flowboy

I want to share my thoughts on the topic and then open it up for discussion. Recently, a nutritional therapist made these observations, which I found very interesting, and prompted me to write this. Some ADHD clients really benefit from nutrition therapy, and some do not. Some are in the camp that says ADHD is a disorder that can (or can not) be healed, and some others say it is a natural state, not a disorder, and it doesn't need to be healed. Disclaimer: I am not a scientist, psychiatrist or a medical professional. These are just my mental models based on insights gathered from personal experience, experience working with clients, and existing scientific literature. Regarding the two camps, disorder and natural state, think both are right. There's multiple components to what people call ADHD. I would separate out the neurotic component and the gift. The neurotic component, I'm further separating into two elements: The stress element The psychological element The gift component, I'm separating into two elements as well: Sensitivity Divergent thinking First, let's discuss the neurotic component. Which I would separate out into the stress element and the psychological element. The stress element is comprised of anxiety, restlessness, inability to focus or stay on topic, impulsiveness, bad sleep, hyperactivity, inability to long term plan, brain fog, bad memorisation of important facts and appointments, being chaotic, tendency to lose things and be messy. I call this the stress element, because these symptoms are the result of the body being in a stressed, fight-or-flight state constantly. Think about it: all these symptoms are what happens to you in situations where you feel like your life is in danger. It's a stressed state of the body and mind that has become chronic. Many people with ADHD do not even realise how stressed their system is, because they rarely, if ever, experience peace and calm. Perhaps unexpectedly, I count being dreamy, distracted in thoughts and daydreams as also part of the stress element. This is a subtle form of dissociation. Dissociation means, simply said, drifting away to a safe place in order to not feel what is going on. Heavy dissociation looks like completely drifting away or blacking out, and not even knowing what is happening with your body. This is often developed as a reaction to heavy trauma, such as sexual or physical abuse. Every time a situation comes up that reminds the sufferer of this, either consciously or unconsciously, the drifting away happens again. It's a defense mechanism against having to go through that again. What's lesser known is that dissociation can take subtle forms, as a result to subtler trauma. A long-term, emotional discomfort, such as being bullied in school, or parents going through divorce, or even a parent who is inattentive and has unpredictable mood swings due to having ADHD themselves, is often not seen as trauma, but it is. And it can cause dissociation, it's just not as obvious. Distraction, daydreaming and being in one's head is a defense against feeling the pain of what is currently going on. Which then remains in the adult as a programmed reflex, even after the emotionally painful situation subsides. Then there's the psychological element: shame, guilt, low self esteem, lack of belief in oneself, self doubt, lack of self worth. The neurotic component as described above can often be healed to a variable extent, and is caused by three things: Early childhood trauma and adolescent trauma. I'm including pre-birth emotional stress of the mother in this, as well as birth trauma, as this heavily influences development. Under the right guidance this type of trauma can be released. Internalized shame of being different, the trauma itself of being punished for thinking differently and functioning differently. This often develops when someone goes to school and is forced to learn in ways that don't suit them, or is not socially accepted because of the different way they think and perceive. Environmental stress and toxins. Think heavy metals in food and water, plastics, food additives, chemicals used in farming, but also alcohol and medication consumed by the carrying mother. The earlier this happened the harder it is to heal. For example, you can teach yourself to eat a healthy diet and make great improvements, but if your mother was an alcoholic or used a lot of paracetamol when you were still in the womb, that has a bigger influence on brain development that is hard to bounce back from. The second component that I see, is what people refer to as the "gift", which exists in sensitivity and divergent thinking abilities. This manifests as being highly creative, inventive, intuitive, having great problem solving and brainstorming ability, and the perceptual sensitivity makes someone great at observing and understanding themselves and other people. I think that the question of to what extent, and how, it can be healed, entirely depends on how it was created. ADHD is a group of symptoms that are developed as reactions to environmental stress, be it emotional or chemical. This explains why some people get better results with cleanses and nutrition improvements, and others do better with trauma healing and therapies or coaching that incorporate that. And some really do best on a combination. If sensitivity correlates with divergent thinking ability / creativity, which I am hypothesizing it does, because creativity can be described as sensitivity turned towards the inner world (sensitivity towards new ideas, thoughts, possibilities), we can close the loop on that too. So then ADHD becomes a function of sensitivity and environmental stress. Sensitivity including: external and internal sensitivity, physical and psychological sensitivity. Environmental stress including physical stress like toxic exposure, and emotional stress like trauma. Both of which can happen pre-birth or post-birth. This is how I've mentally modeled it, but feel free to criticize, add your own experience and discuss

If only people could be relied on to choose what is good for them... Psychedelics are (sometimes) beneficial mostly because you can't choose your own adventure once you're in it. It shows you what it wants, and you have to surrender to it. Part of the experience will be difficult and exactly what you don't want to experience. And that's where the growth comes from. This device, like all other choose-your-own-experience inventions (internet, social media algorithms, Door Dash) will be used for porn and instant gratification. The knowledge that is instantly accessible can be useful, while the people accessing it become increasingly more useless, addicted and lazy. In the end, we will realize that accessing ChatGPT through a computer screen is more useful than accessing it through a lazy human, constantly distracted looking up porn or engaging in twitter arguments in their head, too lazy to even form sentences. It will mean the end of usefulness of the human. Of course, some people will be able to use it wisely and with restraint. Not most. The fact that a phone screen can't be constantly watched and fiddled with, is what protects many of us from complete degeneracy. Forget the gap between poor and rich, this will exponentially widen the gap between the 1% reasonably disciplined and successful, and the useless and suicidally depressed dopamine addicts. I'm with @Leo Gura on this.

@k-ahmadzadeh I can't help you heal your psyche through forum posts, but I can share what I've learnt in studying this topic, which is this: hopelessness, pointlessness, uselessness, helplessness are feelings that belong in childhood. They make sense for a child going through suffering, because it's completely dependent on adults. An adult is not. Whenever an adult is feeling these things, it's the inner child speaking that is still suffering.

Not untrue, but it's important to realize that the intellectual level of the mind is an outflux of the deep feeling layer of the mind (where the unprocessed pain from the past lives, in your case hopelessness/pointlessness for example). So, however convincing your valid propositions, if your underlying feeling state was different, your mind could craft an equally convincing set of arguments that would increase sense of meaning etc. In short: do not take your thoughts as absolute truths, they are just the result of your deeper state of mind. If you have hopelessness to work through, it's going to push your mind to create arguments that rationalize that hopelessness. Work through the hopelessness by putting it in proper perspective (e.g. in therapy, realize it comes from not getting needs met in childhood and grieve those unmet needs properly [not an exercise you can do mentally, there needs to be emotional release]), the underlying hopelessness goes away, now your thoughts convince you of happy things. I'm not just blabbing, I've worked up close and personal with people who have gone through the process I have just described, and their depression completely went away. I hope you watch the videos.

@Ramanujan I've seen her code when she got the job, it wasn't anything impressive, but she worked at it. I imagine she's good now. I think they took a liking to her because she's an ambitious hard worker and did extra things like create a hobby website for teaching programming, and Toastmasters.

yes, she had a bit less choices of company, because not all of them wanted to do the VISA thing, but she found one. Had to move to Amsterdam for it.

I've helped people with trauma reliving, big and small, and delved into that subject quite a bit. If you want to free yourself, you have to go option 1. The other options are good, but to jump to them and leave it at that would constitute spiritual bypassing and gaslighting your inner child. There's an awful lot of intense emotional pain behind this incident, which you are going to have to feel, in order to release it. Please do not use psychedelics for this. Let your trusted therapist help you relive it in bits and pieces, sober. Feel the helplessness, feel the terror, feel the anger, feel all of it. That will set you free. It's great that 5-meo-MALT helped you discover this thread, but if you go deeper into it under the influence of psychedelics, you might bite off a little more than you can chew, and you could be faced with serious depression, panic attacks or psychosis. Which you can avoid if you do the reliving part sober. I wish you all the strength 💚

There's no unsolvable problems from a psychologically healthy perspective. Either it's not unsolvable, or it's not a problem. Reinhold Niebuhr said it best: In your example (the depression), you could go two ways with it: See it as "not a problem". Figure out what you want to do and how you want to live, and do it anyway, even with depression. See it as solvable. One medication not working properly doesn't mean it's unsolvable. There's hundreds of medications that you can try, and besides that, medication isn't even the best solution for depression. Certainly not the only one. Psychedelics can cure depression. Primal therapy cures depression. Working through childhood trauma cures depression. And there's many other therapies that don't involve medication, that can work well. Here's a deeper point I want to make: pointlessness, hopelessness and uselessness are not based in present reality, they are symptoms of an unhealed psyche which are being projected on top of the present situation. A healthy psychological response would be to not mix the hopelessness and feelings of defeat, which are remnants of childhood trauma, to mix with the assessment of the facts of the present day situation. To be able to separate the feeling, which is an old feeling, from current reality, is the important skill there. Watch this:

I run a trauma healing focused accountability group, and my thoughts are that people are mostly not going to be serious long-term about what they don't pay for. It's the sad reality. In fact, I didn't make mine paid until people literally begged me to, because they wanted everyone to be serious about it.

I'm a programmer for a company in the Netherlands, not Canada which is where you want to go. But anyways, where I work it's like this: Your age doesn't matter, your skill matters. We hire people in their 50s if they know what they're doing. You can get a job without a college degree, but you need to prove your skill. Ways to do that are: Previous working experience. If you don't have that, then have these others: Having created interesting projects (have a GitHub portfolio that you can show and talk about) These projects should be somewhat relevant to what this companies are doing, hopefully in the same lang/tech stack too One of their engineers will probably look at your code and they should think it's decent Proficient knowledge of the language (can answer advanced test questions) Passing practical tests in programming assignments as part of your application Getting online certifications. Microsoft and Oracle offer those for example. Your communication with humans is just as important. I can tell from your posts that you need to work on your English a bit more. Someone who doesn't speak English or Dutch really, really well wouldn't get hired where I work, I think. The better you can speak and write, the better your chances of getting hired. So I would advise choosing which programming language you like best (one that is widely used today, for example C#, Java, PHP, C++), and start learning it really well and building your portfolio, and getting an English language tutor as well, for example here: https://www.italki.com/. Any sector you go into will be using complementary technologies and languages as well, so depending on what that is, you might also want to pick up JS, Python, Spring, React, or others... What those tend to be, you can see in the job listings. https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies Having done one or two courses is not enough. You need to practice a lot, because when your manager tells you "Build this" you need to know what to do. But it doesn't hurt to start applying to jobs early, and just see how far you get in the application process. What their criteria and demands are. You can already apply from where you are, many companies hire remote even outside the West, and some might even help you with the VISA (acquaintance of mine got in that way from Russia)

Can't be that difficult. I know tons of people that have done it. Seems to be a promising cure for opiate addiction, apparently you really don't want it anymore after a flood dose. That said, someone I know was at an iboga retreat recently where this woman was suddenly dead. Super weird. It's not as safe as psilocybin.

Yes. I have gotten quite a bit of progress with talking to strangers while taking LSD at festivals. Great fun, too. And wonderful insights. @Shrooms_Alvarez Well I hope you don't mean me. I just said that if you want to find the root cause, and change that, then psychedelics are not a safe option and you would risk messing yourself up. However, I'm making a nuanced point here trying to bridge vocabulary differences: what most people would consider a root cause, I do not. You see, you can have a psychedelic trip about something and have an insight about where it comes from, for example: "lack of self acceptance" or "negative subconscious beliefs" or "lack of trust in myself/the universe" Those things are not root causes. And then with a bit of luck, your mind can be rewired to ditch that negative belief, or remember that feeling of trust for example, and make progress that way. And that's what all these psychedelic healing stories are about, people have insights, change feelings, beliefs, and make progress. It can happen. What's wrong with that? Nothing. Try it. But as others have stated, it doesn't take you all the way there. Psychedelics can be great for unwiring the most problematic knots in your mind! Those knots are there for a reason though, or rather, there is an energy driving your mind into those knots. That energy is something that you have never felt before. And your mind is creating those knots in order to keep you from feeling this forbidden thing. You will not be able to guess what that thing is with your mind. It is literally a feeling you have never felt before because your system thinks it means DEATH. Because, at some point between ages 0 and 7, that was true. Now that energy is still there, and it is creating many other knots in your mind, and in your body. Think of other irrational emotional issues you might have, negative recurring thought patterns, physical tension, sleep problems, you name it. Unwiring one knot makes space for the other. This is what I mean by root cause. I know how to get to that root cause, and when you feel an authentic desire to go there, trust me, you don't want to be tripping. For now, I think you should try psychedelics because you seem really curious about it, and some short-term wins would be good for you.

@Javfly33 At the risk of stating the obvious: have you considered iboga? It would solve your problem.

She sounds pre-psychotic. Don't take psychedelics with her.

Could be just your inferiority complex talking. She didn't say anything implying a value judgment of you. I believe generally the conscious thought of women when they reject goes no further then "meh, I'm not feeling this vibe". In my personal experience, that can be made worse because my inferiority complex made me put too much importance on this particular contact, somehow the "common interests" made me feel like I had an unique scarce opportunity there. Whilst in reality, common interests mean jack shit. And then I can easily get into subtle conversation dynamics where my investment doesn't go down when hers does, and that loops back on itself until she's had enough.

Thanks Yes, highly recommended.

Yeah, that would be great. And good for you! I'm just saying that doing trauma release (reliving and feeling old pain, which must be done in order to heal) is itself not a good idea to do under the influence of psychedelics. It's best done sober, so that your built-in anti-overload safety switches are working.

A few weeks to a month for it to slowly improve, as far as I remember. I was also a cigarette smoker back then, perhaps I quit and that also helped, I don't quite remember the order of events there. I don't have a specific brand recommendation, I know I try to take pure cod liver oil from an ocean that hasn't been completely poisoned, so I recommend using a brand that states explicitly where the fish is from. Back then I took 2-4 1000mg capsules a day, these days I only take 1. It's pretty safe but has a subtle blood thinning effect, so you shouldn't combine it with aspirin or blood thinning medication, also be careful if you are at risk for stroke for some other medical reason or have a blood clotting disorder. I know this because once I got bruises on my muscles after a gym session, that's likely a side effect of fish oil, but it went away even though I didn't stop taking it. The internet said it wasn't anything to worry about anyways. For more diet tips to optimize nerve health, I recommend looking up the Terry Wahls diet. She's a very interesting story, because she's an MD who got multiple sclerosis - a neurodegenerative chronic autoimmune disorder - and decided she wasn't satisfied with the treatments available, and that she would improve her condition through just diet and supplements. And she did - which is amazing, because no conventional treatment can currently improve that disease. The way she eats is probably great for anyone wanting to optimize nerve health - and it contains lots and lots of omega 3.

@Shrooms_Alvarez Interesting, thank you for posting that. I don't think Jung was talking about the same downside here although the structure of the argument is the same: You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I'm not sure whether I believe in a collective unconscious, but what I do know, is that much of our dreams and hallucinations are simply encrypted trauma content, which we would do well to not take too literally, but simply decrypt it by following the underlying feeling until the symbols are replaced by memories. I'm not against psychedelic use, I'm interested in it, have done quite a bit of it and want to do more. I just know that when it comes to unwiring trauma, I prefer to not stomp on the tube of toothpaste until the cap blows off, hoping I'll be able to clean up the mess within a day, which is what LSD does, but rather I would screw off the top, squeeze out a reasonable amount, and put the cap back on, so I can enjoy feeling lighter and having less symptoms and still function the next day, which is what proper trauma release technique can do.

I think the style of video is fine, and can really work well. It's just that the hooks are not working and the questions that are being asked at the beginning are either unclear, or not compelling. Therefore, I'm not compelled to keep watching to find out the answer to something. For example: Clip of Steve Jobs being fired. Starts with the words: "In 1985, Steve jobs got fired blah blah blah". Then the clip. During the clip, I still have no idea why I'm hearing about this. That's a long time watching/listening to something without knowing why, or where you're going with it. Then the narrator goes: "The real reason why he got fired was because he was authentic" That should have been a hook in the beginning, starting with: "Most people still misunderstand why Steve Jobs got fired". Or: "There is a real cost to authenticity that is often overlooked". I'm not good at creating hooks myself yet, but I can sense that both of us need to hone that craft. Then there is the title/concept of the video: it's unclear. Are we answering the question of what being authentic means? Then the title should clearly say that, like "What is authenticity really? (not what you think)" Or is it about what the downside is of authenticity? Then the title should say that, like 'The darkside of "being yourself"'. Lame title examples because I'm not good at this either yet, but you get the idea hopefully. The Rise of the Real You: The Untold Truth about You This title doesn't do anything. It's unclear: what about me? What do you mean by real? Why should I care? What's rising? This unclarity is not curiosity invoking because it doesn't imply that this has anything to do with my survival. A title should invoke a strong emotion, like fear or greed (can I get a good feeling, solve a pain point in my life or avoid pain by having this question answered?) AI will destroy us in a good way also doesn't do this. If it was: AI will destroy us all unless we do this... , then my fear / survival need is being triggered so I might get click. Or: Are YOU set up to be destroyed by AI or will you thrive Lame examples but you get the picture. I once heard really good advice: Let the titles sit in a list of potential videos to make, for a week. And every day look at the list and feel which one you are compelled to click. Only make that video, and tweak the other titles or ditch them until they give you the same compulsion to click. Also, there's too many topics / tangents being thrown together which makes it hard to follow. The script feels like someone with a very creative and somewhat ADD brain tried to connect as many dots as possible. The consequence of that is that it is hard to follow and not very engaging. As a viewer, each side tangent needs to be "sold" to me with a compelling hook, a problem that needs to be solved or a question that needs to be answered to answer the main question, and the fact that we need that subquestion answered needs to be abundantly clear to me. One way to do that is to hit a "wall": a problem along the journey that is seemingly unsolvable. Off the top of my head: Authenticity is just a feeling. Humans are bad at controlling their feelings, you can not decide to feel something at will. X % of people does not know what to do to "feel authentic". So, the road comes to an end: authenticity is something you either have, or don't have, and there's no way to change that. (wall) And yet, some people managed to regain their sense of authenticity again and again, and seem to be becoming more and more authentic as their life progresses. While others seem to never find it, and as their life progresses, give up hope and get depressed. (hook) Now I'm wondering: what gives, how are they doing that then?? Lame example because like I said, I'm still learning this too, but I hope you get what I mean.

Yes, and perhaps you could say I am one of them. Having done many trauma release sessions both with and without LSD, I can say that: Even though psychedelics can make it easy to access the deeper layers of trauma and unfelt pain, This is in fact very dangerous, because there's a safety mechanism that gets overridden When this safety mechanism is overridden, your trauma based pain can start leaking out and is not guaranteed to stop When it starts leaking, people can start having panic attacks, anxiety, depression and psychosis which they didn't have before. This is very serious and happens a lot, and can be permanent or take a long time to recover from. It happened to people very close to me, and to people on this forum whom I helped with self-therapy and whom I advised to not use psychedelics for it. It also happened to people who are clients right now, even though I keep saying to not combine trauma healing with psychedelics. Everything that psychedelics allow can be done sober when you practice correct technique, therefore, using psychedelics to heal trauma is like trying to cross a river and deciding to pick the closest bridge, which is guarded by a guy who makes you play Russian Roulette before you can cross, but you choose this option because the next bridge is a 30 minute walk.

Beautiful.

Models by Mark Manson