flowboy

Very exciting!

I'm not upset, I just mistook you for a spammer. We get those here sometimes. Apologies. @TraceBurkeQHHT Can you induce me? It sounds like a lovely experience.

Yes, except "intentional" sounds like it's a conscious decision, which it is usually not. Usually when escapism happens, you tell yourself it's for a good reason and you're in denial about the actual reason. The only way that works for me to tell the difference, is the "energy" behind it. Is there something frantic in me that can't wait? A quality of neediness, neurotic urge? If it feels like you're calm and you could take it or leave it, it's not escapism. Sounds alright to me. I also stocked up on a bunch of acid once (acquired legally, it was 1P). I didn't want to be dependent on friends anymore. I was rather watching for something like "having lots of acid so I can obliterate my mind". That would be unhealthy. You're fine, enjoy a trip if you think it would help you. Might help you break free from the opinions of friends

@TraceBurkeQHHT are you being paid to promote this? It's suspicious that this is your first post.

This is a bit fishy though, why do you need a lot? What does it represent to you?

@vishnusavestheday Escapism is when you'd rather be tripping than sober. So you can't wait for the effects to come on, so that you can stop thinking what you're thinking, and feeling what you're feeling. Even then, doing that once won't hurt and will probably set you straight. It's only a problem if it's a habit, e.g. you should be working on moving out and changing your life but you're taking acid on the weekends instead.

Made dinner and prepared for bed without any negative thoughts or resistance today. No laziness. That’s new. My deep feeling session might have something to do with that. I feel optimistic that I can actually get better.

@flyingwhalee Any nightmares? What imagery do you see, if any, on your mind's eye when you get to the hellish state? You may be able to identify the state as a repressed memory, if you ask the subconscious some questions. If that's the case, then recognizing it as such will help.

@vishnusavestheday Psychedelics are anti-addictive, so no you're not sacrificing your sobriety. LSD used to be one of the original 12 steps of AA. Unless you use them as an escape. Only you can know whether you are escaping something by tripping. Sidenote: I've stopped recommending psychedelics to people after I realised that although they work great for me, they could go very badly for people with a shakier psychology (prone to anxiety, etc)

It's not a psychedelic and it's not a dissociative. It's a deliriant. The effects are very different from psychedelics and also from dissociatives. They make you instantly forget that you took something, and then they make you see people that are not there and have conversations with them. Your connection to every day reality can entirely disappear and you can be walking around in a hell / dream world. The effects can easily last multiple days. No one knows if they are safe to take when one has a predisposition for psychotic states, but common sense would have to say no.

@Mips Based on what I've read on epilepsy, psychedelics and the brain, I would theorize that they are definitely capable of triggering seizures. I'd only proceed if that's an acceptable risk to you. I've seen people have convulsions on low doses of LSD, although they weren't full-on epileptic seizures, their entire body started shaking and their eyes moved erratically, and they didn't remember it well afterwards. Then again, if I search, I can find one anecdote of someone who stopped having seizures after taking LSD.

I was induced. 2 weeks late, a drug was used to make me get born. Explains a lot of my hangups around being ready for things, finishing things, and things happening without my consent.

@Thought Art The purging of repressed painful memories. Happiness is a default state, for which you need very little as an adult (some social contact, some meaningful thing to do, food, sleep, shelter) If you have the basic things and your state deviates from happiness, it's old pain messing with your present reality.

@Parki I personally have a tendency to do things about 75% of the way, and then invent a reason to procrastinate on the rest. I've observed in myself and others that there can be a deep discomfort/anxiety around finishing. This can be a deep pattern. What helped me understand it better, was reading about birth imprints. (See Imprints by Arthur Janov) Basically, how you do one thing is how you do everything, and it can be related to how smoothly your birth went. To gain more understanding and compassion for yourself, ask your mother whether there were any complications, whether it took too long, if any medications or special procedures were used, anything at all. Unwiring that deep pattern can be a lengthy process that needs some specific professional guidance. Since I haven't gone through that, I need a practical workaround. I've found it helpful to: Practice being aware and noticing when it happens Feel into the feeling that prevents you from finishing (notice that you are not getting sidetracked "by" external things, rather, there is a discomfort arising when you're about to finish, and you react to that by doing something else instead) Get someone, maybe a friend or partner, to sit next to you for the finishing bit - they don't even have to help, just the presence of someone else helps to push through. Alternatively, use this awareness to build a habit to push through by yourself. But get others to be with you when you can, it makes it a lot easier.

Healthy anger should not be suppressed. It's protective, cleansing. What is healthy anger? Healthy anger is when the anger is just about the present situation, without overtones of triggered childhood trauma. It flows through you quickly, no rage or yelling is usually needed, just an intensity of presence and subtle raising of the voice. Everyone knows what's up when healthy anger comes to express itself. When people get diagnosed with an "anger management problem", they just have unresolved suppressed trauma that's mucking up their perceptions. So using the times when you get "too" angry to find blocked memories, and processing those, is how you master it.

A rock with cancer.

So what were the criticisms actually?

That's easy then, the workouts are the change that's new, and they are closer to bedtime than is recommended for sleep. I would try to work out earlier in the day and see if that helps you sleep through the night!

What pain would I feel if I had no mess to project it on? It occurs to me that I'm living with the perpetual feeling of "something's not done, not finished, not cleaned up, not ready" Sometimes I let clutter build up in my apartment for a few days and take a sick pleasure in that. Sometimes I let it build up in my email. Or in not trimming my beard on time. And then on a conscious level, I dread the task of catching up, cleaning up, finishing. But do I really? At certain times during a Primal therapy treatment, the therapist would actually tell the patient to push through and get their life together... just to reveal their pain. They would get a job, get out of a toxic relationship, move to a place they liked better. And afterwards, feel the same feelings with no place to project it on. So it would be much clearer that they were from the past. I love to hate that things in my life are unfinished... overflowing email account, clothes need to be decluttered but I never get to it. What would be revealed if I did all of that? What feeling would I have left over, with nothing more to blame it on? Do I feel unfinished? Was I induced? I should find out.

What time do you go to the gym? Going to the gym within 4 hours before sleeping can disrupt sleep. Also: any nightmares?

Sounds like she's just trying to meet new people and build a social circle. Doesn't sound like a date to me, but I hope you have a good time anyway and report back!

I feel like I'm on the brink of a breakthrough insight. I've been contemplating what true therapy is, and how it relates to manifestation and magic. What some people call shadow work, is just changing your beliefs and feelings in the present so that your life becomes better. As within, so without. Examples of magic: Existential Kink Affirmations Manifestation Magic Sex Magick Sedona method The Work Gratitude journaling Prayer All of these work with the 3rd line, and limiting beliefs and neurotic struggles are removed to enable a smooth manifestation of what one wants in the present. They work with the subconscious as well - they penetrate into the unconscious beliefs and attitudes and change them. That causes someone to behave and perceive in a way that is more conducive to getting what they want. That does not mean that they penetrate the 2nd line. There is repression and gating on all levels, so there are subconscious 3rd line beliefs, attitudes and desires. In the 3rd line unconscious, the symbolizing on situations, objects, relationship and people also lives. This can be rewired with a practice like EK, so that someone stops their self-destructive behavior. But where does the repressed 2nd and 1st line Pain go? Nowhere. Some forms of shadow work do touch it a bit - if it includes an old-feeling inquiry or the pain of parts - then a tiny bit of grief can be felt, which is relieving but not curative, because it doesn't include full first-person conscious reliving, and if there is the symbol of the "inner child" in the mix, then the psyche is still fragmented. I hypothesize that the fragmentation keeps the true Pain at a safe distance while allowing the 3rd line to be improved and rewired. The 3-2-1 method involves first person perspective, so depending on how far one takes that, it could constitute a "symbolic reliving" or a "fragmented reliving" as Stone calls it, which according to him is curative. And then some variants also add a bit of unreality - forgiveness, recontextualisation, "changing the scene" into the mix. This is condemned as dangerous folly by Janov, Jenson and also Miller - creating a groove from real unfelt Pain into unreality, thereby cutting off a pathway to healing. The inner child can not be given what it needed then, now. Neither can the inner baby. Trying to rewire a traumatic birth memory into a good one, as rebirthers have tried to do, just forces that high valence Pain to find another way out, perhaps seizures, perhaps migraines, perhaps colitis, while damaging someone's connection and pathway to let it out. I've worked with people whose 2nd line memories are polluted with "helper" figures - older selves, older brothers, saviours that weren't really there - it makes it almost impossible to focus on the original scene. They think they are done with it, but they have just created more neurosis, more unreality. I hypothesize that hypnosis and EMDR work in similar ways. Reinforcing the disconnection between the memory and the Pain. Which probably does remove a certain triggering pathway, but the pain has to find another way out eventually. I recall my friend who was driven to suicide after receiving EMDR therapy relating to her traumatic childhood. Before EMDR, she was a functioning neurotic. She was restless, unsuccessful in relationships, suffering with the consequences of attachment trauma, the source of lots of drama when she was triggered, and constantly seeking something she never seemed to find - or even be able to recognize when it was right in front of her. But she was stable, reasonably happy, had found friends that loved her and accepted her for her quirkiness, and she had found a purpose. She was a happy-go-lucky free spirit, always able to manifest something she wanted to create, always had people ready to help. Alternative healing methods like rebirthing had helped her a lot, and she was now helping other people with it. Then she decided: perhaps I'm missing out by not doing any mainstream therapy. And signed up for doctor-sanctioned EMDR sessions. Within months, she was paranoid and suicidally depressed. The last thing I ever heard from her were hostile messages containing paranoid ideas about how I had tried to ruin her life in different ways. I was not the only one she pushed away. She committed suicide within a few months of starting that therapy. Back then, I didn't know what to think - isn't EMDR supposed to relieve trauma? Now, what I guess happened, is that some high-valence painful memories were brought up to "process", EMDR was used to disconnect the Pain from the memory, and then the part of the pain that was not consciously processed, had to find another way out. One of those ways can be paranoid or psychotic ideas, as Janov teaches. An effect of traumatic birth Pain - which I know she had - not finding its way to consciousness but overwhelming the psyche, is a hopeless, death feeling being projected onto current reality. That's how people come to believe that there is no way out but suicide. There is a reason that EMDR is not recommended for early trauma, but rather for individual incidents later in life. I believe that the therapist has misapplied her method. I also believe that the "rebirthing" my friend had done some years earlier, might have done some damage to her ability to process the birth pain, by attempting to install a "new, better" birth memory, which can not be done. This could have contributed to her sudden episode of darkness. But I digress. Magic and manifestation are effective techniques to help someone develop the attitudes and perceptions that most efficiently get them what they want in the present. It does that by removing the unhelpful attitudes and perceptions, and neurotic symbolizations. These unhelpful attitudes, perceptions and symbolizations can however be important clues to find and heal the cause of someone's neurosis. I'm not sure what happens if you magic them all away - but I suspect their root cause doesn't just disappear. Perhaps other neurotic attitudes and symbolization just keep popping up indefinitely - like playing Whack-a-Mole. Perhaps this is why people say that shadow work is never done. It is a misunderstanding of the difference between magic and healing. The brain rebalances itself constantly, it maintains homeostasis. Unfelt old feelings of being unwanted create unhelpful attitudes and beliefs. Feeling those unfelt feelings removes the need for those unhelpful attitudes and beliefs, and people do start to improve their lives without the help of magic and manifestation. They develop healthier attitudes, slowly, but they last. Using magic and faith is faster at creating healthy attitudes, which can also create fast results in someone's life. But it must be continuously practiced. Or regularly refreshed. This is why people get addicted to their religion, why faith must be regularly practiced. For some. This has also been my experience with affirmations. I use affirmations, I get what I want... for a while. Then my mind creates new reasons for why I can't get what I want this time. Homeostasis. It's actually quite obvious. People have negative thoughts, and then they remind themselves - or each other - to have Faith. And it works for a while - as long as they can hold on to that faith, their life improves. As long as someone can maintain the thought "I am loved", their relationships go better. This is why people gratitude journal every day and keep doing it. They have to. A daily dose of healthy 3rd line. If they stop, their mind reverts back to rumination and thoughts of worthlessness, nobody wants me, et cetera. Because their traumatic pain is still there, untouched. Regression therapy diminishes that, and people drop their unhelpful beliefs slowly, but permanently. I would say that even CBT can be categorized as magic - if we define magic as getting a daily dose of healthy 3rd line in order to make short term improvements in life. Okay, now I am satisfied with my contemplation.

@Tyler Robinson As are you!

It's winter now, I believe it's normal to have your hair thicker in the summer than in other seasons. It's also normal to lose up to 100 hairs a day (I've read somewhere), they just regrow. If you're still convinced that you are losing an abnormal amount of hair, then keep reading. Getting a thorough blood panel including hormones would be the first thing I'd look at. And then have that result printout checked by someone like @Michael569 or any expert you trust, maybe some biohacking person or female hormone balance specialist, just to get a good read whether something's out of whack or not. Your GP's opinion is not enough, they tend to be too busy and nonspecialized to pick up on subtleties. If something's out of whack with your hormones, then you need to figure out whether it's nutritional or psychosomatic. Here's the order in which I would troubleshoot it: removing sources of stress in your life, removing toxins from your diet and skincare products, see if you are using any hair care products or shampoos that you didn't use before and could contain toxins, quitting smoking etc, getting your blood checked for the level of hormones, vitamins, minerals and other stuff that's supposed to be there, talk to nutrition experts and hormone experts and get their take on your blood panel, try supplementation or diet changes, See if it's a side effect of medication that you are taking maybe try artifical hormone supplementation if that's something you're willing to do, otherwise look at regression therapy or Primal therapy to restore your natural state. I assume that you are in your 20s or maybe 30s and don't have a disease, so you should not be balding or having your hair permanently become thin. If you are suffering from emotional stress, your hormones will be out of whack. If you have a certain level of unprocessed early childhood trauma or birth trauma, your hormones can be out of whack by default. If your mother was stressed when she carried you in the womb, your body can get an imprint from that which can cause an unnatural hormonal setpoint, or an unnatural level of stress that the body takes over as a setpoint for homeostasis. That can sometimes be restored with Primal therapy, but it can take some years and is a big time investment. So check the easy stuff first.

Pretty much exactly matches my experience. And I have been diagnosed with ADD when I was 19. The apathy towards people and the addictiveness eventually made me say: no thank you, I'll find other ways. I've spent years of my life finding different things to optimize to minimize symptoms: diet, supplements, meditation, habits, tricks to structure, et cetera. I've coached others on that stuff, with good result. Currently, I'm doing research on how aspects of ADD can be permanently improved, without the continued use of medication or the aforementioned bag of tricks. I've found some things that are working for me, but it took a lot of digging and reading between the lines of not very well known books. Building tons of good habits that minimize the symptoms is no longer interesting to me. I'm interested in what's curative, and none of the therapies that will be recommended by the current medical system are that. Some forms of therapy that exist, but wouldn't typically be recommended for ADD, do seem to have permanent effects. I need to experiment on myself more before I'm comfortable making recommendations publicly. @KazmanTo answer the question: make a careful consideration about taking the medication. If you need it to save your career or marriage, it can be a good idea. But be aware that if you have a hint of an addictive personality, you'll have problems with this one. Due to the disconnecting nature of the medication, it's easy to slip into a habit of taking it and working a lot, because it just feels good, meanwhile becoming distant to your partner and children and slowly ruining personal relationships while being unwilling to see it. That certainly happened to me; I restarted taking the meds when I was 24 and turned into a workaholic with problems in my relationship. My ability to feel suffered. Here's what I mean by disconnecting: The impulses that make for some of the symptoms of ADD (impulse to switch tasks, impulse to react to a feeling of boredom and distract oneself, impulse to change directions during a conversation or project, making it unstructured and unfinished), are impulses that originate in the emotional body or in the visceral body. You can verify this by 'catching' these impulses and noticing an underlying anxiety or negative emotion (feeling) or strong sense of discomfort (visceral) The medication that exists for ADD helps you to cut the interference from the feeling brain and the visceral brain, so that your conscious, thinking, task driven brain has all the space to calmly do what it needs. And that feels great. Until your relationship, either with friends, family or partner, demands that you tap into your feelings. Then, you may run into problems, because you need access to your feelings to connect deeply with people, have true empathy and closeness, etc. Not everyone runs into this issue, I hypothesize that the people who get away with it are probably keeping their doses really low, and/or they have partners that are sufficiently neurotic and in their head that they don't notice the drop in connectedness. The above points are based on my own literature research combined with introspection. See also: