Alcoholics/addicts have been said to be "hard wired" with their propensity to abuse substances or behaviors. As I understand it, there is a genetic predisposition that is often a contributing factor, but that people with this disposition can still become addicts/alcoholics.
I'm currently reading "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman.
(This happens to be one of those really long term loaners from my friend Jodi. There's something really wonderful of about having a book for so long that belongs to someone else, nothing from a sense of keeping it away, but more as a sort of connection.)
The beginning of the book has introduced scientific research from a scientist named Joseph LeDoux. He pioneered a deeper understanding of the fundamental mechanics of individual parts of the brain, especially in regards to the processing of emotions. Two aspects of his research were striking to me:
1) The amygdala is the portion of the brain that is centrally responsible for the depth of emotional weight assigned to an experience or memory. This is independent of
intellectual processing.
2) In very intense situations, the amygdala can communicate this emotional weight and invoke a response faster than intellectual thought by sending these limbic/emotional impulses over a shorter distance than the cortical/intellectual impulses from the thalamus.
Taking an example of people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), people can be overwhelmed by experiences regardless of age (abused children vs veterans and victims of adult crime). These experiences are so strong that they overload emotional systems. The lasting results of these experiences disallow reason to be processed before the emotional impression has already dictated a person's response. A person's response is often triggered by a similar emotional state, not a similar rational state. Thus, a shellshocked veteran doesn't have to be in a foxhole to lose contact with reality -- a car's backfire in a rural setting or a crowded city can invoke the same response. An adult victim of child abuse can be fully grown and distant from the perpetrator, yet a similar feeling with an intimate partner can shut down their ability to reason and think clearly in the present moment.
From the other side of the emotional spectrum, I think the same can be said of people with depression. They are often as out of control of their responses to stimuli as people with PTSD. I'm sure there are other manifestations or conditions of brain development that fall into this context.
Frankly, much of this made sense to me as I had come to believe my mind had developed in similar ways because I could recognize my hard-to-shake tendencies for habitual or long standing behaviors and thoughts. I've come to see that I had responses that made little sense in hindsight when my intellect was not emotionally overloaded and I have _not_ been diagnosed with PTSD.
The last thing I wanted to say is that I have experienced, for myself as well as in friends who have been diagnosed with PTSD, that therapy works to desensitized, relearn, and redirect thoughts and behaviors for people that have entrenched emotional responses due to strong experiences. It takes willingness to keep trying different responses from those that might seem instinctive. It takes patience as this changing of behaviors can take time, and it take compassion to understand that people who have difficulty changing behaviors and thoughts are at the throes of a brain that has been conditioned into these responses that react faster than thought -- these people are out of control of their intellect at times.
I am not a scientist, but I am an advocate of personal change through many varied approached including therapy, meditation, and 12 step recovery among others. I believe that all of these approaches toward personal change must be done with the assistance of trusted advisers -- they cannot be done alone.
Limbic hijackings: learned emotional responses
When's the last time you pushed a car?
I realized how infrequently I see people pushing cars. When I was a kid, we pushed cars a bunch. It was almost always fun and satisfying to move a vehicle with just our own strength. Even as a kid, I had a significant contribution to my father's or brother's efforts. If not, I would be the one steering the car. This was around Sarah's age now of 7. We spent time working on our cars as well, either for tuning performance on Calvin's hot rods or repairing them like when I helped rebuild the top end of our Datsun 510. Turns out I've done replaced brakes, radiators, carbs and distributors, head gaskets, oil pans, and more. I'm gonna have to include that on my resume.
People don't often push cars in San Diego, myself included. Waiting for the tow truck or leaving the car alone is more common as well as relying on a mechanic to repair them. On occasion, I've helped people push their cars off the road when stuck in traffic. This also is a cool experience, holding off other drivers, helping a person out of a jam, working together with one or two others to move a couple thousand pounds of metal. I felt a sense of longing when I realized how infrequently I pushed cars nowadays.
What does it look like when the disease of codependence is in remission?
Alcoholism is a disease. That's been asserted and proven by various people of the scientific and medical community. It is, as are other diseases, able to be arrested into remission by appropriate methods of recovery. When a disease is in remission, the symptoms are not present and progression is halted.
As far as I know, codependence is also a disease, at least it behaves like one when it manifests and it responds like one when it is treated. What does that look like, though?
More will be revealed as I pursue the answers to this question.
I love Elizabeth Gilbert...
...and I'm not afraid to say so. I may even travel to UCLA to tell her so. :-)
As I wrote to my friend, Stu today:
"Your job, then, should you chose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship -- just so long as hose prayers are sincere. As one line from the Upanishads suggests: "People follow different paths, straight or crooked, according to their temperament, depending on which they consider best, r most appropriate -- and all reach You, just as rivers enter the ocean." -- Elizabeth Gilbert, "Eat, Pray, Love", pg 206
...or, in the words of the AA Big Book, "a God of your understanding".
My friend, Cliff, once urged me to take ownership of my spiritual path, that my journey was mine alone and that I needed to explore it for my sake and my reasons only. To make my travels dependent on anyone else (my wife, my daughters, my job, etc...) opens me up to being victim of the frailties and shortcomings of others. Instead, I chose to become dependent on a God, a power greater than myself and of my own understanding.
For a long time, I've tried to see the similarities across religions rather than the differences and I couldn't see any other reason for their being other than as a means to understand the divine. I find it very saddening to know that, throughout history, people of religious devotion find it necessary to impose their human will on others that walk a different path toward the same goal.
As Gilbert states within that same chapter, it is our individual responsibility to find the calm and center within ourselves. I believe that, without having done that, we are of practically zero value to others.
Running... like the wind!
Heh, it cracks me up to think of myself as "fast". Yet, my softball team says "I have wheels" and, from today's 2007 AFC 5K, I'm starting to think there's some potential in these legs. Here are results from today:
Overall Place: 266
Sex Place: 181
Div Place: 18
Age: 40
Time: 26:27:00
Pace: 8:31
Bib: 9132
Gun Time: 27:22:00
Results are searchable here and here's a breakdown by age. The winner was Coach James who helped speed training for my marathon last year.
The Demise of Customer Service Amidst Acquisitions...
(or "Time Warner Status Quo"?)
Here's an explanation of the experience my friend Pete has been having with Time Warner regarding his digital phone service. When I read it, I thought it'd be appropriate for the world to hear his story. Perhaps some followup support can grease the wheels.
We were planning a Skype chat today while Skype themselves were experiencing service issues. When he said he was wrestling with Time Warner, I asked if it was a bandwidth issue, something I've dealt with on my own with digital phones (both Time Warner and Vonage). Here's his response:
Not bandwidth, just horrendous customer service. Since I've had my digital phone/internet account, the provider has switched from Media One to AT&T to Comcast to Time Warner (and one other in between that I forget). Every time there's a switch, the service gets worse (for two years with Comcast, when I dialed the number for digital phone support, I was connected to internet support, even when the prompts said I was getting digital phone support. About half the time, the internet people in India told me that they had no way to transfer me to the telephone support people, and half of the remaining half of the time, my call was dropped when they tried to transfer me. Always, I had to wait on hold twice just to get through to customer service, and that only worked about 25% of the time. I talked to people in the CEOs office (supposedly) who assured me they would have the problem fixed and would call me back to confirm. A year later, the problem persisted and I hadn't heard a word from them. Thre was virtually no way for me to get to the right support people during the whole period.)
The current problem stems from the fact that Time Warner is discontinuing the old Comcast digital phone service and is moving to their own digital phone service. With Comcast, I had a main number and a "distinctive ring" number for my fax that rang through on the same line, but had a different ring that the fax machine picked up. The new Time Warner service doesn't offer the distinctive ring. I've spent about 7 hours on the phone trying to get them to just give me two lines with the same two numbers I had before. I talked to four different managers. At first they told me it was impossible to keep the distinctive ring number (which both Traci and I use as our business fax), and then the finally (after I said it about a thousand times) figured out I just wanted two separate lines. That, they said, was simple, and I had an appointment for them to switch me over this morning. Of course, no one showed. After being on hold with customer support for more than 30 minutes, my call was dropped. I called back and was on hold for nearly an hour before someone could finally tell me that their computer system had cancelled my appointment for unknown reasons. Naturally, they hadn't called to tell me. Total time on the phone with Time Warner today: more than 2 hours.
So, they are supposedly coming to install the new service next Friday, and I'm supposed to get a call back confirming that on Monday. I'll believe it when I see it.
So, no, not really a bandwidth problem. :)
I've been wrestling with post-sales support from Lenovo. Not nearly as bad as this, more an issue of strict policies for returns. Pete's story tapped into the loss of time on the phone that I've been lamenting, though, and the rest is just a travesty of its own.
Because my faithful reader(s) appreciated them...
...here are some more links of interest:
How to Predict Weather with a Forecast
Daily Comments on China
Cussin' Buttons
Google Transit
Interview with Gaiman and Avery
10 Ways to Entertain Young Children for $1 or Less
Work at home isolation: Good or Bad?
6 Principles of Change
10 Way to Instantly Build Self Confidence
Declutter 101
Why Owning a Pet is Important
How to Exit a Conversation
How to Conince a Manager to Take a Chance on You
U.S. Government Websites You Didn't Know You Could Use
How To Sleeve Computer Cables
Color Guide to Eating Healthy
Finding Real Live Blues from the 40's on YouTube
Design better with CRAP
27 Great Tips to Keep Your Life Organized
Is There A Slogan In Your Resume?
Cut Spending with Flickr and a Cameraphone
Start-Page Showdown
55 Essential Articles Every Serious Blogger Should Read
Radar Online: Secrets and Lies
Chat with AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and other contacts over Google Talk
How to Get Your Music Off Your iPod
How To Give a Back Massage
70+ Tools for Job Hunting 2.0
7 Habits of Highly Successful Freelancers
The Happiness Project: How Employers Cab Help Boost the Happiness of their Employees
20 Signs That a Pink Slip is Coming
Get and Set Reminders via Twitter
Maximizing Apartment Space
A Tokyo Wave Pool
We Want To See Your Go Bag
Master Information Overload with Bit Literacy
Increase Online Shopping Security with Virtual Credit Cards
DVD Review: If...
Videos of The Cramps: Live at Napa State Mental Hospital
15 Productive Uses for a Wiki
Bill Maher: The Business of The Catholic Church
Etan Thomas: They Are Not Jealous of Our Way of Life
10 Ways To Think For Yourself
Alarm Clocks Work for Early-Waking Babies, Too
Get Boring But Necessary Tasks Done Online
Overclock your Audio Learning
Bookshelf Makeover
4 Steps To Take If You Hate Your Job
Tips for Keeping The Peace
Backup Your Data On A Windows PC
A Beginner's Guide to Mind Mapping Meetihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifngs
Peter Walsh's Clever Hanger Trick
Top 9 Fitness Myths Busted!
Google for Free Comic Books
Compendium of recent coolness
I hate just bookmarking sites and there are a bunch of pages that I've been leaving open cause I want to do something with them. I've decided to compile them here for lack of anything better (regrets for not properly citing my sources, but I'm not editorializing and I'm not looking for pagehits):
08-13-07: A 2007 Interview With William Gibson
Wooden iPhone (and iPod) cases
Root Beer Float Cupcakes
Pressed Flowers
DIY Shrinky Dinks
How to eliminate debt in bursts instead of incrementally
Ten Free Services To Send Self-Destructing Emails Which Expire/Disappear Automatically After Specified Time Interval
InviteShare - a place to share invites to websites
How to Reclaim Your Name Online
The Art of Living in Small Spaces
Residential Energy Saving Tips
Talking Heads concert vids - Live in Rome 1980
Preparation to handle your online life after death
A Guide to Personalizing Google Maps
Trailers from Hell: directors muse on schlocky movie faves
Vibram Five Fingers - barefoot honoring shoes
Navigating With The Stars - a very cool tutorial
Putting Google on your Phone
I'm emailing with my nephew!
One of the coolest things lately has been some email back and forth with my nephew Eric. It started from some email from my niece, Holly, which was also cool. I feel like I have a full(er) family, and I like it.
I told a story about their dad, Calvin, who passed away a couple years ago. Here it is for posterity's sake:
When he was sixteen or so, he bought this 1967 Pontiac GTO. It was like a copper or rust colored paint and it had a raised rear end, "60s" on the back (those were wide tires), Thrush brand sidepipes for his exhaust. It had a black leather interior and his "mag" wheels were called "slots" with a brushed aluminum finish. He would drag race the car, but I never actually saw this. I would kinda watch him working on it in our driveway at the time. He had a couple friends from around town in Roseland that worked on cars together. One of his good friends was named Mike McGinnis. Mike had a 1968 Chevelle SS, metallic blue with white stripes down the top middle. I think Mike's car was a little quicker than your dad's, but that wasn't too important to me. I just thought they looked cool.
I've had a couple diecast model cars of your dad's car. They aren't the right color and they're stock so they haven't been raised in the back. I've got this fantasy of doing a killer job repainting them, fashioning the wheels the way I remember them, etc... I don't think I have the skills yet, but it's something I want to do.
You dad ended up having an accident with that car. I think it was a wet evening and the car hit a telephone pole on the driver's side. I think he had a bruise on his kidney or something, but I don't think it was a long lasting injury.
Anyway, just wanted to pass that along. He had other vehicles, but I'll tell you about those later.
China, China, China...
I'm back from China after 12 days in two cities and there's so much to process. I'll be posting soon. I promise.
I played softball tonight!
My team said that I have "wheels", which is cool, but I also caught a flyball to make an out. Yeah, I rule.
