Carl-Richard

Only generalizing, or generalizing a lot, can cause some issues. An antidote could be listing different alternatives and then synthesizing them. For example, with sex addiction, you can list many things: trauma, personal predisposition, personal beliefs, culture, neurological issues, cognitive styles, attention, awareness, executive control, values, life orientation, suppression, transmutation, habit. And sex addiction might not even be the right concept here. The OP seems to be struggling with some obsessive-compulsive thoughts around sex. It can often come from a desire to control or do things properly, which can come from many things, perhaps a belief, perhaps trauma, or personal experiences that cause lack of control and expressing it through control over sex can be a byproduct. Or perhaps a general cognitive style of control. And maybe you can challenge that need for control with acceptance, either by accepting the controlling behavior or relinquishing the need to control at all. What are you aiming at with the control after all? Feeling at ease with yourself? Or is the goal more important than that, is it bigger than yourself (maybe it isn't in this case)?

How to make a progressive metal song: score a horror movie scene with the precision of a Tom and Jerry score (virtually any microscopic part of the scene you can pick out, down to the eye movements of the actors, you intentionally score the music to be in sync with): https://youtu.be/2TFYM9hYxzA?is=eH9y9Q4__FPsEcIZ The way they choose the rhythms and accents, the time signatures, while still maintaining a cohesive overall song, is a work of supreme musical intellect. This is highly deliberate and consciously created music, created by conforming to not just an overall abstract idea but an existing concrete artwork in another medium. The antithesis of conforming to a tried-and-tested formula that will sell the most records. Epic example of creativity through limitation.

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

Bro I linked that first video as a joke but now I watched it, and literally the music is synced to every little thing in the scene; eye movements, bodily movements, speaking, objects falling from the wall, the exact oscillation of those little worms. It's way more exact than I realized before.

I have theory of how a Cred post goes: "I have a theory. This specific thing is this very general thing. *Proceeds to give an explanation of this very general thing*. I have now explained this specific thing, even though it could be explained by a range of different concepts, not just this general one."

Preemptively countering call-out of (intentional) misspelling by linking disturbingly niche horror movie clip with a heavy metal (progressive) score, with "icular" in the title: "Blotted Science – Vermicular Asphyxiation [Video]": https://youtu.be/2TFYM9hYxzA?is=cv-74Un-n_rUt4i3 (YouTube doesn't allow embedding of that video). Ron Jarzombek is a musical genius, arguably created technical (death) metal as a genre. Or if you like Disney instead of horror movies: Derail over :,)

Could part of it be that when you don't come from the perspective of "finding the right one" or going by your likes or dislikes as much, that when you're in the relationship, you don't sabotage it with these expectations and you're already going into it in a more accepting and less entitled way?

@Natasha Tori Maru When will Clavicle realize that interacting with girls leads to taking up feminizing hormones transdermally, hence he will graduate to homophiliamaxxing to ascend to the ultimate chadmaxxed specimen. (Forget that interacting with girls increases testosterone endogenously for a moment :))

I started believing this after I got pranked by my brother with a THC vape and I became sensitized to the THC high (pharmacological sensitization has both psychological and physiological mechanisms, before the placebo hounds come after my nutsack). After that, if I merely entered my brother's room after he woke up, the trapped THC-filled air would make me high as a kite (it would have only come from his lungs as he was asleep). Same with people who drink coffee, if I get a strong whiff of their breath, I get a coffee buzz (I don't use caffeine so I'm pretty sensitive to it). I've also had a thought that it's possible that I could be affected if somebody is on an anti-depressant. But acknowledging these things shouldn't be problematic. We already are able to pick up people's state by merely being with them or watching them or hearing them through a video screen. That we are influenced by other people is a truly trivial observation. That some of that influence can be attributed to physiological or pharmacological influences, should be obvious. It's just some people don't care about it and view any care for it as a mental disorder, obsessive-compulsive fixation on minutia and paranoia (which it can be, but it doesn't necessarily negate the reality of the phenomena). But that said, it can be a valid question to ask yourself "should I care?". You only have so much time and attention to spend in your life, and some things are not truly controllable (like the air when walking outside), so sometimes, not caring is simply the valid option.

Can you say if it's serotonergic or something else? (What's the general pharmacology/receptor system?)

It's all good man.

Journalling on online forums can be a good way to thread the needle on narcissistic exhibitionism and genuine self-insight.

Consider that many pedophiles became pedophiles because they were abused themselves as children.

I think when somebody says they empathize with murderers or pedophiles, I think it's primarily a cognitive thing. It's mainly about how you hold them in your mind. That you don't feel them emotionally like you would a child in pain is understandable as you intuitively see them as predators and that's your gut response, big scary things to avoid rather than small fragile things to be protected. But perhaps if you watch a documentary about pedophiles describing their day-to-day experience, maybe you can get a more immediate emotional traction as well.

I can see myself in the shoes of somebody having a desire and wanting to act on it and the various feelings and situations that might arise. I don't have strong memories of genuine homicidal or pedophilic desires, but maybe especially for homicidal thoughts, I think everybody has had those at least as a passing thought or very weak or temporary gradations of those things. If you are able to understand the concept and experience of desire, and especially if you are able to link microscopic personal experiences of specific desires to their more extreme forms, then there is little that stops you from being able to empathize with murderers and perhaps pedophiles.

You know how it's like to have a desire, how it feels like, so maybe you at least are able to empathize with that part of having a desire about prepubescent (or merely underaged) sexual relations or homicidal acts.

A desire you currently don't have or haven't had yourself. I'm just asking if you are able to.

Please chill with the topics. You might also consider evaluating your mental state with somebody who you can trust.

Everybody has desire. Can you empathize with somebody having a desire you don't have?

Keep meditating, bump it up to 60-90 minutes each sitting and do one sitting every single day (or one in the morning and one in the evening), add retreats if you think that's what you need. There is no either/or. A trap would be dropping daily meditation and thinking you only need retreats once in a blue moon.

There are situations where anger can be a reasonable solution, but anger tends to make people feel bad, so it must be used with care. If you choose it, you choose it. And expressing anger, in the moment, doesn't have to be very problematic. It tends to get worse if you linger on it or stew in it and it turns into resentment or the solution isn't clear or probable and it only perpetuates and not solves conflict.

Self-forgiveness, and then you try again.

If you get sick, less thinking is going on, but you may also be in pain and you may think about that. If you can get through the pain and sit in a restful posture so that you no longer care about the pain or the pain dampens, then you could enter a state of less thoughts, but you could also do that while not sick (i.e. meditation). When you're not sick, its easier to get lost in thoughts because you are able to think and move around and do stuff all day, while when you're sick, you have to sit down and rest more.

What about Ted Bundy?

These are the most intense and immaculate and terrifying black metal vocals you will probably ever hear in a high-fidelity format: