Moderates United

Unbelievably–or believably, depending on your viewpoint–I have in roughly 8-10 weeks drawn the same card twice now three times: the Fool, the five of swords, and the 9 of swords, just now.

This, just after I decided to invent a new therapy for myself.  I am talking with the fear generating part of myself (this sounds crazy, but anyone who does deep exploration can readily see that our personality, until it is fully integrated, has “parts”, and you can and should talk to them; this is easier done than conceptualized) and telling it that if it allows me to do anything or go anywhere without excessive fear, it is failing me.  It is not doing its job.  I am telling it to do its job.

I tell it, when I walk down this hallway, I want fear.  And I have been able to trigger shaking.  What I’ve noticed is the shaking builds, then subsides suddenly.  It has a run time, and my guess, based in part on the notions I read about in Somatic Experiencing, is that you only need a finite amount of shaking.  For severe trauma, it may be a lot, but if I can integrate it daily, I will make steady progress.

This makes me happy.  There is an end in sight.

I’m probably sharing too much here, but I have come to view this blog as emotionally beneficial.  It may be that people I know read it, a thought which makes me uncomfortable, but the benefits are worth the risk of embarrassment.  Hell, what could be worse than what I’ve already experienced, and sometimes still do?

Where in school did you learn that unprocessed trauma from your baby years could affect you for life?  I don’t remember it, but it seems to be true.

I have awakened something substantial.  If I don’t more or less drink myself to sleep, I wake up multiple times a night–something like every 90 minutes–shaking from head to toe.  Apparently, people “with” PTSD have dreams they can’t remember, but which wake them up.  I woke up punching the bed repeatedly the other night, and wonder if I was punched as a baby.  One reads stories of mothers smashing their babies skulls on the wall, microwaving them, smothering them.  I have recently noticed PSA signs saying “It’s OK to walk away”, targeted at mothers of babies whose crying drives them insane.  I know personally how tiring it can be to wake up every half an hour all night, and that is presumably what happened to my mother.

Still, I was allergic to milk, and they kept giving me milk.  I watched her burn 10 pancakes in a row one time.   She is quite able to avoid learning anything she doesn’t want to learn.

But this is all very interesting.  It is unexpected.  It is a nice trip into the unknown.  I really wonder how many people wander through life with undiagnosed PTSD from the period when their every last instinct is emotionally and physically exhausting for their mother.  Who tests for this?

Could Multi Dimensional Eye Movement be added to physical exams, to uncover hidden and unsuspected trauma?  I would bet 1 in 10 people have it to some degree.  Is that why Kurt Cobain really killed himself?  What about Hemingway?  Were they fighting demons that were completely invisible to them, other than through the manifestation of pain?

And I got to thinking: logically, if an effect of trauma is a timeless, unchanging state, then could we infer that those incapable of breathing life into their notions about the world are by that very fact indicating some degree of trauma inheres in their beliefs?

Very short transition: leftism.  Classes that don’t change.  Historical processes that are abstract, ubiquitous, and inevitable.  Usual suspects.  Clumsy thinking that turns the whole world into a wax museum devoid of personality and ideosyncracy in motion.

Is Leftism the product of trauma, and if so, of what sort?  It is the trauma of grasping, finally, the horror of history, of humankind’s very human defiling and murdering of other humans?  Is it the unresolved trauma of the failure of the French or Russian Revolutions to accomplish anything but mass death and misery?

I will add two more things, then conduct my current process (as I think I said, I am going back into counseling, now that the value of abreaction is apparently better understood, again): I had a very unpleasant episode this morning.  I am working very hard, physically, and by and large all alone.  I was heading into a very hard piece of work this morning, in another city, processing memories that had arisen in the night from my baby period, and anticipating another 7 days straight of equally hard work, and it overwhelmed me briefly.  Anyone who has felt severe clinical monopolar depression knows what it feels like.  It is like a panic attack combined with wanting to cry but being unable to.  Your head spins a bit, and this sense of unreality sets in, which makes you feel like you are going to collapse or have a nervous breakdown.  You may just wind up in the looney bin.

No, no, no.  I knew I had to fight it, but something like that you can’t battle with will, not directly.  You can suppress many feelings; that is not one of them, not in my experience.

So I went through my inventory.  This list, you see, was created by me for me, and then shared with the world, in that order.

Self pity: not a shred.  I am in fucking pain.

Perseverance: I can do that.  I can always keep going.  A little voice in my head (no, not that sort of voice, just the intuitive kind) said that if I persevered in my work for 10 minutes, the crazy would go away.

Perception: Hell, why not simultaneously encourage the craziness, AND keep moving.  EMDR is basically getting into a state, then adding motion.  That is all trauma is: a state without motion, frozen.

So while consciously increasing my sense of depression, I kept working, and damned if ALL the symptoms didn’t disappear in short order.  I worked 9 hours, largely by myself, in an office tower, and I felt and feel fine.  In fact, I have noticed my irritability has decreased.  Things that used to upset me, no longer do so.

I think that most people have all sorts of unresolved trauma that trigger things.  What happens when someone cuts you off in traffic?  Well, of course that can be dangerous, but that is not why you flip out, is it?  Someone just told you you were UNIMPORTANT, you don’t matter.   Fuck you, you nobody.

THAT is what creates road rage.  There is a little nexus in there of potent content, and somebody just triggered it.  I am realizing I have all sorts of triggers, that are diminishing as I get at the REAL trauma, the root of all of it.

Couple more thoughts: Spiritual Emergency might be thought of as an extended nervous breakdown with a beneficial end.  As I tend to do, I feel almost everything most Westerners need to do has NOTHING to do with religion or spirituality: we simply need to become human, and many of us fail.  Being human is where spirituality STARTS.

I also wanted to add that unresolved PTSD from the early years is a potent starter or seed for the formation of complex and strong Resonant Constellations, as I call them: it is invisible, real, and affects everything.

Also, of course, the birth process can play a role here as well.  The thing about the birth process is that it is no doubt somewhat traumatizing for every baby, but I think babies that get the love and affection and attention they need get over it in short order. If, however, you add a hard birth to a barren emotional world, that, again, can create problems whose source is unclear that last a lifetime.

If your only tool is a hammer, it is not necessarily that every problem starts to look like a nail, but rather that you only try to solve problems that look like nails.  You ignore the rest.

Until recently, hypnosis was the only mainstream method of getting access to these primitive states.  Therefore, even though I am going to say with confidence the birth to 2 year old period is often a major source of unresolved and life altering trauma, psychologists, and psychiatrists largely ignore it.  Anything they don’t know how to treat, they would rather not know about.  It makes them look stupid, and they don’t like looking stupid.

The games will continue until she sees the inside of a jail cell. Our target is His Highness, so I ser no reason not to grant her immunity, once she’s stewed in a celll long enough to get some clarity.

Eric Holder belongs in jail. Given some balls on the part of Congress, it could and should happen today.

I am going to speak Acadamese, which iis like jive, but for people with greatly constrained emotional and social skills.

The narrative “Conservatives essentialize others” is itself an essentializing narrative.

I have made this point before, but thought it worth reitetating.

The halls of our best universities are filled with crappy thinking and emotional infantilism.

There is no idea so stupid that someone smart has never hrld it. People still think Communism is something other than an orgy of horror papered over in comic book thinking.

This is a book by Johannes Fabian, that I would been responsible for understanding had I continued in graduate school.  Most everyone in some form of cultural studies will have to read this book.

I have not read the book, but am familiar with the thesis: white men want to rule the world and this really sucks because everyone else is better than us.  That’s pretty close.  A longer summary is here: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2011/07/johannes-fabian-time-and-other.html

Seriously, the gist of the book as I understand it is that Western culture tends to assume things about cultural Others which are untrue and patronizing, namely that they are culturally static, and absent outside contact tend to remain the same.

Here is the point I want to make: it is debatable whether this is true or not of the West–clearly many military veterans understand Afghans and Iraqis far better than people who have never even been over there–but it is CATEGORICALLY true for leftists.

What got me to thinking about this was the widespread belief among Leftists, then and now, that our retreat from Vietnam–from a war we had won and which only needed maintenance, exactly like Iraq–was a GOOD thing.  They assume that since we were over there shooting people, that this was intrinsically, definitionally, a bad thing.  They assume the Vietnamese were a static, homogeneous, culturally united, peaceful people, and that war only came because of us.

They see, in other words, a picture they have created in their minds, not what is actually there.

Place yourself imaginarily in Mosul at this moment.  There is shooting in the streets. People are being executed.  Women and children are being raped.  Imagine families hiding in terror in their bedrooms, knowing the lock on their front door will never hold.  Imagine children looking to their father for protection, and him knowing he cannot do anything.

This is what Obama has engineered.  This is what he has  created as a policy.

The thing with narcissists is they never see the world as it is.  It could be seen primarily as a perceptual defect, a type of hallucinatory capacity to see things which are not there.  If you simply define America as always an oppressor, then leaving a theater of oppression is a good thing, period.  There is no ambiguity.

But this calculus makes not even a RUDIMENTARY effort at defining the Good, at weighing one option against another.  It does not consider rape and murder to be crimes against humanity.  They are only crimes when committed by one set of predefined, timeless Others against a predefined Us.

This is the very tribalism which Fabian’s  book seeks to explore and reduce.   As always with the leftists, they are pursuing in reality the very evil they claim to oppose.

As it often does with me, this becomes personal.  I have a great many emotional scars to heal, and this is one of them.  There is no difference between my mothers refusal to recognize me as I matured–to recognize that I existed in my own Time–and the Left’s refusal to recognize the horror and very human suffering they have enabled through their idiotic blindness.

And there is a sadism to all this, underlaying it all.  Obama almost consciously is spitting in the face of our military, who are cultural Others to him, in exactly the Fabian sense, and getting satisfaction from it.  The Left delighted in the torment our chosen retreat from Vietnam caused our veterans.

This is all madness.

In my previous post I could, of course, have spoken of our war dead, and our war wounded.  Men and women who lost legs, eyes, suffered traumatic brain injuries, or who wake up screaming every night, and whose spouses rightly fear them.

I feel the pain of these people too.  But what I want to speak to, the people I want to speak for, who are never spoken for because they are the least whiny human beings on the planet, are all those who WORKED, hard, for a very long time, who stayed up all night many nights, poring over maps, analyzing intercepts, who CARED about getting this thing right, about winning the war not just because it was their job, but because it was the right thing to do.  These people come back home, get civilian jobs, and largely disappear.  “You were in Iraq?”,  “Yes, ma’am, in 2005-2006, and again in 2010-2011.”

I just feel horror at looking at all this waste, this willful, unnecessary waste of human energy and talent.

This is another variant of PTSD: the bitterness of watching what you gave your life to torn apart and scattered.  That, I guess, is the use of Kipling.  I have If on my wall.

Goddamn it.  Goddamnit.  Fuck Fuck Fuck.

These people are going to cut off at least hundreds and probably thousands of heads.  They are going to start a war with Iran, and turn the Iraqi cultural landscape into an arid, spirit-less desert.  They are going to assert their misogyny vigorously.  Death and destruction, hate and fear follow them wherever they go.

From all I hear, the Iraqi military is filled with pussies, and the Iraqi government has disarmed the populace.  Baghdad will likely fall.

Within a couple months, Obama will have stood and watched the vitiation of all the work our soldiers did in Iraq, and established the basis of the failure of our work in Afghanistan.  The parallels with Vietnam are uncanny.  In Vietnam, we clearly, unambiguously, beyond any doubt, beyond any debate, factually, won the war in the South.  If further evidence were needed, it comes handily in the form of the fact that the Easter invasion was led by tanks provided by the Soviets that originated openly in the North.  So too did the final invasion in 1974-1975.

Yes, of course the amoral whores who run our press have suppressed general understanding of these facts, and even more critically, an understanding of the MEANING of these facts.

We won in Iraq.  Then we lost.

We won in Afghanistan.  But now we will likely lose.

I am tired, irritable, and maybe have some  vodka in a cup next to me, but I want to offer a general statement that feels right to me.  Shit, I’m going to do all caps, and give it a carriage return

NO WAR THAT AMERICA CAN OR WILL FIGHT IN THE FUTURE WILL ACTUALLY BE FOR “FREEDOM” OR “DEMOCRACY” UNTIL WE ELIMINATE THE POWER AND INFLUENCE OF TRAITORS IN OUR MIDST.

I know soldiers.  I talk with them.  I sympathize with them.  I’m a working class joe who rubs elbows with sheet rockers and painters every day.  I like ordinary people.  I respect them.  I don’t like intellectuals, as a rule.

And goddamn it if they are not getting fucking screwed.  I have no personal idea how hard these soldiers, sailors, airmen marines worked, but 16 hour days for a year straight is probably a good guess for most of them.  I know a nice, easy schedule is 12 on/12 off with the Navy.  7 days a week, for the duration of your deployment.

Obama DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT.  I have said this elsewhere several times in the past few days, with regard to his dumping of illegal aliens other than back in Mexico: he values nothing.  I have said he values power.  But that is a craving, a “sehnsucht”, to use an apposite German word.  It is not something he values, cares about.  It is simply a defining aspect of his insanity, his craziness, his poorly constructed reconciliation with unprocessed trauma.  He does not love Americans.  He does not love Valerie Jarrett or even his own children.  There is no love there.  There is only the horror of emotionally detached abstraction.

Perhaps that glass of vodka has shrunk.  Let me ask this question: ISIS–Islamic State in Iraq and Syria–originate in Syria.  Did we arm these mother fuckers?  Did we give them guns, ammo, jeeps, APG’s?

We know Obama has been arming blood thirsty savages in Syria.  Were these some of them?

Was this invasion part of the plan?  Should some little bird have warbled in our ear when Obama talked about how sweet the sound of the muezzin was?

Oh, the birds have been shrieking at us like hysterical monkeys for some time.  

I was talking with someone today about Alison Krauss, and how amazingly soothing her voice is, and it occurred to me that I filled my children’s childhood with soothing music.  We listened to the soundtrack to “Oh, Brother where art thou” over and over.  We listened to a LOT of Alison Krauss.  That was about all we listened to in the car for a year or two.  We rotated three albums.  We listened to the album I’m listening to now, Hem’s “Funnel Cloud”.  We listened to the soundtrack to “Secret of Roan Inish”.  That track is delightful.  Highly recommended.  We listened to a lot of Alan Jackson.

Music is a water you swim in. It is an atmosphere you imbibe.  It fills you, and if it does not quite define you, it affects you, it alters you, it moves you towards or away from balance, wholeness, and emotional satiety and happiness.

Ponder where you go musically, and if you have children, ponder how you make their water both soothing and enriching.

Emerson.

I have this on my wall, as I am misunderstood multiple times each day.  I don’t know that I am great, but I am certainly misunderstood.  In fact, I can’t recall ever being understood with regard to any of my more complex ideas.

One must have some ego to keep slugging, and this is one bit I grant myself.