next.

I’m not going crazy. Watching someone you love die is likely one of the harder things a human being will have to go through. Being both a human and not a rock, life happens as a blur. Trauma is an acute thing, as is my response to it. There are things that can be done to mitigate it from become a chronic issue, but while it is happening, it is real and very piercing.

I have fixed my diet, started exercising again, eliminated a lot of the habits that weren’t doing me any good and worked on establishing my boundaries as an individual and as a member of my family. It is really hard to see my mom cry, it’s really hard to be sad around her as she has lost her husband and best friend of more than 40 years. Theirs was a love that lasted exactly forever for my dad and will burn on for the rest of my mom’s life. There are thoughts going through my head when she is crying and talking about the loss that I almost feel horrible for having, but I have to keep reminding myself that her grief is hers to work-through. It’s a conscious decision that requires a lot of mental energy to not internalize and try to fix. I’m not a bad son for not trying to fix it.

There is actually nothing I can do to fix it.

Admittedly, I’m a little scared for the future, not for the recovery from my dad’s passing, but for the future grief that I will experience. But with the help of my performance coaches, therapist, doctor, family and friends, and myself, I’ll learn how to move through these traumas more effectively and hopefully remain intact when the next one hits.

GoodLife Fitness is a good organization when you get right down to it. Their policies are for service and profit, but when one of their team hits the wall or the bottom, their HR policies supersede those about money and they are there to help them regain their footing. It isn’t about engendering loyalty, it’s about restoring quality and passion.

The Most Astounding Fact – Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson tells us what he thinks the most astounding fact is.

It is without a doubt one of the most important facts that sentient beings need to keep in mind when they float through life.

Matter has not been created in billions of years yet life begins and ends, over and over and over again, with these same molecules.

When I speak of reincarnation, THIS is what I speak about. Our spirit returns in the form of the material that once made us in our current and past forms. Sometimes we get lucky and a lot of the same material is used and we are old souls with wisdom beyond our present years. Other times we are just a small piece of them and need to learn the lessons again.

And one day, one day very soon, our pieces will all return to the mass of molecules that has the potential to become, ANYTHING. Until then, well, we get to choose what we become.

“I Can’t Make Your Feel Anything”

I was chatting with Leigh, an old girlfriend from university a few weeks ago at my fathers service, and the topic moved towards what did we learn from each other that carried with us? I try to mine smart people for gems of information and wasn’t expecting her to say anything other than “I was young once and didn’t mind wasting time having fun” but she floored me with something that I had forgotten I had said.

I had done something that she found really frustrating – I have no idea what it was and it probably doesn’t matter much. She said “you are making me feel so angry” to which I replied “I can’t make you feel anything.”

What struck me as profound about her mentioning this is that Leigh has three degrees, works as a educational psychologist and she said that she has given this piece of information out to a number of people though out the years. She never mentioned that it was to any of her clients so I’ll assume that it was just her friends and people in a non-therapeutic setting. I, however, have and will say this to my coaching clients and basically anyone who needs to see themselves as the source of their own emotional state of mind vs. holding other people responsible for their pain.

As I turn the corner and close off my Childhood I see and feel the truth of this statement made 17 years ago. My grudges are my creation. If I’m annoyed that someone didn’t live-up to an expectation that I created and pushed onto them, that’s my choice. I could have created smaller expectations or none at all. Even if I mentioned the expectation to them and they agreed to abide by it, my disappointment in their decision to look after themselves first is my choice. They can’t make me feel anything.

It is my love, my hate, my compassion, my sense of abandonment, my everything. Adults understand and live by this. They establish boundaries and let others in WISE to the fact that with them inside, the potential to hurt grows. But we own our emotions and our emotional responses to our subjective interpretation of reality. I have too much love to go to waste, BUT I realize, understand and accept that I risk emotional pain by reaching out and partnering with another human being. My responsibility is to look after myself and my interests; to direct this love to me first and then to others. Until I have children, I am responsible for just me. My family, girlfriends, friends, co-workers and peers need to look after themselves and their children / interests.

The only power others have over us is the power we give them. And even then, we choose our thoughts which in turn shape our state of mind and emotional reactions. It’s fine to give love away, but if you cannot handle not getting it back, you aren’t giving out love. You are sharing something dark and sinister.

It was a timely refresher from an old and dear friend. Thanks Leigh!

Reasons To Not Be Afraid

I’ve got a lot, but I am. I have been for years.

Sure, I can continue to wrack my brain, analyzing the hell out of my memories and ripping apart my actions looking for meaning, but that hasn’t gotten me any closer to the truth, happiness or to a level of satisfaction with who I am, my place in the universe and even a reason to keep going. It can’t, I’ve been lying to myself for a long time. I didn’t really realize it. When I was small I told myself a lie, a story, and I went with it. Then life became it, and finally I did too.

That isn’t good enough for me anymore. There is more to this world than these distractions I’ve been seeking and compulsively indulging.

My therapist suggested that I make 2 lists, one of the why’s and one of the what if I stop. I thought it would be tough, and it was kind of, I crumbled and cried and the self-loathing seemed to grow exponentially. But I had a lot to write and the ease at which it flowed out of me help me see that I have been ready for a sometime, but just afraid to step off the cliff and drop to my death. I liked the old me, but he was selfish, scared and offered only conditional everything. Those who knew me saw that things weren’t right, those who knew me really well would leave. My family and close friends were the only constants, and of the friends, only those who engaged me like an Adult, without judgement remain. And that was key unlocking the gate and convincing me to take the leap. I AM an Adult and it is okay to forgive myself for my past actions. Further self-judgment here is pointless.

The why’s of my compulsive behavior:

  • Predictable outcome – good or bad, I knew what would happen and there is some sense of security in that
  • It created a false me / them dynamic that helped me feel like I was different
  • It closed me off from other people, which helped me feel like I didn’t belong
  • It is wildly isolating, alienating and paradoxically not the person I presented myself to be
  • Being isolated allowed me to indulge my thoughts without outside perspective to balance them
  • It helped me feel different and deviant so not as good as anyone else
  • Doing it helped me feel a sense of shame that I could wear and feel inferior to others
  • It altered my emotional state temporarily so there was some escape for the emptiness / insecurity that I felt
  • It was childish and was a calling for some sort of love that I didn’t think I was getting
  • It was proof that I wasn’t okay and therefore not worthy of the things that others may enjoy
  • It helped me get a very nice body that I thought would compensate for my lack of confidence
  • It was easier to keep doing what I was doing vs. put the effort in to change

The what if I stop my compulsive behavior:

  • I will save money
  • My teeth, skin, and body will look better
  • I will feel my baseline, whatever that is, and be able to get the help I need to adjust that
  • I will improve my spiritual health as I become reconnected with the universe and the people on the planet
  • I will save a lot of time
  • I will feel my emotions clearly and in a timely fashion allowing me to properly engage and parse them for the information they are revealing
  • I will be free of the anxiety and guild associated with indulging compulsive thoughts
  • I will be able to recover from my fathers death more effectively
  • I will be acting with self-love and treating my body, mind and spirit with compassion
  • I will be acting more like my mentors
  • I will not be harming myself
  • I will have removed the monkey from my back and will have stopped doing something I am ashamed of
  • I will have gain the knowledge of just what these compulsive behaviors have been doing to me
  • I will be acting responsibly, I will be acting like an Adult
  • I will no longer be acting in a hypocritical way and this will restore my integrity
  • I will be thinking more clearly, my body will be functioning more clearly and I will be reducing a number of very serious health risks
  • I will be in a position for find a partner who complements my life but does not give it purpose
  • I will have a better idea of my actual worth and be able to take more effective actions to help me achieve my goals
  • My public self will match my private self and any dissonance between the two will be eliminated
  • I will not need to be living and managing two separate and incomparable lives

I looked at the lists when I was feeling absolutely crap over the last few weeks, picked an item and mediated on it. It didn’t take long for my chest to puff-up and for the fighter in me to come up to scratch. My actions are my choice so stopping is as easy as just not doing it anymore.

However, there is something going on inside my brain that this exercise was supposed to bring to light and my therapist was happy that it came out. I’m not necessarily afraid, but I am anxious.

I Love You Lungs

I love my lungs, not just because they bring in oxygen and send out CO2, but because they are working hard to keep me alive and to repair themselves from the abuse I was subjecting them to.

It was never personal, I wasn’t setting out to hurt them, I just was.

They are serving me well and over the last few weeks I’ve been clearing out a lot of stuff that I don’t recall breathing in. There’s no way I would sit down and inhale this black stuff that I’ve been coughing out if it presented itself to me as the black stuff in the first place. But it presented itself as a feeling of decreased tension, anxiety, stress, and the cessation of withdrawal symptoms; which are easy to consider positives. Now, a few weeks out, it’s very clear that there was NOTHING positive about them. Withdrawal from poison is a good thing because it means you are healing.

It is kind of shocking though. Some report that you can be clearing the nastiness for months, others claim that nothing ever came-out. I’m somewhere in the middle. Most of my coughing has stopped, but when the shower is really hot or I’m cooking a bunch of food and the humidity in the kitchen is high, I get my cough on and lumps or strains of black come out. I look at them and imagine what my lungs will look like in a few months and years.

For someone who presented themselves as giving a crap about how they looked, I sure didn’t pay much attention to keeping the lungs a nice beautiful pink.

Welcoming New Canadians

Last night, when I got home from teaching class, I saw that Mariam Makhniashvili’s body had been identified and that the police believe that she was not murdered. It appears that she feel to her death from a hwy 401 overpass above Young street.

Mariam was a new Canadian who didn’t have a lot of friends and who loved to read. She was a quiet 17 year old who mostly kept to herself. She parted ways with her brother at their school on September 14th 2009 and wasn’t seen alive again.

I don’t know anything about her other than what is being reported, but some of the information seems to resonate with me. Our family moved to Canada when I was 9 and almost immediately I was an outsider. I did make friends fairly quickly but found that many of the would turn on me or simply just stop talking to me. As a young person you are ill-equipped to make the call that their behavior says more about their past than it did about my present so you internalize it. I was the immigrant freak, who spoke funny and was the brunt of the jokes when the class bully was feeling small from whatever living hell he was going through.

I thought about jumping, a lot.

I never did and instead felt anxious and sort of went into myself finding the evidence to validate that I wasn’t the same as everyone else. Again, a child will do these things when because their brain doesn’t process information as effectively or in the same way as an adult.

Children are important and they are worth being nice to. The waste of one life is too many.

Rest in peace Mariam.

Transactional Analysis – Part 1 – Laymans Introduction

Sean gave me another critical piece of the puzzle. I asked him if he has been pacing the information so as to not blow my mind up and he claimed no that it just hadn’t come-up. Transactional analysis is an object-oriented way to document interpersonal interactions. Each interaction is a transaction and the currency of TA are strokes. Depending upon the depth of the transaction, a stroke can have little worth “hi” or a lot of worth “I noticed that you pasted your exam, it’s great that all your hard work is paying off.” Hi is simply an acknowledgement of mutual existence. The lack of this type of stroke will be noticed MORE than it being there. The comment about passing the exam is more complicated and validating to the ego. Acknowledgement of mutual existence is there, the recognition that they exist to the other person when they aren’t in front of them (noticing that they past the exam), the recognition of historic labor efforts, and the social recognition that passing an exam is a payoff.

Ego states and Social states

An ego state is the psychological state from which ones’ comment comes. Child, Parent, Adult. The social state is the apparent state from which a comment comes. For example, it being important that we are on time is socially adult but if we direct a comment towards someone who is always late it is from a Parent psychological or ego state. These states are indicated with a capital letter.

We learn these states from our parents and other caregivers and while we may never be aware that they are there, they are, and while we may never be aware that we jump around from one to the other, we do. They are biologically hardwired through years of experience and validation and for these reasons certain behavioral tendencies are really sticky and may never go away. Your Child is going to be your Child for most of your life. Your Parent is going to be your Parent for most of your life.

The Parent automates the day-to-day stuff that makes life manageable – shopping, cooking, cleaning, going to work, looking after loved ones – because it is both controlling and nurturing. The Child allows for play because it has been cultivated with a sense of freedom. Creativity is the realm of the Child and this represents an essential piece of a human beings spirit. The Child can become overly adapted however with the wrong proportions of control and nurture:

If Parent nurturing Then Child free.

If Parent controlling Then Child adapted.

The Adult ego state is reflective and purposeful. It exists in harmony with the universe as it calls upon past experience for information and solutions but transacts with the others in a deliberate way. It has well-established boundaries and accepts that each person has the right and responsibility to manage their own life and affairs. Adults engage in coaching with enlightenment or independence as the goal.

The goal of TA therapy is to coach the client to transacted with social and psychological states being aligned as Adult. They are aware of and use when appropriate their Child and Parent states but these are tools to use vs. compulsions to serve.

Why would Sean tell me about this? Because I needed to hear it as I was lacking a visual framework from which to logically represent what I have been feeling and living through.

My last post of 2011 was about how I had to accept that I didn’t know what my motivations were in most situations and why I act the way I do. I needed to give-up my belief that I know myself in order to finally observe how I act. This is still the case, but it’s getting easier. What is remarkable about it, is that once it was understood to me it became very easy to see things happen and feel the shift in my psychological state.

For example, I was recently compared to someone I didn’t like very much. There was a moment when I thought about what I had heard and what I wanted to say and then realized I didn’t really know what the comment meant. I replied with “yes, there are similarities between me and him.” It wasn’t the Child reply that initially popped into my head. Their reply was “well, actually, this is the one similarity” which was true. He and I both have a tendency to try and solve the problems of the people we care about; not necessarily a character flaw but it can be a Parent action. MOST people have this problem. The key thing with the interaction was that I didn’t let myself slip into an automatic Child-like reply of “yes, but…” The comment was accurate because the other person made it. The inverse comment would have been equally true – that he and I aren’t very similar. That’s the thing with conversations with people, almost everything is right under some circumstances so, well, what’s the point in arguing?

I know what I need to do, I know what I want to do and I haven’t been showing a lot of control over things. When I work and play, it’s purposeful and passionate. When I am a Parent, it’s about very few things in my own life and I do have a tendency to try and look out for the people I like. When I’m an Adult I’m okay and everyone else is okay.

Now High Risk For Cancer

Des let me know that he and I are now a high risk of developing cancer given that our dad and our grandmother on our moms side got it. I haven’t really thought about cancer in those terms before.

From a purely statistical point of view, up until December, my actions had a much bigger impact onto my future with the disease than anything else. For all intents and purposes my body was the same as any other low risk body in terms of fighting off mutations that become disease – if diet, exercise, stress and sleep needs were balanced the potential for life was not handicapped by anything.

That isn’t the same anymore. It is now evident that written into my DNA is a lower finite potential to correct cell replication errors. The fact that my grand mother smoked has nothing to do with how you interpret the statistics because she ended up getting cancer. And on its own, my dad’s brain tumor is random and has an much consequence on my mom’s chances for cancer as it does on Des or me. But when both sides of the family are paired together there is a significant statistical relationship worth considering.

Dealing with an increased risk for something means creating an environment that is NOT conducive to it being there. With cancer there are two things to do, the first is avoid things that cause cancer – keep away from chemicals and stuff that is burning. The second is to do things that promote a healthy immune system, the most effective cancer defense you have.

Below is a list of some of the things I can do to help my body stay sharp and stop disease:

  • Eat more leafy green vegetables and more plants in general. They help with reducing the acidity of the body which can help reduce inflammation and lower physiological stress. They also provide antioxidants which help clear the waste associated with metabolic functioning.
  • Consider supplementing with some plant based vitamins. The bio-availability of the nutrients may be higher than for those made from raw earth. The is a link however between increased vitamin supplementation and some cancers, so be cautions and consider eating whole food as the preferred source of nutrients.
  • Lower sugar consumption to reduce insulin secretion. Insulin is a critical and nontoxic hormone when present in the body for short periods of time. Insulin secretion is a sign that something has gone wrong (we’ve eaten too much). The less it is around, the better for over all health.
  • Stop inhaling things that aren’t good for me, be it smoke, the fumes from cutting wood or plastic, the pieces of insulation that break off when I’m making panels, the disinfectant spray at the gym.
  • Eat more diverse types of protein and as much from wild sources as possible.
  • Reduce stress in all areas of life. Create a budget and save a fixed amount of money each week.
  • Restore a normal social life that gives me a variety of opinions and personalities. Close off any open loops in terms of grudges or crap that isn’t going the way I need it to.
  • Stop judging myself for my past actions and present thoughts. There was no malice in them, and I’m as susceptible to the fundamental attribution error as anyone else.
  • Update my goals to reflect the needed changes in my life in order to live to as close to my life expectancy as possible. Change my behavior to move me towards these goals.
  • Treat myself with as much respect as I treat other people and this means approaching everything with win:win or no deal. This may mean less short term gain, but it will come with less long term pain. The sadness of a relationship ending before it gets off the ground is a small price to pay for avoiding the enormous heart ache that seems to come from ending all of my relationships that last longer than a few months.
  • Balance my training to make sure all areas of wellness are being addressed – cardiovascular functioning, strength, flexibility, join mobility, and spiritual health.
  • Surround myself with people who are able to love compassionately and unconditionally; this also means learning these skills myself. This is a big one, stress is a major contributor to disease and illness and social interaction is a great way to relieve stress and feel connected to others and therefore the universe. Social interaction serves not to transfer the stress, but to allow for the healthy emptying of whatever is on the mind.
  • EVERYTHING I do is a choice so when I say that I can’t change something I am lying to myself. I will be sad about loss, but I do not have to feel that loss non-stop. It is fine to table dealing with parts of it until I’m in an environment were it has less impact on others.
  • Start to see yourself as someone of worth and value who SHOULD live a long time. More over, start to do the things that PROVE to me that I have worth and pay more attention to the Adults who are engaging me about my talents. After Natalie died I wanted to be dead but wasn’t going to actively end my life. It’s a paradox in this world, but legal enough are the things that you can consume that will kill slowly – smoking, drinking, low quality food, raves in condemned warehouses, and a “woes me” attitude. I don’t want to die sooner than I have to, so taking the action to eliminate these types of things from my life will go a long way at helping me achieve my life potential.
  • Cheer-up, let go of the nonsense and go with the flow. I can steer myself along the river, but I can’t paddle upstream back into my past. What’s done is done. Be grateful for having had the chance to do your best with it.

The future is coming, and I will pay for my past when it arrives. What damage was done, IS done and now get round to reducing it by restoring the loving relationship with myself. I have to care because I haven’t cared for a while, and that attitude shows in my actions, my thoughts and my essence.

Negative Love Syndrome – It Can Stop Here

A few weeks ago Sharyl sent me an article. It was a .pdf of The Negative Love Syndrome by Bob Hoffman. It is fascinating and I’ve read it a few times a week since I got it. It isn’t very long and it is another layer of explanation along the lines of how people observe, learn and practice things as a child that become their unconscious adult behaviors.

With Negative Love Syndrome (NLS), just like compassionate love, children normalize the early experiences of “love” they observe from their parents / caregivers interactions with them and each other. No matter WHAT happens, it will be regarded as normal and set the baseline for all love behavior moving forward; these early experiences shape the child’s future actions so they will work unconsciously and often against their own interests to ensure the baseline experience is restored. But with NLS, the children normalize seeking loving behaviors that do not add quality of live or are simply negative.

For example, when mommy withdraws and doesn’t tell dad what is bugging her, daddy yells and then she does. The boys learn that adult females are cold and conditionally open (when they get yelled at), the girls learn to bottle things it up until her partner gets verbally abusive. Provided the boy yells, both eventually get what they want so they remain in “love.” This is in contrast to compassionate love were the women may not talk openly, but her husband accepts that she will talk when ready and will not pressure her. Children viewing this will internalize appropriate boundaries, and both the need for and respect of another person’s privacy. While the boy will not learn how to make conditionally females open, he also doesn’t learn to attack an object. He learns that women are people, with feelings and that they will talk when they need to. The lesson a girl learns from watching her mother set-up and honor the boundaries can on serve to make her more empowered.

If left unresolved NLS will manifest itself as a series of games between the adult and their future partners although little if any of this is conscious. Seemingly healthy relationships will begin to suffer as the adult works to create the relationship of their parents; which is the reason why they suffer from NLS. If their partner doesn’t realize that this is happening and remains committed to having a healthy relationship, they begin to alter their actions and play the game as well. This is why NLS relationships create unusual experiences for those who normally engage others with compassionate love.

It makes perfect sense when you reflect on it. You need and want your parents to love and approve of you so you try to do what they did. Doing something different than what they did will be tough because it goes against most of what you learned; it will feel and likely be perceived as rebellion. The assumption people make when they choose to get into a relationship is to work towards the bond that their parents had. One does not necessarily realize that this is what they are doing because they engage most parts of their life without the impact of NLS such that they may pick suitable candidates for girl or boy friends, ones who offer compassionate love, but once their own feelings of love begin to develop the negative love tendencies start to come out and degrade things quickly.

The confusing thing is that often what they are receiving is EXACTLY what they need and know they want but since it doesn’t feel like negative love it is rejected. The consequence of compassionate love being rejected tends to be a withdrawal from the rejecter – a negative love trait. So by rejecting the thing they want and need in their life, they are able to experience the thing that makes them feel normal and shittie.

People are going to be nuanced when how they manufacture a negative love environment so the games that get played can be very complex, engrossing and red herrings in terms of what is actually happening. Think about it, you are engaging someone with a very fast brain, that has automated and normalized something to the point of it falling outside of their consciousness so they are not even aware of what they are actually doing, let alone why they may be doing it. They KNOW something isn’t right, but resist all coaching in an effort to win the game.

The prognosis is good but only if the person is willing to change, so the outcome for most is poor. I have known a couple of people who have been able to find their way out of the darkness and would be confident that if someone is willing to work at it, they can get better. It takes time and a keen awareness of how you are thinking. But first it takes the person to realize that there is something wrong and a willingness to press pause, let things settle and see how the landscape looks.