Thursday, March 29, 2012

Why I named this blog Obnoxious Psychobabble and Blasphemy

Why I named this blog Obnoxious Psychobabble and Blasphemy.

I initially and mainly chose the name because I would imagine that is what a lot of the things I say sound like to most people.  I think theories about why we do the things we do almost always sound obnoxious and rambling because deep down we know that we are not really as complicated as those theories would make us out to be.  There have been times in my life when I tried to buy into some fairly elaborate or complicated and convoluted theories for individual things I did or for the totality of who and what I was because it was obvious that I was a conundrum to myself, and I was ready to try anything.  However, none of the theories really seemed to fit.  I was always having to try to twist and contort myself and my experiences to fit myself into the theory rather than all the pieces of me fitting together neatly for the first time - like should happen with a good and accurate theory.  At least from my vantage point my own theory or theories are fairly straight forward and uncomplicated when applied to myself or an individual.  Throwing all the individuals together to form the societies we live in introduces a lot more uncertainties and complexities, but that is not my focus.

I added the Blasphemy to the title because I wanted to warn people in a somewhat joking manner that I would be freely considering, and for myself sometimes adopting unorthodox views of God.  I do not believe it is important for others to share my particular views of God, but I do believe it is important to engage in the struggle to settle upon what it is that you really believe at any given time.  And my hope is that my sharing my views may spur others to be open enough to explore what they believe and be OK with whatever they find.  Being settled on something that feels right in this regard is a nice place to be, even if it is sometimes only temporary.

Finally, I chose the tittle because it felt right from the perspective of adding a little humility into the equation.  It feels very odd and at least somewhat wrong for me, a person who has made a ton of mistakes and a mess out of their life many times, to be offering up with confidence answers or solutions to some of life's toughest and trickiest problems.  The normal solution to this problem seems to be to say that it is God working through me and not me.  That only somewhat jives with my current beliefs regarding God and man though, and beyond anything else I am committed to being as honest as I can be, even at the risk of pushing people away.  And I do believe strongly in owning up to and claiming all of ourselves; the good and the bad parts and not separating them from ourselves to ascribe them to God or the devil or whatever.

Certainly though none of my insights or answers or revelations would have been possible without my connection to God.  As I previously discussed almost all of my answers have come during times of what I would consider meditation.  Additionally, my felt need to share what I think I have found also comes from my connection to God.  So maybe I am just splitting hairs.

Any way if you are still with me, thank you for being patient with me while I discussed all these preliminary things I felt were necessary.  If it has driven you nuts - my need to discuss so many preliminary things - you are in good company.  It drives my wife nuts regularly, and she is probably the most instrumental person in helping me get to where I am today.  She recently told me I have a long wind-up.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Why the underlying details

Now I am going to discuss why I plan to go into great detail regarding how I believe human nature works and results in mental health problems or conditions.

Often people and professionals who might try to help with the sort of problems and concerns I am discussing do not try to explain why they recommend doing the things they recommend doing.  This may be because they do not think it would be helpful, which may very well be true, or it might even be because they really do not know. In some ways we have become such a results oriented culture that we have lost the basis for why we do the things we do or what the main goals of our efforts really are.  This can lead to uncoordinated patchwork that might help a little with one problem but not really do much for a persons overall benefit in the long run.

I am by no means talking only about medications use for mental health issues, but this would often fit into this category and is a good example of what I am talking about.  I am not saying that there is an evil plot to sell medications that has led to our current circumstances where the main thing a person struggling with a mental health issue will receive for their condition is medications.  Rather it has developed much more innocently with most people involved having very sincere and good motives - to try to help those afflicted.  However, in reality what has happened is that there has been relatively little research into non-medication treatments for mental health conditions because it is virtually impossible to raise the money necessary to do the research or to recoup the money even if you find a successful non-medication treatment.

As a result most of the quality research and evidence for mental health treatment involves medications.  So professionals doing what they are supposed to do recommend the treatments with the most evidence for benefits.   It is also much easier to prescribe a drug for someone than to get into their very messy issues, which are often unresolvable with our current approaches and resources.

The problem is that with this approach at some point we start to get further away from the real and ultimate goals rather than closer, and I think we might be getting to that point.  Before going further though let me be absolutely clear.  I am not against medications for mental health conditions.  I am against viewing them as the sole solution or main treatment for most people for most mental health conditions.  

In my opinion we need a whole new understanding of human nature and behavior, and from this mental health conditions or problems, before we can really make significant progress.  My initial plan was to write mainly about addictions since I have been greatly affected by them, but then I realized my ideas on addictions would not necessarily make much sense without at least briefly explaining the underlying framework of human nature and behavior that these ideas are based upon. 

Therefore, I am going to attempt to briefly describe what makes us as humans act the way we do and feel the way we do.  I will be trying to do this from a variety of different perspectives, such as psychological, biochemical or physiological, and spiritual.  The exciting thing to me is that I think all these different perspectives point to the same answers. 

Another reason I will be trying to provide a fairly comprehensive framework for understanding human nature and our problems goes back to something I mentioned earlier.  I am not interested in arguing or debating about my beliefs and ideas.  However, it would feel unfair to me to simply throw out controversial ideas without their surrounding foundation, and whether I like it or not all ideas about human nature, addictions, and God seem to be controversial.  The controversy seems to be due to our tendency to grab onto a belief that is true, but then apply that true belief too broadly.  I will go into much more detail on this tendency later.

Finally, I will conclude with an idea I first heard from and therefore attribute to C.S. Lewis where he discusses the fact that if you are going in the wrong direction the answer is not to push harder in what you are doing but rather to turn around.  And the only way to know if you are currently going in the wrong direction is to have a big picture map that describes the landscape of human nature and where different paths lead.

A mentor of mine described it another way.  If you are baking a cake there is a certain order you must do things.  If you do not add things in that order and bake it at the right time you will not end up with a cake.  Obviously without at least a broad framework for what is going on with us, there is no way to determine a decent path to start on.  As a result we often end up working really hard trying to implement good ideas without finding or producing what we are striving for or looking to achieve. 


Being Successful and Productive

This blog is about finding peace of mind and a sense of well being.  It is not about being successful and productive.  These things are not mutually exclusive, and for most of us peace of mind and a sense of well being will lead to some measure of success and productiveness.  It is also true that to have peace of mind and a sense of well being most of us have to try to give something to the world and therefore be productive.  However, my point is that it is very important to prioritize what you are really after, and if the answer is that success is more important to you then you are reading the wrong material.

In fact many of the things that keep us from peace of mind and a sense of well being are actually very good at driving us to be successful and productive.  My inner turmoil and feeling inadequate and hopelessly defective led me to get a couple doctorate degrees and be successful everywhere I have worked.  Well except for getting fired twice for drugs, although I was relatively successful even during my drug use, until it was discovered.  

It is also important to understand that if you believe in evolution or even something fairly similar to it, our make-up is geared towards survival and success rather than happiness (or having peace of mind and a sense of well being).  

If you do not believe in evolution or at least something very similar to it, I would suggest you are likely similar to those who believed the sun revolved around the earth and could not let go even when the evidence was very clear.  I do not pretend to be an expert in biology or evolution, but from those who are and from my own somewhat limited investigation it appears clear to me that evolution does explain how we became who we are, and if it was not evolution it was something very similar.  

I do not bring this up to pick a fight or alienate people.  I would prefer to not alienate anyone, but in my opinion it is one of the most important things to know and understand about myself.  The fact that I have evolved from animals and still share a great deal of similarities with them is extremely valuable information.  Indeed it was one of the main catalysts that brought everything together and gave me my freedom.  More on that later.

For now let me say that believing in evolution is not inconsistent with my belief in God.  In fact I would go even further.  This may sound very odd and I have never heard anyone else say it, but I believe that evolution actually is one of the greatest secrets humans have discovered to give us a glimpse of God's playbook or methods.  Additionally so that you do not get the wrong idea, I will tell you that I believe God made this world perfect, it has always been perfect, and it will always be perfect.  And I completely reject the idea of a vengeful or angry God

Beyond that I will leave the topic of what God is and is not alone for now.  If you are good with your relationship with God that is wonderful, and if you are not I might spark some non-traditional exploration that could be useful, but like everything else I will be discussing, you will have to work it out within yourself and hopefully with friends and mentors or advisers of some sort.

The only thing you need to be willing to at least consider might be possible in order to go along with my answers is that we are actually very animalistic, that human nature is very animalistic.  Soon I will try to explain what I mean by this and how it is true even when it may not seem to be the case.  But first I will discuss a little of why I believe it is important to try to explain a lot of the underpinnings or foundations or roots of my answers.  


Black and white thinking

We have to have a foundation of beliefs that we live by whether we are aware of them or not, and unless we have done years of self surveying we probably are not aware of most of them.  This foundation of beliefs often leads to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as the saying goes.

A long time ago I read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck and completely connected with it, which provided me with some hope and solidified some of my foundation of beliefs and what I was trying to do because it helped me trust or believe more strongly in the ways I was trying to change my life.  Shortly afterward I read the The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller.  In that book Alice Miller addressed something from The Road Less Traveled and contradicted what The Road Less Traveled said.  My reaction was that I could no longer bring myself to even read the Drama of the Gifted Child because I no longer trusted that anything it said was right or had value, and I could not handle something challenging The Road Less Traveled, which was a core part of my foundation at the time.

My point is I missed out on a lot of great stuff in The Drama of the Gifted Child for a long time because I could not tolerate this one contradiction, and I am trying to suggest that if you find something completely abhorrent to your current foundation of beliefs try to just set it aside for now.  I may be wrong on that issue or what I am saying might not be applicable to you or you might just not be ready to hear it.  Any which way see if you can find other things that might be helpful, and if you do run with those for a while, then repeat.

We can only do so much and change so much at any particular time anyway.  So when you find something that seems beneficial throw yourself into it and see where it takes you.  Be careful and try not to necessarily make it a solution for everything, which I and most people are prone to do, but nonetheless try it and see where it takes you.  You will likely be better off and it might lead you to the next thing to try or you can always come back here or millions of other places to find other good ideas to try.

Sometimes when big changes do occur in us it can be very unsettling and even big healthy changes can sometimes cause significant negative feelings or even physical manifestations.  One example of this is when I made a decision to give up a career that I had spent a lot of time, money, and effort preparing myself for because I realized that my main reason for doing it was to feel important and have other people think I was really something.  To me this represented the whole paradigm of my value coming from what I was able to achieve and do, and giving up this career was clearly giving up on this paradigm within me.  I knew it was the right decision, and after knowing that it would have been almost impossible to continue the career, but actually giving it up came with a big sense of being rudderless and losing a big piece of my identity and foundation.  I have only had maybe 6 migraine headaches in my life and I think 3 of them were in the month I was carrying out my decision to change careers.  (BTW I already had another job that paid about as much and I could do without much mental or physical strain, and I knew the career change was what I wanted and needed.)

Another similar example occurred when I realized I was not going to turn back in trying to improve (at least from my perspective) my relationships with my parents and brothers.  I had already done most of the work and had most of the interactions to make the changes, which consisted primarily of having mature and candid conversations about some of our underlying family dynamics, before I realized deep down that I was past the point of no return.  However, when I realized there was no going back I had the longest migraine headache of my life.  I knew this was what I wanted and needed and the candid conversations had gone fairly well from my perspective, but family had always been my biggest foundational pillar and forever changing that and making it less certain, while necessary, was very unnerving.  Again I felt rudderless and like I was no longer tethered to anything.  Honestly, I am pretty sure my family would still be there for me when I need them, but they might not take my extreme dysfunction or shitty behavior with nearly as much acceptance and forgiveness as they always had.  Which would probably be a good thing, but awfully scary for me.  You see I was the one who finally initiated the mature and candid conversations about family dynamics, but I was also the one who in the past had probably taken advantage of the dysfunctional family dynamics the most.

Again my point with the migraine stories is that even very necessary and healthy changes can have both negative feelings associated with them and even negative physical manifestations.  This is one of the great many reasons that it is absolutely necessary for most of us on this type of journey to have trusted friends and hopefully mentors on the journey with us.

I will close with something that I think is funny.  I have a very good friend in a 12 step program that says he thought when he started to come to the 12 step program that he would be brain washed.  Then over the years he learned that his brain needed a good scrubbing.  That has certainly been true for myself also.  



Quick summary of this post - We all have a foundation of beliefs that dictates how we view the world and what we do.  Knowing this and understanding how it makes us view and react to certain things can prevent us from completely discarding inconsistent views and being stuck with our current foundation of beliefs forever.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Knowledge and action

What does self knowledge provide?  A lot if that knowledge is used or applied and misery if it is not.

I can understand why I do the things I do and feel the way I feel, as well as how to act better and what to do to feel better.  Yet if I am not willing or able to take the new actions nothing productive will come from knowing the answers, and I will probably be more miserable than if I did not know the answers to begin with.  I have also found that self knowledge can be a trap because my mind thinks if it understands why I feel the way I do that it can devise a way to feel better without the undesirable parts of the actions that lead to feeling better.

However, what knowledge can provide is hope that better things might be possible, and the motivation to start taking actions that will make things better.  It also provides a road map or guide as to what actions to prioritize.


What do good actions in the absence of the right answers or knowledge provide?  In my own case and I think with a lot of other people, craziness or at least close to it.

I was once a couple years clean and sober, attending lots of 12 step meetings, actively working steps, meditating 30-60 minutes a day, had lost about 90 pounds, was exercising regularly, had a house on a lake, the truck I always wanted, a couple quads, a couple snowmobiles, a boat, a wonderful wife, a good job, and I treated people well and people treated me well.  And I was nuts, restless, irritable, and discontent.  I was doing the right things and I had great people in my life.

All the good and healthy actions were making me crazy because they were fighting against or trying to overcome or suppress my emotions or feelings.  Even though I tried very hard not to be, I was still at war with myself and my urges and emotions.  In other words fake it until I make it did not work for me.  It might work for some other people and if it works for you please run with it and enjoy the heck out of your life.  I am completely serious here, if you have found what provides you with peace of mind and a sense of well being stop reading and start living and do not stop living.  Some of us though, like myself, are a little sicker or more screwed up and therefore need more help and more intense and thorough methods.

Detailing the more intense methods that I have tried that have worked well to bring about the wholeness, freedom, and fulfillment that we all seek is my subject matter for this blog.  Unfortunately, I do not think most people think this wholeness, freedom, and fulfillment is really possible, including therapists, those in the rooms of recovery, the religious, and most other people.  So it can be lonely at times and full of worry and uncertainty until you know it is real for yourself.  Even then of course there are still struggles but what I am talking about is not incremental improvement.  It is a different plain of existence that is hard to describe.

Describing it and what leads to it though is my vision for this blog.  Wish me luck.  I will obviously need it.

Quick summary of this post - knowledge by itself or actions by themselves, even if they are accurate and good, are insufficient to bring about the peace of mind and sense of well being we seek.



Origins of my answers

The main topics of discussion for this blog will likely be human nature, God, and addictions.  Before starting in on one of those though I will discuss a few preliminary matters of importance.

First, while I am fairly educated and have read some on the above topics my answers and what I will be trying to share have coalesced during times of meditation or something like that.  My beneficial answers have almost never come from an analytic process.  This is important because having come to me at a visceral or intuitive level and then with all sorts of things in my life and the world around me making sense for the first time when viewed with the help of the new insight, I do not second guess them or actively try to refute them.  I do continue to explore them and I do something similar to meditation to both hone them and be open to new insight.  Actually in this meditation I am open to even radically different or opposing insights since the whole point of the meditation is to get in touch with and learn from my connection to the world around me, including the people around me, and the parts of myself beyond my thinking mind.  I believe the part of myself that connects to the people and world around me is what some call the soul, and spending time with this part of myself and listening to what it has to tell me is perhaps where most of my answers come from.

As a result of where my answers come from I share them as truth because they are the truth for me today. At the same time I realize they may not be for others or even that I might just be full of shit or crazy on some issues. I also fully expect and hope that most of them will change and evolve at least somewhat over time because they must if I am going to continue to grow spiritually and emotionally. What I am also saying here is that I am never trying to persuade anyone to adopt my views or beliefs. I am simply sharing a little of my journey in hopes that it might precipitate within others a spark to ignite that part of themselves where their own answers may lie.

The bonus is it is helpful to me to share it without regards to if it helps anyone I share it with.  This is at least partially because trying to articulate it brings me much more clarity, and in trying to share it I am again spending time with that part of myself that connects to the world around me, which is where my answers, strength, peace of mind, and sense of well being come from.

As a result of where I think my (and our) answers come from I regard mine as the truth for me today.  I realize that they are simply what I believe in this snapshot of time and may very well change a little or drastically.  However, because they are my truth today and it is annoying to keep saying I think and I believe I will often just state them as fact rather than include the I think or I believe.  Please know that I am sure that I will be wrong about some things and will try to readily admit it when I find that out.

Finally, I am not interested in arguing with anyone who disagrees with my beliefs.  I would be interested in hearing about other peoples' beliefs that are bearing desirable results for them, but I have no interest in hearing attacks of my own.  If mine are no longer working for me I will seek out new ones myself, possibly with your help.  If you have found answers that work well for you by all means live them and share them, but that can be done without attacking mine.  Normally when I find myself wanting to attack the beliefs of others I find that I am insecure about my own beliefs, normally because I have not really tried to live the beliefs I claim or they do not actually work very well.

Fortunately, I have the perfect test for my own beliefs.  If when consistently practiced they lead to greater peace of mind and sense of well being they are keepers.  This would seem to be a very selfish test and I guess to some extent it might be, but the reality is that I cannot have sustainable peace of mind or a sense of well being if I treat others poorly.  That is one of the best things about our world.  True happiness, peace of mind, and well being can only come from treating others well.  However, it takes a lot of hard work to clean myself up enough to believe that and to live it.

Now is not the time to go into details, but please do not assume I am talking about passiveness in personal or group relationships.  Often the best and loving or kind or beneficial thing to do for others and for a relationship is confrontational and/or demanding.  However, there is a lot of personal work that must be done before we are even decent at making those determinations well.