Waking up like it has all been a bad dream

So what do you do when you wake up from a depression to discover that you are in fact rather unhappy with your life?

You wake up and you realize that you are out of shape, underachieving academically, without employment and have a life absolutely devoid of extra-curricular activity.

What happened to the little girl who showed so much promise? What happened to the precocious teen who had dreams of making a positive difference in the world?

Every good idea, or exciting job, or interesting volunteer work I have become involved in I have given up on, quit, or abandonned. I have lost track of all the interesting academic ideas I swear I use to have. I could not even add 2.50 to a pizza bill of 18.96 tonight because my brain is actually melting from a lack of use.

I try yoga but my body cannot handle that kind of honesty with itself right now. I try prayer but I am stuck in the athiest vaccuum of the secular west where I cannot get my mind invested in a deity but cannot commit my heart to a religious tradition without one.

Last year when I started getting sick I knew something was wrong because everything in my life was right so I should not have been feeling so sick. A year and a half later I am starting to understand how this illness must have gradually morphed itself into a chronic depression for my mother. You try losing 4 months of every year. Watch what happens. Have the same sad tear-filled conversations with your friends over and over again and watch them lose the ability to listen anymore. (Or worse yet sit on the recieving end of their stories without the ability to process them.) Watch what that does to you. Watch your faith in yourself disappear.

Or worse yet wake up and discover that it slipped away in the night.

And then cry.

For the first time in months real tears. Real big sobs not just the hollow moans of depression.

An Essay Complete

I just finished the most difficult essay of my academic career thus far.  It wasn’t really that hard.  It was just a second year paper on a Celtic myth.  In fact the prof even gave us a list of questions we could choose from to answer–and as a cognitive science student I haven’t had it that ‘easy’ as long as I can remember.  But it was not something I could deal with.

I never understood myths.  When I was very young I could never understand the parables in the Bible. I learned in Sunday school that one of the most amazing things about Jesus was that he spoke to the people in a way they could understand—but that always confused me, because he seemed impossible to understand: “Why did he not just say what he meant?” I used to wonder.  All this about seeds on paths and in thorns and in good soil, why not just talk about people who were or were not open to hearing and accepting the word of God? The Trinity was not a difficult concept for me even as a child, but Jesus’ sermons were impossible. 

Then as I got older my mother used to try to share her love for Roman and Greek mythology with my brother and I.  Again I was baffled.  All these stories about all these people doing all these different things and I just could not understand what any of it was supposed to mean.  Addition, subtraction, eventually algebra, biology and physics I could do, even philosophy and philosophy of religion—but myths, and legends no way.

Last year I took a psychology course in personality that opened my mind to a whole new world of understanding.  Relatively unconventionally Jordan Peterson taught us personality from a historical perspective.  In a field where many have stopped actively teaching the thoughts of Freud and Jung, Peterson took us even further back.  He showed us slides of artifacts from Egypt and medieval Europe exposing us to fundamental notions underlying the religions and myths of various cultures and how they could be related to Freud and Jung and modern personality theory.  He made us watch Pinocchio analytically, pausing it every few minutes to discuss archetypal characters.  Peterson helped us to understand that evolutionarily speaking the mind has not changed much in the past 250,000 years—and that we have a lot more in common with the ancients or those living in the middle ages than we may have previously thought.  We began to look at myths as people’s attempts to explain their experiences in life.  Just like the art of today, we began to understand myths as people’s insistence to struggle to put the ineffable into words.  He uncovered for us the wealth of information myths communicated to people within the societies they became popular in, as well as the wealth of information they have the potential of communicating to us if we look deep enough into them.

And it got me all intersted and stuff.  So I’m trying–my damndest.  And I’m learning alot.  But I think Peterson’s courses on the psychology of all of this will always remain my strong suit.

Please make it stop

One thing I will never understand is the societal choice we have made to begin medicating our children.

The individual choice as a parent? –I get that. It’s what is done now. It’s what teachers and doctors tell you is necessary. You want your child to do well and succeed–and in today’s day and age, this is the accepted way to make that happen.

But as a people what are we doing? We are deeming it necessary to medicate children who are active and curious (aka ADHD “sufferers”) into being able to sit still for hours while teachers drone on at them. We are allowing a growing number of our children to take very powerful (in some case even life-threatening) medication which effects their brain while their brains are still developing. Whether or not they were actually fucked up in the first place is debatable, but they’re sure as hell likely to be when the process is over…

Can we please stop? Seriously. These are children. Whether you believe in God or evolution, or both: they have been designed exactly the way they are for a reason. Leave them alone. Let them be. Teach them. Work with the people they are and the people they are becoming. Embrace their moods, both positive and negative. Teach them to deal with their anger, or their excessive energy, or their depression. Learn how to deal with those things yourself if that’s what it takes to teach them.

We can do this. As a people we can raise the next generation without anti-psychotic medication. I swear we can.

“i’m not crazy cause i take the right pills ever day” –jimmy eat world.

Problem Solving

There is a vast disconnect between the type of thinking that we are trained for in the public school system and the type of thinking that is expected of us in real life. In problem solving research in psychology the distinction is explained by the terms ‘well-defined problems’ and ‘ill-defined problems’.

In school we are given very well defined problems. Even the most complicated question about a train departing Chicago at 6am travelling at 80km per hour while another train departs New York at….(you get the idea), is very well defined. It may be difficult, but you have all the information you need, and once you’ve gone through the relevant math course you know the steps you need to apply. The difficult part is staying focused, and applying the steps without making any mistakes.

Real life is full of a differant kind of problem. Real life is full of very ill defined problems. “Get a good job”. “Find a life partner”. “Be a good person”. “Put together a report on XYZ”. These are problems we haven’t been trained for. They are problems that don’t have prescribable answers. They are the big real, important kinds of problems.

And yet when we sat down in class for problem solving, over and over again, what did we do?

“Class Susie has 5 oranges, and she gives 3 oranges to Sam. How many…”

I have encountered these ideas repeatedly in my courses with Dr. John Vervaeke. John is the academic director at a private highschool where he’s trying to apply knowledge gained in psychology research in teaching methods

A day of unnecessary brain gooey-ness

i was thinking today about finding a balance between worrying unnecessarily about events too far in the future to change, and planning ahead because you truly care.

i was thinking about how getting too wrapped up in worries distract you from what’s sitting right in front of you.

i was remembering how with just one guitar, one book, a tupperware container full of freezies, a pair of scissors and a patch of grass we could feel completely fullfilled and inspired and excited and i realized that sometimes i’m just downright silly.

i was thinking about how at work i soon learned, and discovered that most new parents were aware, that 9 times out of 10 if a baby is crying it is in some way related to sleep, and that 7 times out of 10 if it’s not about sleep it’s about food–and i was wondering why we (people who have gotten bigger than babies) think we’re any differant?

i was thinking how bizarre it is that angst can wrap itself around your body and then turn inward and weave inside until every inch of you can feel questioning and on edge and that sometimes this feeling isn’t even actively directed at anything.

With an exhaustion headache

I often wonder if I didn’t know that depression (among other things) runs in my family would I worry so much when I’m feeling down? I sometimes wonder how bad it is for your mental health to study psychology.

It would be nice to just have a headache, and feel drained and not worry about it.

More on Drugs

Did you know that alchohol is the only drug which causes agression?

That’s right. You name the terrible, awful drug you ‘ve been warned about and how bad it is for you…and the truth is: in a number of ways alchohol is arguably worse.

And that’s the one we’ve got as legal. …Makes lots of sense doesn’t it?

Experimenting with drugs

I stumbled across one of the most interesting thing I’ve read on the statistics of drug-use and drug-abuse among adolescents in a long time (for those who don’t know me very well: keep in mind that this is an area of intense interest for me and I seek out information about it often).

“…it has been shown– and this is of vital importance, from the perspective of policy and prevention –that adolescents who never experiment with drugs (not even marajuana) tend to be as maladjusted as (although somewhat differantly from) actual drug abusers; that is, significantly more maladjusted than occasional users.”

I’m interested to hear comments on this…is it surprising/obvious/unbelievable?

On Freud and Crumb

The mother, dissatisfied with her relationship with her husband turns for satisfaction to her son. Hateful of men in the world she quenches his male tendancies (exploration, courage, etc), guilting him into weakness–promising always to be there for him, with the dagger of an implication that he will never leave her.

…subconciously petrified of the power of his mother this man grows up intimidated by the gender in general and ends up mistreating any woman he comes into contact with. He grows up to be exactly the kind of husband to dissatisfy his wife and have her turn to her son. …

The tyranical father honours his daughter above all else. Sets up an excellent power struggle between the mother and daughter. The daughter grows up to do everything she can to try to impress her father, or make him happy, meaning that her entire world becomes like an inverted projection of his heirarchy of values.

…Father destroys daugther, mother destroys son, father challenges son, mother oppresses daughter.

My professors insight on Freud for the day?– “If you’re not offended by what Freud has to say, then you can be bloody well sure you don’t understand it”.

We’ll be watching a documentary on Robert Crumb over the next couple of days in my personality class. Should be frightening and disturbing and interesting. The gist we were given today is that he is the most well adjusted of the boys in his family. Oedipal complexes gone wild with unbridled intelligence is pretty damn scary.

Classes this term, stepping out into the unknown, and scorpion suicides

So I’m back at school, and beginning light therapy, and things are good. I’m almost ridiculously excited about my classes this term, which look a bit like this:
Personality and its Transformations
Bases of Cognition
Modes of Reasoning
and
The Phenomenon of Religion

*sigh*…life just doesn’t get any better than that.

I think, though, that it is definately the course on the theory of personality that I am most excited about. The professor seems like a really brilliant man, with a philosophy on teaching that I respect alot. He ‘invited’ us not to take notes in lecture and told us to treat the readings for the class like pleasure-reading, not to bother with highlighting or memorizing, because we’d never memorize it all anyway, and he wanted us to have a general understanding of what we were talking about that would stay with us rather than an ability to regurgitate facts that would get lost a week after the final.

The course is about how the personality develops throughout an individual’s life, and how that process has been transposed during differant times and cultures throughout human history. Pointing out that we haven’t changed much genetically over the last 150,000 years or so he likes to explore ideas about the human condition (stories, myths, etc) from people in as many differant eras as possible, believing that they were all dealing with the same personality development no matter what their technological awareness or scientific knowledge.

For example, on the first day he helped us explore the ancient Egyptian concept of Freud’s ego, super-ego and id. For those without much background in Freud, the idea goes that the ego (individual) is stuck trying to balance the id (basic and profane impulses from hunger and thirst to greed or sex) and the super-ego (the over-arching moral sense), and that life is a struggle as the ego attempts to hold the balance in place. In the case of Freud’s analysis we see a very individual and scientific (by which I mean observable, or at least defineable) division. The Egyptians had an idea which was much more abstract, but was equally brilliant, and perhaps more insightful (or helpful). They had three God’s which can be seen together. The first God is Osiris. Osiris is made of stone, but is old, crumbling and blind. The next is Isis. Isis is associated with the moon and the underworld. And the last is Horas, a falcon, with the single penetrating Egyptian eye. So how does this relate? Osiris represents society. He is solidly in place, but he is blind, and behind the times, and crumbling to pieces. Osiris is like the super-ego, the moral sense we’ve developed about what we’re ‘meant’ to do. Isis is like the id. She represents the underworld and the unconcious–the part of us which is most natural but most hidden from us. And Horas is the ego, stratifying the two. What makes this so brilliant, is the penetrating eye. To the Egyptians the question went like this: betrayed by society, and susceptible to the conditions of nature what is the individual to do? Pay attention! Keep your eyes open. And you will maintain a balance.
(…oh…and while on the various representations of this idea. Trinity anyone? Or in the Catholic tradition: Mary, God and Jesus anyone?)

The next story he told was one of a scorpion. We were talking about the human tendancy to flee from things they don’t understand. Novel people, places and things represent a potential threat to us–not just ideologically, but on a fundamental biological level. This is why the 3 year old is afraid of the monsters under his bed. He’s just old enough that his amygdala (responsible for core emotional responses, like love or fear) and his hippocampus (responsible for his map of the world) are starting to develop fully. He’s starting to get a sense of the world he understands as it is seperate from the world he doesn’t know anything about. When the light goes off, he doesn’t know anymore, that he understands the room he is in. He becomes scared, and in his fear he begins to associate everything he knows to be dangerous and bad with the dark places in his room. Monsters (usually reptilian, because of our innate fear of reptiles) MUST be under his bed! Eventually he grows out of this particular fear (hopefully) but the process of associating his greatest fears with the unknown is unlikely to ever leave him (….has anybody started thinking about the Western Capitalists tendancy to demonize Muslims yet? Or vice versa for that matter?). So anyway, this tendancy is very natural, and helps to protect us. But the unknown doesn’t just represent threat, it also represents the potential for reward, or the discovery of something new. So the healthy well-developed personality doesn’t just flee from novelty, it keeps its eyes open and cautiously explores it to see what benefits might be inside. This means stepping out of the world the individual understands, and may open the individual up to a completely new way of looking at the world (which can be scary) but if all goes well the individual will arrive at a new and better established understanding of the world than the one he began with. The story of the scorpion is the story of the individual who never tries this.

Imagine a large circle drawn on the ground. A scorpion, representing the human individual, is placed within this circle. He runs around inside of it, mapping it, and declaring it his home, and refuses to step outside. A division is made. The circle is seperated in half, and the scorpion traps himself on the one side. He scurries around within his newly defined border. Again the circle is divided in half. Again the scorpion scurries. Again it is divided. This process continues, each time driving the scorpion to scurry faster and faster, until finally he is trapped in a space so small he can’t move. So he stops. He lifts up his venomous stinger, and stabs himself in the back.

If we are unwilling to challenge our ideas of the world or broaden our perspectives over time they will get smaller and smaller and fold in on top of us. Eventually there will be nowhere to turn but onto ourselves. Unfortunately, however, if we’ve spent so long denying ourselves the process of exploration and learning, and refusing to open ourselves up to the worlds of others, when we turn into ourselves all we will find is hatred and fear and emptiness. And there will be nothing to do but die.

Frightening, and dark. But brilliant (sort of makes me think of Nietszche actually–who I’ve always been a fan of pretending to be able to psychoanalyze)–keep your eyes open. Explore the world carefully. It’s exciting. And if you keep moving outward, farther into it, you will become a stronger, wiser, more resiliant, more independant individual. But if you hide within the world you already know, you will become more and more hollow, right up until the end…
…that’s how the personality works…