Sunday, September 13, 2015

Dream interpretation

This is the dream description I sent to the neurofeedback practitioner:

A bad guy (or multiple?) are after me for most of the dream. It gets resolved, and the bad guy gets caught. For some reason, he has hands that are like just flat circles, like the shape of a thick hamburger patty -- like a skin and flesh mitt that has been placed over his hands or that his hands have been burned and deformed intentionally that way by whatever "good guys" got him (cops?). His face is also deformed and scarred. I think his lips have been fused together so he can't talk. I think this is part of his punishment somehow for being bad, that they tried to neutralize his ability to do harm while still allowing him to exist. He doesn't get locked in prison, though, he gets locked in a walk in closet in a master bedroom suite of what sort of looks like my parent's house. I'm also staying there. Some night some time after that, we go to check on the bad guy, but he's not in the closet (we don't realize this at first for some reason, even though the door is open, maybe we think he's hiding). Then I notice bloody footprints from the sliding glass door entrance from the bedroom to the outside -- footprints that go to the closet, and then continue into the house. The other bad guy let this one out and now they're both on the loose. That's about when I wake up.

His interpretation was to ask me what the "bad guys" wanted from me. I told him that it felt like they wanted to make me like them, to disfigure me, so that I wouldn't be fit for a normal life anymore and then I would have to be with them. It reminded me a little of what the protagonist/antagonist in Boxing Helena is trying to do (that film has had such an odd lasting impression with me that I either watched that film either way too young in my development or it struck some chord of truth with me that resonates and haunts still today, I wrote about it a little here). He loves the object of his desire to much that he wants to ruin her for anyone else. Or the Crazy Love documentary, in which a woman whose ex-boyfriend that hired thugs to blind her by throwing lye in her face ends up marrying him because he was the only man “who she knew saw her as stunning rather than blind and disfigured.” I was afraid to become this woman, or to have people attempt to make me become this woman.

The neurofeedback guy suggested that maybe these bad guys  were not trying to make me like them so much as they already were parts of me that I (at one time) didn't want to be -- that they were really just aspects of myself that I had disassociated from and they were haunting me because that's still who I am at some level but have chosen not to deal with it. I actually found that to be a pretty compelling interpretation. It felt right to me, and it's odd, the dream was actually a nightmare -- it was hard to fall back asleep from it and it still haunted me a little in the days subsequent. But the moment I saw those bad guys as just these castoff parts of me, it was a light had been flicked on, so quickly did my paradigm shift. Instead of fear and confusion, I felt compassion and sorry that I had done this to myself -- I had mangled my own self. I was sorry for my childhood self and my teenage self and my young adult self and every other self that I have contorted and distorted to fit whatever my purposes were at the time (to appear to fit in, to get something out of a situation, to achieve something or maintain something that society requires a certain degree of conformity for). I sort of resolved then and there to not do that ever again, as much as I could help it. I started to think of the things that day or week that I had been trying to ignore, suppress, or repress about myself. I started doing little things to try to more openly acknowledge and express those aspects -- something as similar as getting in touch with certain friends or acquaintances or reading articles about those worlds.

The whole thing was such a revelation to me that I now wonder if dream interpretation typically has such drastic results, or if this was just a one off? It also made me think of how many other things about myself that I am oblivious too.

I have a few more thoughts about how the neurofeedback guy let me come to my own truths and didn't try to tell me what my truths are that I'll put in the next post.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Anachronisms and hubris

I've been watching a period television show (The Knick!) that deals a little with mental illness in one of its side characters. I love period shows in general for the anachronisms. I think it's so easy to assume that whatever we are up to as a society is the best there is to offer (one of my favorite cheesy songs is Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City), but who knows what thing we do now is going to cause future generations to cringe at us for being idiots.

The Knick is often cringe worthy with the old fashioned medicine, depiction of race or gender relations, public shaming, slanted morality, etc. But the episode dealing with the character suffering from mental illness reminded me of one of my favorite SNL skits, "Rick's Model T's", in which Crazy Rick sells used cars with his actually crazy wife: "Don't make me put you back in the attic. . . . Damn it Daisy, I wish I had a more legitimate treatment option other than the attic, but that's just where medicine is at." I have a personal belief that we'll think of our current treatment of sociopaths as the rough equivalent of putting people up in the attic. I know others think that this is the best we can do as a society for sociopaths (or that sociopaths should have it worse than they do?), but I don't know, I still cringe at it.


Somewhat relatedly, I like the opening scenes of A Private Universe, in which Harvard graduates and professors confidently explain the changes of seasons all wrong.



I've tried to recreate this scene a little bit, but millennials in particular all give the right basic answer. They seem surprised that anyone ever thought that the closeness of the Earth to the sun could possibly explain the seasons (why is winter in the northern hemisphere summer for the southern then?). But it's of course not interesting to me so much about what people do or do not know, but whether they are able to recognize what they do and do not know -- how open is their mind, how good is their self-awareness, how humble is their sense of fallibility?

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Neurofeedback

I have been putting off writing about this because I wish that I knew more and could tell you more, but I also feel like better something than nothing. This past summer I did a round of 15 sessions of neurofeedback along with a friend who really wanted to try it and wanted sort of a buddy in the process, but also because I have always struggled to fall asleep and stay asleep and this was recommended to me as a potential help. I don't really want to try to describe the process completely or even my experience with it (nor give the impression that I endorse it) but I do want to relate a little of my experience with it.

I first started with a QEEG mapping of my brain, essentially (and forgive my ignorance) where they put a cap on your head are tracking your brain waives with all of these nodes placed in different areas of the scalp. This UCLA professor kind of describes its use in neurofeedback here. One thing that I found incredibly credible about the results was that knowing nothing about me (I never told him about my diagnoses of anything), my practitioner told me, in this very cautious way, "I don't want to alarm you or anything, and this is definitely something that we can see in the "normal" population but it is much more common in the autism spectrum, but your empathy and emotional processing regions have abnormally low functioning. Do you ever feel like you are disconnected from your emotions or other people?"

So even though my primary focus was on sleep, brain efficiency, and perhaps increased creativity (if any of these were possible and I was just making a wishlist), my practitioner became pretty fixated on working on the emotional processing. Sometimes he wouldn't tell me outright that was what he was doing for that particular session, I could just tell from the types of questions he would ask me. Sometimes he told me but said that he thought it was necessary to get that up and running before we targeted other things on my wishlist.

Things I appreciated about the experience:

  1. It was a little validating to hear that my brain actually is demonstrably mapped out to be crapped out (at least according to these metrics) when it comes to empathy. 
  2. Making the little green boat move with my brain waves while keeping the red and yellow boats still in the little electronic regatta made me realize: (1) my thought patterns are a lot more fixed and beyond my control than I realize and (2) because I consciously process so much information as it comes into my brain, I am less open minded. By the latter I mean that my very mechanism of trying to consciously process as much information as I can rather than letting the subconscious deal with it requires me to quickly categorize the data as being interesting or important or not, and always according to my pre-existing criteria. I've always thought that this made me function higher cognitively because less is getting past me, but I realized that it also has the weird but predictable effect of making me search for familiar patterns and thus be closed minded to truly new things, concepts, or types of information. 
  3. Certain sessions (again forgive my ignorance) where he wasn't tracking my brain waves but feeding my brain certain waves could be an absolute trip. Once I felt for all the world like I was on an opiate.
  4. I slept really soundly and deeply after almost every session in what felt like deep, restorative sleep. 
  5. I did sometimes feel waves of affection or other very strong emotional moments of truth, either during the sessions or in the days between the sessions, that suggested that there is still (for me) a capacity for less muted emotions. 

I didn't continue after 15 sessions because my talk therapist suggested that the problem with the neurofeedback technology and techniques are that the brain changes are there, but that they don't last. Again, I did not do any research to verify that claim, so forgive my ignorance.

Even if the effects did not last, there were certain realizations I made during the process that have lasted. I understand better how my brain takes in raw information and that my most efficient brain processing is not to try to earmark or categorize everything as it is coming in (as I naturally default too now), but rather to try to passively let the information come to me in whatever form it chooses to take -- as if there is a direct tunnel of information from the source straight to my brain and I just need to keep that tunnel clear, not force anything. I realized that I do have strong attachments to my loved ones, even if that feeling of attachment or love does not always seem very accessible to me. My practitioner was also a dabbler in dream interpretations, and I learned that whether or not dreams actually have meaning, there was sometimes useful information to glean from the analysis of my dreams. Maybe I will discuss one particularly clear example in a future post. 

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Acquired hyper-empathy (or a surgical treatment for low empathy?)

This is an interesting Wired article (link to the full study) about a woman who had part of her temporal lobe removed as part of a treatment for epilepsy and after acquired what her doctors described as a "hyper-empathy":

The researchers are careful to make some distinctions – they say there are two forms of understanding other people’s mental states (an ability known as Theory of Mind): a cognitive variety, which allows us to represent the beliefs and intentions of others; and an affective variety, which allows us to represent their feelings and emotions. They further explain that empathy is separate from Theory of Mind and is about feeling other people’s emotions. The finding from their tests is that Susan has heightened “Affective Theory of Mind” – that is, an enhanced ability to recognize the feelings and emotions of others; and heightened empathy, in the form of an intense response to other people’s emotions.

The tests

The researchers arrived at these conclusions after subjecting Susan to various neuropsychological tests. One of these tapped her Affective Theory of Mind by asking her to rate her agreement with statements like “I am good at predicting how someone will feel”; another tapped her empathy levels by asking her to rate statements like “I get upset if I see people suffering on news programmes”. More objective was use of a French version of the Reading The Mind in The Eyes Test, which involves identifying a person’s current emotions purely from looking at their eyes. Susan excelled at this test compared with ten healthy control women. The researchers also tested Susan’s Cognitive Theory of Mind using a false-belief task. This takes the form of short stories and the test-taker must deduce which character knew what in each scenario. On this, Susan performed no better than controls.

Richard-Mornas and his colleagues conclude that theirs is a “fascinating case of a patient with a hyper empathy associated with exceptional performance in a task of affective theory of mind after right amygdalohippocampectomy [that is, partial removal of the amygadala and hippocampus]”. They note that the regions where brain matter was removed are part of a neural network, together with the prefrontal cortex, that is involved in understanding other people’s minds and feelings. “The present case report suggests that a new permanent cortical organization of attention and emotion processes has developed in our patient that may be responsible for an enhancement of affective theory of mind,” they said.

The article goes on to suggest reasons to be partially or even highly skeptical about the woman's largely self-reported and unverified claims. The author's main argument seems to be yes, it is possible this happened, but we can't be sure it happened to this woman in this way to the extent she says.

But I kind of want to believe it because I started doing a little neurofeedback this summer (I'll try to write more on this when I get a chance), and a large part of the treatment was focusing on stimulating the temporal lobe to get me more up to speed on things like being connected with my feelings and empathy for others. And at least during certain times of the treatment, I did feel an unusual degree of affection and love for the my loved ones -- extremely high for me certainly, and probably high for anyone, give their reactions to my feelings? Or maybe they were just surprised that such expressions of love were coming from me. :)

Monday, August 31, 2015

The Courage Game

I have historically alternated between trying to understand how I work and trying to understand how the world works or what my place in the world is. When I first started the blog, it was trying to understand myself. After a few years, it went back to the world. After the book was published, it went back to myself again -- this time with the help of an aggressive therapist. Now, I have a sense that I should sort of move on from this simple but comfortable and relatively safe life I have carved out for myself post book publication and trashing much of my previous life. I feel like my gaze has been slowly turning outward, and sometimes in some somewhat dispiriting ways.

This was an interesting video about a 12 year old boy who came out as being gay to his friends. Even in this day in age, that didn't go over well. Probably of most interest to me and people that come here is how he describes how society turned on him, how he reacted to the social ostracization. Starting around 4:20, he talks about how his peers chose to shame him, and how he withdrew as much as he could from society, how he desperately wished he was normal. The most poignant quote from him for me, though, was "I would always want to go to sleep and like never wake up you know because I just didn't want to deal with what like society had come to, and I thought, nothing would ever get better." He eventually stumbles upon a youtube video of an interview openly gay professional lacrosse player from a decade ago, and they strike up a mentorship. At the end, his mentor infers that one day the boy will be able to perform a similar role for other boys in similar circumstances.

I have felt what this little boy has, the feeling that every time you wake up one of the first things you think of is what type of world this is that you are waking up to -- where you don't want to deal with what society has come to. Sometimes I think about other sort of sociopaths that have gone public about their status (oddly only older males?) and how well they seem to be doing. I wonder why things seem more ok for them and their lives than they do for me -- why people don't seem to be as eager to witch hunt or to ostracize or to shame them as they seem to do for me. I could come up with a list of reasons (and some of you may feel the need to tell me why it's my fault), but could anyone of those reasons really explain the drastic difference between one man's and the others? I sort of don't want to believe it, because if I do the world will seem more arbitrary to me, although it may seem less arbitrary to others to want to blame victims, e.g. the rape victim for leading men on or dressing provocatively or putting herself in those situations, or the gay hate crime victim for rubbing it in people's faces. I understand the urge to blame the victim, because if you've never experienced victimization like this, you want to believe that you never will as long as you make all of the "right" choices in life.

But I guess the real answer is that there probably isn't an explanation for who gets victimized and who doesn't, or it's just so complicated. Why does this little boy get ostracized when so many other other young people nowadays have no problem coming out? And if you tried to think about how people would react all of the time to your honest expressions of identity, they would cease to be honest expressions of your identity. And as much as you can try to plan for the right moment and the right way and balance all of the competing interests and variables, everything can go wrong quite easily, like Gettysburg for the South. But in social situations like this, not only is there a large degree of risk and uncertainty and any planned or unplanned social maneuvering like a coming out, there's also a large degree of irrationality.

And I guess that is what I am actually really grateful for, for the opportunity to finally understand what it feels like to go through something a little like this boy did. I understand better now what it must feel like to be an abused spouse, where everything can seem like it's going fine and suddenly for some reason (but really no reason, or no rational reason, or not any reason that could be a reasonable response to the alleged trigger), you are something that is so reviled that you deserve to be treated like human garbage. It reminds me a little of an interview I watched with a youngish black man who had been raised by white parents and never really experienced the worst of racism in his sheltered middle class community until one night he was pulled over by police who proceeded to pull him out of the car, antagonize him, and then beat him to within an inch of his life. There is no rationality to it. There's no predictability to it. Or Sandra Bland. Did she really deserve what she got for not being deferential to the police? That's the reason why? And I know that not all of you will see it this way, but to me it's as ugly to me to hear people try to justify the police officer's behavior as it is for people to justify the homophobic bullying of a little gay boy. And now I can see better how people would just not want to deal with what society has come to. And this is not an indictment, it's just an expression of gratitude that before when I used to feel very little ties to society outside of my close family and friends, I now feel a sort of kinship to everyone else who has had a similar experience. And I don't know. If this is the way the world is going to keep working, at least for the foreseeable future, then I feel a little bit of an obligation to make my life work so that maybe eventually my example can help others who endure similar fates. But it's still a huge struggle for me right now to reconcile myself to this being just how the world works. Maybe that's a good thing too. Maybe eventually there will be enough people bothered by this sort of thing that it will cease to be as socially condoned as it still is. Because I wonder what the world would look like if people got as outraged by senseless shaming as they did senseless killing. In a lot of ways, I think victims of shaming would rather be dead -- that's why the suicide rate is so high among young gaysters, as the video points out. But also what good does the outrage at senseless killing accomplish? Maybe moral outrage of any kind is not the solution that it sometimes seems to be in our moments of deepest frustration with the world.

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