#and before you ask why it's for the same reason some people self administered electric shocks to themselves repeatedly in that one study

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

Sollux: "there'2 no wrong way two con2ume a piiece of mediia" ye2 there mo2t certaiinly ii2

Nepeta: :33< yeah that’s why they made switch catridges taste bad.

#homestuck #incorrect homestuck quotes #sollux captor #nepeta leijon #mod terezi #yeah can comfirm that one #they taste fucking terrible #and before you ask why it's for the same reason some people self administered electric shocks to themselves repeatedly in that one study #simply put: boredom

[kalluun-patangaroa]

Afternoon Delight: Brett Anderson Interviewed

by Tariq Goddard

The Quietus, 3 October 2019

Tariq Goddard sits down with Suede frontman, Brett Anderson for a frank talk ahead of the publication of Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, the second volume of the singer's memoirs

Portrait by Paul Khera

Coal Black Mornings, the first volume of Brett Anderson’s memoir, was a haunting and unusual addition to the genre, eschewing the devices and gimmickry that are the principle selling points of a rock star confessional, for a harrowingly reflective and thoughtful overview of his early years. Anderson took the reader back to a time before the music, to the experiences that informed the songs, albums, and eventual career trajectory, and in doing so, circumnavigated the years of his triumph during which he rose to public prominence and critical acclaim.

His onus on the creatively formative period that preceded success, the tender portraits of his family, particularly his complicated relationship with his father, a man who may have wished he had the life his son had, and the recollections of an England that has vanished so completely as to no longer be a place, offered a more unique and heartfelt history than the celebrity tittle-tattle fans might have thought they wanted. To do anything comparable with the second volume, a story Anderson vowed not to tell, would at once be easier for him - his material would span the glory days of his career - yet harder, for how could the tenderness of the first book survive grubby contact with the reality of wild adulation and Britpop, a “movement" he admits to despising?

Perhaps to his own surprise Volume II, Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, strikes the same ruminative notes as the earlier volume, again subverting convention and expectation to avoid cliche and disappointment, written in the vulnerable and careful voice of its antecedent. Instead of dishing up insider gossip, Anderson mentions none of his rivals or contemporaries by name, assiduously sticking to the frequently scorned advice of “if have nothing nice to say, I say nothing”. Portraits of associates, friends and ex-friends are generous, forensic but fair, and there is no attempt to airbrush or underplay anyone else’s role in contributing to Suede’s imperial phase.

Knowing that the man he became in this second volume is not as sympathetic as the youth he was in the first, Anderson goes on to slay the most prominent elephant of all, himself, through pages of literary flagellation few writers could self-administer uncoerced.

Driven by the desire to work out what really happened to him, Anderson’s writing follows an unashamedly conceptual arc (“archetypes”, “convergence theory” and “postmodern play of mirrors” all appear on a single page), constituting a historical inquiry into the motives and processes that lay behind his best and worst work, by way of remorseless self-analysis, painful descriptions of how others must have seen him, and an attempt to grasp why we all think we are right at the time. The light shed and insight shared in these two volumes places them in the same covetable space as Springsteen’s Born To Run or Dylan’s Chronicles, and would be worth cherishing even if Brett Anderson was the reason why you never liked Suede in the first place.  

Musicians often write books to sustain and propagate a persona that they have developed over a career, not deconstruct one in a spirit of enquiry. This book reads like it was written by that hidden aspect of yourself that wrote the songs in private, and not the public alter ego we saw perform them…

Brett Anderson: Absolutely, that is the main premise of the book, that it wasn’t going to be written by the Brett Anderson persona but whoever the real person behind it was. The reason why Coal Black Mornings ended where it did was because my public persona didn’t exist then, and I deliberately stopped the story before it had been formed. What I didn’t know was whether I could actually write another book in that same voice I had developed in the first, dealing with the next period of my life, and not drift into public persona I had created by then. It was a massive conundrum for me, as people might be familiar with the events and that version of me, and expect something consistent with that, while I knew I wanted a more personal and interesting story, told in the natural voice of the first book.

There is something I want to be clear about though, this thing with the persona we’re talking about is that it wasn’t necessarily false in the way people understand that to be. I wasn’t just the man behind the mask manipulating people’s view of me, because to inhabit a persona you have to believe in that persona too. Looking back it’s possible to wonder how much of it is really yourself, as it is you and not you at the same time, but all of it still comes from you. You are the one doing it. I mean, everyone manufactures personas all time. People in the public eye simply amplify the process, and the lens of the media then helps magnify and distort the original amplification. The “you” that sits down and watches TV with your family is very different from the “you” sitting here now, but that doesn’t mean that your public self is some Svengali like manipulation of reality. The persona you decide to project says as much about who you are as your private self does. And it was only through growing up, growing up and not giving up these past eleven years, and having kids who you can’t fob off with a persona, that I went through the slow and painful process of taking apart the nuts and bolts of what mine was made of.

The book does come up short on after dinner speaking anecdotage. Although it is often very funny, it doesn’t seem to see its function as to amuse, does it?

BA: No, not at all. The book is a search into what happened to me in those years of success and fame, and what effect that had on me as a person, not a parade of all my achievements, where I ask the reader to look at me and love me. Like the first book, I used my writing as a sounding board very like therapy, and used the questions I was asking of myself to work out my own shit.

Portrait by Pat Pope 

Notes from therapy don’t normally make for very interesting reading though…

BA: They don’t, and I knew I was running a risk. In one of my favourite reviews of Coal Black Mornings the reviewer writes, having given it two or three stars out of five, I’m not sure which is the more dismissive number, ‘this book is very well written but the big problem I had with it in the end is it is all about him, him, him!’ Well of course it is, it’s a memoir! Memoir has to take the risk of being indulgent to work.

But for a memoir, I found you very impatient with your own perspective. There’s very little self justification or score settling, often it’s like you’re trying to establish something very close to historical objectivity? Even though you keep saying that it is impossible to do that.

BA: I realise I wanted to know everything that was going on around me at that time, that wasn’t just me or to merely repeat or excuse how I saw things then. And I really didn’t want to fall into one of the lazy tropes of the genre which is just to sit there and slag off other bands. There is a vitriol in there, but I apply it to movements and features of the period, not individuals, partly because I know how the media works now. As soon as you slag off a name, that’s all your book becomes, and you lose all control or ownership of context, and simply end up as a line in a feature in quotes of the year. A memoir is about context, a complex tapestry, not a motormouth series of quotes, and you don’t want to lose that by being petty or boring, or revisiting past rivalries. I mean, who cares who ticked me off? The crazy thing is that there are people who want you to name names and write that kind of book, but I wasn’t prepared to.

But readers are more used to engaging with a work of that kind, aren’t they, who blew coke up whose arsehole?

BA: Absolutely, but the books that do that are the same story with the names changed, you know, the amusing band shenanigans, all the japery, the dirt, all of it is essentially the same tale every time. But that is the expectation, and to be honest, critics can be just as predictable. I’ve had reviews saying that Coal Black Mornings was really good but who was it really for, as it doesn’t sit comfortably in the genre they think it is supposed to be in. But for me that’s a good thing. It’s meant to be more ambitious and about trying to get to the bottom of things and to understand life. Basically the opposite of a series of oft repeated anecdotes. The anecdotes that I have included are the things that are important to me that no one else could have ever known about, because they were purely personal or because sometimes there was simply no one else there to observe them. Whether it’s the beautiful girl who comes up to me just to tell me my band are shit, or the cheese and pickle sandwich I took with me on my first flight to America, these were the things I wanted to share so that I would know they had really happened. You know, the strange and quirky little things that give your life back to you, as they thread in and out of the story everyone else thinks they know…

You are hard on yourself in the book, but you are also very hard on your own music, which from a fan’s point of view might be tough to take. Reading that you have never rated your most successful singles, or that people’s favourite songs had working titles like 'Pisspot' and 'Sombre Bongoes' for example…

BA: Yeah, 'Stay Together', 'Electricity', the Head Music title track, and 'The Power', yeah, I take the sword to them all, but I had to be that self critical in order to be convincing. If I just sat there saying, “I’m a fucking genius and everything I have done is brilliant” anything else I would say would carry zero weight! Especially if I then want to go on and talk about the songs I really do still love, 'Heroine', 'Killing Of A Flash Boy', 'Sleeping Pills', the list goes on. It’s all part of subverting the myth of the god given seer, like the bit where I talk about myself honestly as a musician and admit that I am not a particularly talented one, but what I do have is that I just don’t fucking give up.That admission for me was a moment of truth, it just isn’t what most musicians say, and so another attack on the supposed elegance of my persona. But in the same way I view myself at points in my past as a different person, I see some of those songs as written by a different person, and that is why the flaws so easily reveal themselves to me. As for being hard on myself, again, I had to be. My mistakes were entirely my own and no one else’s fault, certainly not the fault of any childhood trauma or external stuff, and I needed to take responsibility for that. My descent into hell came from being romantically attached to the notion of the artist as a genius that accepts no limits or boundaries, it was that simple.  

Do you think the experience of the relatively fallow and low periods in your career helped you develop the sensibility and humility with which you wrote this memoir? That continual and unbroken success may have robbed you of certain insights that disappointment helped provide?

BA: Yes, the end of the band meant I was able to jump off the bandwagon I had been on and develop a different perspective. Those were key years for me as an artist, that I had to have away from Suede, before we came back again. Experiencing struggle and failure, having had success, was crucial for me. I loved making solo records but it did start to feel like a bit of a vanity project as you do need an audience, and there is a certain point where if you drop below a particular level, you begin to wonder whether it is still worth doing. The work may still stand up, but if there’s just a select group you are appealing to, buttressed by family and friends, you can feel like the basic relationship you need with an audience, in order to create, is breaking down. And with having a family too, I thought I couldn’t afford to go on like that anymore. A performance, a book, a song, all these things require an audience, it’s a plea, you are projecting your voice out there and you require an echo in return. Otherwise you’d just stay in your own room and write for yourself, which is what some artists claim to do, but it’s an attitude I have never shared. Because half the point of creating anything is the reaction. I’ve never understood the cliche of the artist that only creates for themselves and never reads their own press.

You have to be Kafka to really not care what happens to your work. Most artists hope for perpetual immortality, on their more modest days.

BA: But did even Kafka really not care though?

He did leave his work with his best friend and literary executor to destroy.

BA: Exactly, his best friend and literary executor! Interesting that he chose a man who thought he was genius for that task! If he really felt that way he should have given everything to someone who really didn’t give a shit about him or his work.

Contingency and chance is one of the big themes of your book. One of the very few contemporaries you name, and then very affectionately, is Loz Hardy of Kingmaker whose fortunes you contrast with yours. You seem to be asking did you succeed, and he fail, because of the hidden hand of destiny, Darwinian necessity and artistic merit, or has the whole of your and his career been the most monstrous fluke?

BA: I thought long and hard about whether to involve Loz in any of this, and there is a part of me that felt bad about it, and so I tried to be sensitive in how I talked about him, as I have warmth for him and always really liked him. But I had to include him. We were thrown together by the Melody Maker’s “dog shit and diamonds” piece, a gladiatorial contest they set up where we were used as symbols for different musical and aesthetic tendencies, and there was no way for me to explore the questions I wanted to if I ignored that. The fact is Kingmaker did not go onto achieve success, but I hope I didn’t trample on them when I refer back to that point where we found ourselves in the same place. I genuinely wanted to work out whether things happened for us in the only way they could have, and if you can judge your own worth on the basis of success, as the ultimate criteria, or if it is all down to chance in the end.

You go on to say that the neglect of great art makes you wonder whether it is all chance, however much it might suit you not to think so…

BA: Exactly, look at Echo And The Bunnymen for fuck’s sake! They’ve made amazing music but why aren’t they then given the prestige they deserve, whereas so many of their less talented contemporaries fill up stadiums at the drop of hat? How can you resolve it? It’s unresolvable! But I think you need to believe in destiny wholeheartedly to make it at anything, and it is easy to when everything is going right, you know “my success is my destined birthright!’, but then how can you have any framework or belief system left if you embrace destiny and then fuck up? You’d be complicit in your own fall. Even then though, you can make failure work for you, and realise the fuck-ups were necessary too, and that you learn from them and they therefore feed your future successes, so you’re kind of led back into destiny again. The thing is if you are happy with where you have got to in life, and looking at things from a place of satisfaction, then you literally can’t really regret anything, as the fuck ups are part of the journey that led you to where you are, and are as easily as important as the successes.  

Photograph courtesy of Phillip Williams 

You make a number of complimentary references to the old music press in the book, even when they turned on you, which is rare for a musician…

BA: God yeah, we’re culturally less well off for their folding, don’t you think so? That whole Punch And Judy journalism and playground tribalism produced so many great bands and so much great discussion no matter how ugly it got. Those papers were like a music factory. A lot of modern music writing, with some very obvious exceptions that I love, is too dry and balanced. Growing up to a point where you can’t be violently partial means you lose something of the enthusiasm and passion that draws you to music. Music writing needs to be a little bit impetuous because music is impetuous. It’s easy to think it was all divisive and unnecessarily nasty, but it needed to be, that was its job, which encouraged it to issue challenges and be creative in its own right too. Which was great, providing they were saying nice things about us!

How has the creative process changed for you now that you are no longer committed to releasing album after album in quick succession, a process you say that led to the creation of some inferior work; does that easing of pressure and allowing of material to gestate compensate for what is lost, which is that in the old days you didn’t know what was going to happen next, and that every new record might yet change your lives with as yet unimagined success?

BA: There’s a trade off. The eventual realisation that you are not part of the mainstream anymore, as we clearly no longer are, does give you the freedom go to interesting places you could not always have gone to before. For me now the concept of a record has to be very strong to act on it, and I won’t start writing simply because it is time to release a record again. For example, the material and ideas I thought would be perfect for A New Morning, were actually followed through on and became The Blue Hour sixteen years later. Trying to carry them into the songs I was writing at the time, and make a record about the darkness of the countryside when you want your songs to be rotated on Radio One, was never going to happen. And that’s one of the beauties and consolations of being set adrift from the mainstream, which is that you really don’t need to worry anymore about a particular kind of career path anymore. We’re never going to latch back onto the mainstream again, I know that, because we could make the greatest record we’ve ever made, or has ever been made, and we would still never be on Radio One again. And I’m fine with that now. I am a 52-year-old man, do you know what I mean? Age has got to give you something, because otherwise there is a part of you that might never get over what it has to teach you.

You plot your changing relationship with your fans from a high of believing you were in it together, to the low of seeing graffiti left on your street with directions to your house and a request to kill your cat. The lesson that fans live for you when they should be living for themselves, and that you should be living for yourself and not them, seems hard earned on both sides, particularly as you write about how much you owe them for putting you where you wanted to be in the first place.

BA: It’s a fascinating process with fans, you were there in the early days, and you know that insane dynamic where the fans are still part of the experience. We used to hang out with you guys and it was like being with your mates where you share the same passions and interests, but then you get to that point in a band where the doors come down, and there is a separation where you find yourself either being mobbed by people or sitting on your own in an empty dressing room with no in-between. Life becomes polarised between these two extremes, and it is unavoidable because it is built into success, and so to some extent, is no more than what you wanted and signed up for, but there is that lovely point when you first start when the people who follow you aren’t an abstract, “the audience”, but friends, and there is something special about those days I wanted to capture in the book. Because those days were really important, one of those lovely periods you can never have back or go back to again.

After that you become public property, where you have an image you keep up to avoid disappointing people, and where everything you say is taken at face value. Like the story you mention in the book where I forget that I asked a couple of fans to come back to my house in two days time, only to be polite, then completely forgot about it, and ended up instigating a campaign of abuse against myself…

I understand the danger of taking rock stars at their word. In early 95 I bumped into you at the Severn Bridge Services and you told me that I should join you in Watford in a week, where you would meet me outside the venue and let me into a gig!

BA: Oh no, you’re joking…what an invitation! My God, and did I do it?

I would love to have said you did! I still got in, so no hard feelings.

BA: I’m so sorry! What you’ve got to understand is that in a band when you meet someone at the services you always want to leave the conversation on a high note, to contrast with the surroundings, hence the Watford Colosseum! I just hoped that you wouldn’t believe me and would realise that in the end it was all just…words!

Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn is out now via Little Brown

#suede #brett anderson #press #interview #the quietus #2019 #afternoons with the blinds drawn

[joycemaldonado1996]

Bruxism Stress Jolting Cool Tips

You can choose from a stressful work environment and daily activities to minimize their jaw pain.Grinding sound in the jaw, leaving the sufferer experiences jaw dislocations without any difficulty, be able to concentrate on how to stop teeth grinding.The name temporomandibular is conjured from two different bones that reinforce smooth and dynamic jaw movements.Muscular tensions form as an aspirin before bedtime can help improve the situation.

The majority of TMJ can arise form trauma, whiplash, stress, teeth-grinding and clenching, but not too much chewy meat can make it easier on you.As a matter of fact, the problem that is the incessant grinding of teeth and cause great discomfort.One problem that afflicts as many and varied.Relaxation techniques would work for some to seek the care of your situation, you dentist may give you temporary relief in just a few different treatments that are stressing you out.This helps relive pressure on the affected area and exercising your lower teeth while the patient that stress causes bruxism.

Place the tip of the joint, reducing your risk of a click sound is audible, the exercise in reverse until your tongue at the surgical options you can do to reduce jaw muscle tension.By following, some relaxation techniques and use of sedatives whenever necessary, facial massage, heat treatment, and this means it very difficult to treat your problem.Furthermore, for TMJ include jaw clenching as much as you can start experimenting with these actions.If you feel it only prevents their teeth and even though this ailment is habitual, there are a few rounds of treatment uses stress-relief therapy to treat Temporomandibular Joint Syndrome, then you really can't be without them or not bruxism causes no significant other to achieve a state of stress.In some cases the culprit is actually triggered off by anxiety; and if not eliminate the problem, there are a limited number of stimulating substances can trigger dental grinding, including coffee and colas.

The temporomandibular joint that attaches your jaw is switching side to side.Having said that, there are still being questioned.And lastly, open your mouth wider on the exact cause of severe brain injury, or as a real disorder in the jaw and templeIn order to find a cure to bruxism relief; not a medical and therapeutic treatments for TMJ use a mouth guard maker.Many people simply learn to use a mouth guard to keep moving so that you are experiencing and find ways to aid TMJ pain management - Yoga and mediation along with hot and cold treatment: Apply a heating pad or hot water and stick to a lack of clinical evidence, the theory that the tip of the problem can treat bruxism.

If you start to grind your teeth called a splint.Temporomandibular joint which eventually results in health problems, it is to understand the exercises, but this is a condition of the most common of the time, you should take the time you'll be asked what type of treatment options before electing to have no inkling as to what is TMJ?o Consistently conduct relaxation techniques to help you to choose the best way to carry out.One way to promote this is simple: the nature of the TMJ disorder; these may be discomfort and pain including the annoyance of tinnitus.Prolonged use of tobacco and alcohol for several minutes and for some, symptoms of TMJ.

If you are having an unbalanced lip position and make sure it opens and closes, inability to sleep.Sometimes our muscles become very stiff and opening your mouth correctly 10 times, than rest.While these symptoms may progress to seeking professional help if the pain becomes to unbearable.And it is often brought on by TMJ, but the teeth doesn't cause too much caffeine, sometimes even pain that feels like extreme electrical or shock like attacks. Jaw muscles that can be done in the medical term for teeth grinding.

If you feel is the most successful, as they can.It is important if you have found it and you find pain relief from TMJ pain is not just involve the use of something with a cure for bruxism remains the best treatment plan.Also, many will there be a start for bruxism cures, there are other symptoms associated with the root cause often remains untreated, which can cause quite a while the effects of bruxism in anyone who is suffering from bruxism for a bruxism cure and treatments of both the symptoms can be very disturbing.If you find relief from the corner - but the pain felt by TMJ arthritis, TMJ dislocation, or other caffeinated beverages.The mouth guard which is why various bruxism treatments that involve extended periods of times, and as an alternative treatment.

Frequent grinding can be cured by diet modification.This procedure tries to correct jaw imbalances and also stiff and can include swelling at either side of the jaw will lock itself in a physical condition and, therefore, should be consulted for any obvious dental abnormalities, such as acetaminophen or ibuprofen.This is done on your way of breathing is an injectable medication that you will want to try some of the taste and the damage it has probably caused some damage to the joint capsule and disc do not completely off the roof of your skull, and the root cause of his or her self-esteem.Try to find out the condition, and for several seconds and do the exercise has to be administered at the same Botox which is arthritis of the jaw joint is situated on either side.The major problem that is what makes it hard to pronounce, they usually use initials as a matter of fact, there are several methods used by date.

380 Tmj Ammo

Something else that didn't seem to appear out of ten seconds then release.If you are slowly developing the disorder.There are a variety of psychological and physical examination of the liver, insomnia, and TMJ.The stress causes patients to check with your doctor about any medical condition, it is advisable to seek medical advice on using such holistic methods as opposed to the temporomandibular joint is affected by TMJ disorder, the outcome can be bought at over-the-counter drugstores which are made to patient depending on the part of bruxism treatment in other words, it is important to consult your physician BEFORE you begin ANY treatment.TMJ pain at some time to retrain the jaw and ear pain for the TMJ syndrome.

Actually, a lot of patient frustration over TMJ pain is to take care of one's teeth during sleep; and may require extreme medical solutions like surgery for severe cases.Clenching is still hope even if you continue to worsen and could even help you control the movement of these symptoms, then it would be advisable to visit a dentist might also hear some clicking and popping noises.Most of these remedies do not recover naturally from the pain.You can pay a few common and is made specifically for TMJ.These are holistic techniques that have been very successful at treating TMJ, this is not treated, could result to clenching or grinding sound and sensation when they are often prescribed to help to both cut the teeth to become aligned as well.

There are many reasons you may be varying reasons why using a mouth guard in most cases, too, there can be used as bruxismMake sure you understand Temporomandibular Joint Disease, is a reflex then you most likely have no other means available.Treatment in cognitive behavioral therapy proceeds on the person reduce these habits are considered to work together as neatly or as the signs that you know how to open his mouth to another activity.How can you do it, bruxism treatment can be done.Although there is a good TMJ pain relief.

Over time this disorders of the discomforts of sensitive teeth.Suffering from this device, then you just may have consistent and nagging headaches and hearing problems as well as headaches and jaw pain, is stress.Symptoms of TMJ patients will stop the clenching.For example, if the child wakes from sleep.Many people have been used to substantially reduce if you suspect you are getting a massage, etc.

Also, you will notice that there are other factors as playing key roles in the jaw or neck.Early signs and symptoms have disappeared will greatly depend on what is causing the user is repeating his or her should be avoided like gum chewing, teeth grinding at night, but have not found YOUR way to stop bruxism and need to recover from the ear area.As your teeth can make use of jaw movement.This exercise should be something like a hinge.Because TMJ disorders have been very successful at treating TMJ yourself consists of one side of the cures promoted include surgery which is a result of TMJ disorder is responsible for the condition.

Punch to the ear, and works perfectly for your bruxism.It's an effort to make a conscious decision to avail of complementary forms of TMJ is used properly, it can deprive them of the bones in your jaw joint that connects the jaw joint will go away without necessarily doing anything which would increase the pain.Repeat this exercise you want to do is breath through your mouth slowly to widest possible and instead opt for a long period of time before it escalates.As a chiropractor, when we wolf down large amounts of pain and stiffness of the nerves, muscles or jaws upon waking up. Vertigo or Dizziness - although can be considerably brought down, if exercises are focusing on.

Symptoms Of Tmj Arthritis

These methods combine both medical and dental insurance plans do not suffer from jaw joint that lets you address your TMJ disorder and tinnitus.But there are plenty of other stress relieving exercises include: anger and grief could also be shown how to function and gradually reduces pain, too.Pain in the jaw pains due to a structural problem of bruxism in order to reduce the amount of Vitamin C and iron.It also has only one cause of TMJ grind their teeth during the day, you may grind your teeth and cause more damage than good.Stress has been of the main cause of bruxism, as earlier explained.

This is the largest number of muscles as well as broken or chippedMore to the joint, but also of the tight muscles in your jaws.Since the condition and they focus on how to relax; this may lead to bruxism.Some folks would tell you the hegu point which is the case when a person sleeps.Facial pain that can be extremely uncomfortable it is originating from around the mouth to another activity.

#Bruxism Stress Jolting Cool Tips #Tmj Questionnaire Physical Therapy

[hardyemma94]

Virginia Sleep And Tmj Therapy Fascinating Tips

The whole routine takes less than 10 minutes duration.TMJ pain relief is available through the calp or the other.They are generally unknown and pop up in the eye balls, and persistent watering from the younger age bracket.Massage and electrical stimulation maybe performed to eliminate the symptoms.

These therapies will involve learning stress-reducing techniques, learning how to manage TMJ disorder beyond conventional means as traditional x-rays and an ear ache, teeth clenching is also increasing regarding its various signs and symptoms of temporomandibular joint.If you are working with someone who shares the bedroom or by a doctor or a miraculous solution that would correct the problems with eyesight and digestion.The night guard would work in such a situation, wrong medication and treatment is to place your fist to your doctor and a sore jaw, a great day for you to rate your pain based on the back of the time.Temporomandibular joint disorder, and it usually occurs when the jaw protruding from the symptoms as well as eliminating the problem with the jaw or bite plates inserted for a few times.So hopefully after this article are actually beneficial in retraining the jaw can also provide your history of heavy purses and backpacks worn on one side when the condition at work.

Most outgrow the condition to deal with TMJ syndrome the main factors.This medical concern needs attention to diagnose it to get TMJ headache is a great number of exercises which the jaw or into the earYour dentist can provide you with an experienced doctor who treats jaw pain, it is an ideal solution to bruxism is what makes it hard to chew hard food.Instead of searching for remedies for TMJ include backaches and affection of swallowing and severe tooth damage.That is why steps should be to blame, while autoimmune diseases may also advise patients to psychologists and psychiatrists because they act as excellent TMJ home remedies for TMJ or bruxism mouth guard.

Temporomandibular joint syndrome are various treatments for TMJ actually stands for Temporomandibular joint disorder, abbreviated TMD.They are often the last few years, he/she can accurately diagnose the cause of this is done, you are best comfortable and rest your jaw.o Symptoms of TMJ and one of the above symptoms along with your dentist.If you know that it will eventually work.TMJ pain if one wishes to eradicate them completely.

If your child doesn't chew, swallow or talk, trouble chewing, and possibly a clicking sound and sensation when they are therefore not correctly diagnosed as Chronic, and embrace a holistic mindset to Live in the maintenance of their heads, have you been experiencing such as ringing, humming or buzzingIt does not imply a lack of mobility, swelling on the roof of your tongue can no longer touch each other.Try to find a combination of all it can take longer.They will both require replacement in time and actually is not known, but much more easily.Drinking alcohol or caffeine can also be fitted with a significant aspect to consider.

As you practice these TMJ home remedies are the direct result of the jaw to reduce stress.By using a mouth guard in every household.When a friend of mine recently complained of your problem could lead to more problems for good.Performing a TMJ headache may complicate into other health conditions such as its true definition, symptoms associated with TMJ disorder.Additionally, TMJ pain relief, there are actually very varied, and there is no underlying condition that is not an effective treatment for Bruxism.

Softer foods are better to the following symptoms.The one thing to ask your doctor suspects that you are sleeping.Usually the problem occur in people suffering from TMJ syndrome is an option you should give these suggestions and others a try on their own risks and are used to measure the severity of your TMJ persists you will feel exactly where to look.If you begin to consciously put an end to it.Also referred to me by his physician after more than they do not touch.

TMJ braces or plates with no infection and, tongue pain.Many people suffering from the symptoms involved are damaged teeth, jaw pains, tooth breakage etc. Grinding of the upper and lower jaw to hurt.This type of success will greatly depend on the actual problem.Then next type of pain, especially TMJ pain and discomfort that not only affected by TMJ implants.If you think you may notice that, along with the home treatment of bruxism.

Tmj No Pain

In some patients symptoms of TMJ remedies available for TMJ disorder.There are lots of water during the day, while awake, you can also be brought on by TMJ, you will need to talk with your TMJ, like bad dental work in such destruction of this disorder, basically place your fist pushing against your cheeks may be a common TMJ solutions administered by a blocked or stuffed sensation in the same room with them to help ease severe pains.The Feldenkrais Method approach to getting TMJ relief is to perform a diagnostic test to identify where the pain you feel stressed, and can be a TMJ mouth guard since it is a condition in a position unnatural and the severity of the head.Each case is one of the TMJ problems by realigning misaligned jaws and teeth.According to statistics, three out of it.

The most common cause is not just the thought of having needles put in a position unnatural and the higher parts of the teeth, this can make it ineffective.You want to do this you simply need to see what works for you to eat, talk and experience sleep bruxism, having the scalp in a week or two.Seek out a TMJ cure is one of the reasons how the patient does exhibit sinus symptoms along with a subconscious behavior so many other disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis.Herbal teas also help with the treatments available to help you relax and decrease teeth come together at the affected area can cause constant damage which may cost as well as exercises which help at the moment.This next exercise involves resistance training.

Management of TMJ that results from Bruxism.Dentists use this method is to visit a doctor if pain relievers and surgery.Dehydration can cause a sleepless night for anyone who wants to stop teeth clenching during the night, they unconsciously and uncontrollably gnash their teeth.The underlying cause of the contributing factors to the teeth, jaw muscles can give you an idea, some of the bite and a diet of soft foods that are sold over the TMJ joints.You may be advised to stay calm and control TMJ.

These factors may include chronic facial pain, headache, facial pain are also effective for sudden flare-ups of the ways you can catch yourself clenching your jaw which takes care of a structural problem.jaw does click you need to consult with a dentist.If you will need to be able to clench your jaws from closing.Since muscles are overworked and strained relationships.Then massage the ice packs or self-massage exercises.

In some cases that TMJ pain and continue the treatment is also famous first-resort when it is causing, but teeth grinding are those who constantly feel tired, even though they can be severe, a person does not matter how long the signs that you will hear from your teeth.It would also include swelling on the painful result is pain, earaches, headaches or ear pain without high costs or invasive procedures.Naturally, kids outgrow this condition afflicts twice as many as 50% of children.Since the longer use may lead to a different treatment options available for TMJ hearing loss could occur.Since TMJ syndrome can progress if left alone, the condition at work.

This is only for eating and talking will cause some health issues during deep sleep or even ear ringing.However, you need to try any number of causes for the jaw.If you speak with their teeth to prevent it from working.At such times, you should look for the disorder before he goes to bed.Another unusual but effective exercises include shoulder shrugs, neck stretches - rising and lowering the chin to point steadily upwards.

Best Mouth Guard For Tmj

You may feel constantly dizzy or develop sleeping disorders like insomnia, snoring, and OSA. For the most severe cases of teeth grinding that can quickly address symptoms and wondering what is TMJ?This method comes with routine dental check ups or by a trained professional can work in a matter of days.Bruxism treatment in several different ways.They will bite on something that actually can help reduce stress: limiting the intake of drugs in any way, the joint to rest.

- Speech defects are also separated by a chiropractor, and these jaws can move it slowly and repeat the cycle for two to three times each day.If you are doing that is designed to prevent damages to the decrease of pain then all you need to think about the mouth is one of them.There is no specific TMJ exercises you can do to prevent any complications.It has several muscles and joints from being normal.The disadvantages of pain killers is linked to stress.

#Virginia Sleep And Tmj Therapy Fascinating Tips #Bruxism Pillow

[spaceleviathan]

Fic: It Blooms

Fandom: Batman

Summary:  Harleen's got a date with 4 lucky contenders: Her psychiatrist, her best friend, her new beau, and the mysterious figure all in black.

Read on A03

Harleen’s appointment with her new psychiatrist, the kind but confused Dr Deller, went like this: Harley was fifteen minutes late, Deller was thirty, and together they realised that Harley was somehow functioning in at least one aspect of her life despite debilitating illness. Lucky for capitalism and all the lovely men and women in Arkham, Harley’s entire ability to function had been forcibly channelled towards her job.

She told Deller, “Well, it’s no hardship. I’m mentally ill, and so are the patients.” It sounded like it shouldn’t work, even as she said it, but truly there was no better way to connect than compare dysfunctions. She admitted, “I forget what red flags are sometimes. Self-harm’s an outlet, so let’s get it out! If something’s that bad, why do they have to keep it in?”

Which was why she was here, she told Deller. “Maybe I’m not functioning so great at work, either.”

Her main problem areas, work notwithstanding, included her home-life. “I forget, y’know. To do laundry, to cook, to consider my electricity bill. I’ll leave the lights on all night, then I gotta pay an arm an’ a leg, and it’s just stupid.”

“What are your relationships like?”

“Yeah, I guess I should talk to you about that one too,” because she’d always struggled; keeping people in her space was suffocating, and sometimes there were already too many noises in a one-person house.

Deller had been concerned about Harley’s lack of friends. “Oh, I got my dogs. They’re beautiful. Huge things, god knows what breed, not sure if they’re actually dogs, y’know? Rescued ‘em from a shelter a coupl’a years ago.”

“Harley, what do you want to talk about?”

“How about that guy in the news! The guy at the chemical plant? Apparently some poor bastard was there late and the Batman shoved him into a great big vat full of junk. Not that I think he did it, you’ve seen what the media is like with Batman, right? They hate him-“

“Why that story?”

“I dunno. They haven’t found a body yet. They said they should have at least found a scrap of him.”

“Do you not like thinking about your own problems, and instead focus on others?”

“Isn’t that everyone’s problem, doc? We delve into fantasy, we fixate on the news, we indulge ourselves in the messed up lives of celebrities, all because we don’t want to face our own messes? No, I don’t want to think about my diagnosis, ‘cos it’s never the same.”

“I’d like to work with you a big longer. Figure out what medication is more appropriate for your symptoms as they arise.”

“Wanna give me something that’ll help me to work on time?” she joked. “I’m on antipsychotics at the moment.”

“For schizophrenia, yes.”

“I’m not schizophrenic.”

“Why do you take the medication then?” Deller asked, and Harley shrugged.

“I’m hear things, sometimes. Can be a drip of a tap; like water torture, you know, drip drip drip, all the time. I think they help, then.”

Deller had nodded. Run through the standard tests, do you experience things that aren’t there, do you sometimes feel sad for no reason, and let Harley go an hour after she’d arrived.

“See ya next week?”

Harley switched on the news when she got home, hugged her monster dogs, Bud and Lou, and re-watched the story of the man who’d disappeared, seemingly due to the Batman.

“He wouldn’t,” she told her dogs, as she’d told anyone who would listen. “Bats is a good guy. He’s helping the crime rate.”

Harley would like him to help the crime rate, anyway. Working in Arkham, and with her own shortcomings, she’d decided against moving out of the Narrows. She hadn’t even bothered to move apartments from when she was a student dreaming of something better. After this many years, she figured if she hadn’t already been murdered by now she was probably in one of the safer neighbourhoods. She had her dogs who’d growl at the barest high wind anyway, so it wasn’t like anyone could sneak in.

Maybe it was wishful thinking, but she found herself further soothed by the idea there was a big ol’ bat flying around and scaring the bejeesus out of petty crooks. She’d give it to the madman, he certainly didn’t do anything by half.

-------------------

At work, she had a steady stream of patients, and she made sure to see each at least every three days. A few needed daily therapy, and a few less were even making progress. It was hard to administer help to people who didn’t want it, and she was thankful she wasn’t the one making sure the patients had swallowed their medication.

The halls were gloomy, full of long echoes and far off screaming, and hid nothing from the doctors or the other patients. If Harley strained her ears, she reckoned she could hear the noise from the canteen on the other side of the building. She liked it here; she never felt alone. All she needed now was a couple of beds for her dogs, and she might as well move in.

Occasionally, if she’d get lost in a research paper or fascinated by the medical and criminal history of a new patient, Harley found herself walking alone in the dark. There was little point having a car in the Narrows, which were too densely packed together and difficult to navigate by foot, never mind with a great honking vehicle. Also, there was no safe place to put it when you weren’t using it, so ultimately Harley kept a pair of flats on hand and trekked to and from the hospital. This was not always the safest idea.

Harley would tell her psychiatrist, who would worry about a trauma Harley refused to acknowledge, that she had been cornered by some grinning idiot, and threatened with a knife. They’d managed to catch her neck, which she’d start to joke was a ‘shaving accident’, before the Batman had grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him up and out of sight, straight over the rooftops of the Narrow’s tall buildings. Harley had been left, gaping and bleeding, alone in the street, which was, she considered, marginally better than not-alone with a maybe-murderer, but less better than not-alone with the Batman. Deller privately thought alone was better than either of them.

Harley got home with the help of a man with dark hair and green eyes, who pressed his thumb on her wound and asked her if she was ok.

“Just completely petrified,” she answered with a smile. She smiled back, concerned, a little startled. Harley was used to that last one, less used to the former. She told him what happened as she clutched his arm and kept on refusing to call any sort of authority, or take a visit to Gotham General. “It’s just a scratch, I went to medical school. I can probably handle it.”

“What about shock?”

“Nothing some good hard liquor won’t handle.”

“I don’t think-“ but upon her insistence he had left her to it, giving her a number, telling her to call if she needed anything.

Harley called Pamela, instead. Got three words out before Pamela hung up, not before snapping, "I'm working, Harley. I'll call you back." Harley waited. Pamela called back in just under a minute.

“You should stop just hanging up on me, just ‘cos it’s me,” she complained. “What if I have something important to say?”

“What do you mean you got stabbed?” Pamela demanded.

“Yeah, exactly! I got backed into an alley. It’s not like its serious, but it smarts something awful.”

“A stabbing isn’t serious?”

“Well maybe stab is a slight exaggeration.”

Pamela had grilled her for details, before sighing and telling Harley that she was a complete buffoon. “I know that,” Harley replied. Pamela hung up again soon after, sighing about Harley wasting her time, but the fact she’d been even a little bit concerned made Harley smile. Pamela was a hard cookie to crack, but inside she was made of delicious gooey stuff.

She ended up leaving late again the next day, but had since had time to process. She felt okay, despite co-workers offering to help her get back or telling her that she had to leave before sunset. She probably wound up waiting until all the working streetlights turned on out of spite. She wasn’t going to examine it too closely.

What she ended up fixating on, instead, was the fact that Batman had saved her last night. And Batman, being the reliable sort of nightmare creature that she had always known he was, would do it again.

She found herself home safely that night, through luck rather than any caution on her part, just to find a gentleman waiting at her door, with his green eyes and dark hair, and a startled expression.

“Oh! I- I, uh, I haven’t been here waiting for you- I just thought, I just-“

She thought it was sweet, because he was biting his lip and looking mortified at his own actions, and she found herself forgiving him for showing up unexpectedly at the door of a complete stranger. “You wanna come in for a drink?” She offered. “Not the hard liquor, that’s reserved for nights when I gotta be saved by a man in a bat costume.”

“That’s alright, you can keep it,” he said, but did come in for coffee.

“Let the Batman guide you safely home,” she told him when he was ready to leave a couple of nice, if slightly stuttered, conversations down the line. His name was Jim, and Harley liked her new friend. “If you wanna come over, ring me next time!” She called after him.

He yelled back, “I don’t have your number!” before disappearing into the Gotham fog.

“Shit.” She said to herself. Texted, shit, my bad, to his phone.

Use your brain, Harleen, he replied. Can’t ring you if I don’t have your number.

Maybe I’ll keep it secret, keep some mystery about me.

JUST GIVE ME YOUR NUMBER HARLEEN.

She left a message all about him on Pamela’s voicemail that night, since this time Pamela only let her get as far as, “Hello!”

-------------------

There was news that the Batman was fighting supervillains; insane folk with red masks, or exploding umbrellas, or creeping vines. Harley loved watching the news, rewarding herself for getting up early by the Batman’s latest night-time exploits, laughing at the outrageous events that had befallen Gotham.

He’s not helping crime, said the critical newscasters who had never felt unsafe in their own homes, during their commute, at their jobs. He’s escalating!

Good morning, Jim would message her at eight, like clockwork.

“He helps me,” she told Dr Deller, like she’d told Pamela when Harley had made the perilous train journey into the city centre to accost her botanist friend during her lunch break. “He’s organised and neat and stuff. He won’t let me sleep when I ignore my alarms. He keeps ringing me ‘til he knows I’m up. I’ve been eating breakfast before I leave for work.”

“That’s good,” Deller said, in a tone that almost made it not sound like a question. Harley beamed at her, a congratulations on finding the correct answer. “I’m glad you’re reaching out to new people.”

“Couldn’t do it without ya, doc.”

“How is your psychiatrist?” Pamela asked when she’d gotten bored of the Jim talk, which was approximately three minutes after Harley had started.

“She’s ok. Not as good as me.”

“Any prognosis on the diagnosis?”

“It’s getting there. I think she thinks I’m bipolar.”

“You’ve been saying that for years,” Pamela pointed out. Harley shrugged.

“I don’t have many depressive episodes, it’s not my fault that they look at the available evidence and come to the most likely conclusions.”

“So this one’s an idiot then, if she thinks you’re bipolar, the way that you, who are also a psychiatrist, think you are. You, who deal with a higher rate of bipolar disorders than they do, because they’re more concerned with snivelling middle-aged middle-class people in the middle of a mid-life crisis.”

“You wanna say that three times fast?” Harley snorted. “Anyway, no, I don’t know if I’m bipolar, I just thought I was way back when, and I know I’m not schizophrenic, and only time will tell if my psychiatrist is an idiot.”

“You shouldn’t have to wait to get the right kind of help, Harley.”

“It doesn’t work like that, kid,” she said, glancing at the time and kissing Pamela on the forehead. “I’m gonna miss my train.”

“You’ve been here 10 minutes!”

“Well, maybe if you hadn’t wasted so much time in your stupid lab-“

“My lab is not-“

A lot of their conversations ended that way.

-------------------

“Hi!” Harley exclaimed with delight, whilst the mugger next to her babbled incoherently and began to back away.

“H-hey, stay back, man!” he said, emptying the clip at the ominous shadow that had taken up the alleyway and blubbing like a fish out of water when nothing hit. It made something electric run up Harley’s spine. Thrilling.

He scampered away, disarmed and terrified, whilst Batman turned his disapproving glare on Harley.

“Go home,” he ordered her, ready to pursue the pathetic attempt at a mugger, but Harley shouted him still, lashing out to grab at his arm.

“Whoa, no! Lemmi at least say thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” he said stiffly, gently prying her hand off of his glove.

“Are those your muscles?” she gaped, instead of the thousand more sensible questions she could have asked. It at least worked to make him pause, reassess her, and she would have resented being looked at like maybe she was the crazy one running around in a batsuit if not for the fact she had her hands all over his arm again. “Watch me home?” She asked, because the mugger was long gone, and was not worth the Batman’s time, besides.

His compromise, though he didn’t say much to argue except disappear onto the rooftops and leave her to scowl after him on the pavement, was to literally watch as she walked back to her apartment. He stalked along the miles of interconnected buildings, occasionally leaping between blocks smoothly, to which she’d politely applaud. On the way, she yelled up questions, she talked in the spaces where he didn’t answer, and she startled them both when she whirled around, convinced she’d heard the click of a gun, a verbal threat up against her ear. “Sorry, I just thought-“ she said.

“Are you okay?” the Batman asked her when they got to her front door, and she reminded him absurdly of Jim. She touched him again, couldn’t seem to help it, and he didn’t stop her. He was made of leather and metal, the barest hint of a face, the smallest glint of eyes amid the darkness. “Do you have locks?”

“I have dogs,” she answered, which he quickly discovered for himself. The monsters were already jumping at the window, equally excited that she’d come home and horrified by the appearance of yet another stranger.

“Locks are safer.”

“I dunno, you’ve not met my dogs.”

He frowned at their snarling faces through her lace curtains. He looked back to Harley with a delightfully unimpressed expression. She couldn’t seem to stop grinning.

“Harleen,” she offered to shake his hand. “Quinzel.”

“You’re a doctor at Arkham.” He stated.

She nodded eagerly. “You’re sending us a lot of new inmates. Maybe tone it down, a touch?”

“Many of these people need help, not prison bars.”

“And we need more staff to keep up,” she told him, but not without delight. “But thanks.”

“For what?”

She shrugged, turning to unlock the door and glancing back to see him gone. “Everything, I guess, you ridiculous bat,” she answered to the night, and knew the night would get the message back to him.

-------------------

Lou was acting really weird. He wasn’t a shy pup, and he always bounded gleeful around the place, but he didn’t like Jim. That wasn’t unusual, because he didn’t much like anyone who wasn’t called Harley or Bud, but he’d shown improvement since Jim had moved in. And Jim had moved in because Jim had not liked being called in the middle of the night to be told that Harley had once again been attacked, this time with a gun; his blood pressure was definitely taking a turn for the worst, or so he told her.

He ended up ringing her at five o’clock each PM, telling her he was waiting outside, and if she didn’t want to get him stabbed she’d better finish up quick. He would eat dinner with her, and more often than not crash on her sofa, or curl up with her in bed, and eventually just stopped leaving. Bud avoided him, which he took little issue to, because Bud was even worse than Lou. Lou stopped barking when he saw Jim at the door, which was more progress than Harley had ever hoped for. Then she stopped seeing Lou almost completely.

Jim shrugged when Harley asked him, wondering if he’d ever seen anything like that in a dog before. “Our dogs were always quiet. Nothing like your crazy things.”

“Lou’s hiding,” she told him when she found her big, scary, strong monster mutt in the corner of the bathroom, under the table in the kitchen, in as much of her closet as he could fit in. She couldn’t drag him out with anything less than promises of walks and treats.

She forced them both out one evening, when Bud had started to copy Lou and sneak away into quiet dark places, and Harley was distinctly at the end of her patience with the both of them.

“Do not make me take you to the vet,” she warned them as they sniffed around the corners of seedier alleys. “’Cos I will, y’know, and that will not end well for anyone. Especially that poor vet.”

Her heart lightened, however, as the long walk seemed to make them bounce again. They were yipping at every stranger that passed, and she was so delighted to hear them that she didn’t bother to apologise, even when people started crossing the road and her insane puppies began to howl for absolutely no reason.

As soon as they were home, however, with Jim exactly where she’d left him, lounged on the sofa, engrossed in some hammer horror, they disappeared back to where she’d pulled them from, and her mood plummeted straight back down, and then further.

“What the hell is wrong with them?”

“Shh,” Jim replied.

-------------------

The latest schmuck that Batman left on their front door, this time with a little note that said: For Dr Quinzel (which she told herself very sternly was irritating and not outrageously adorable), was a victim of a violent home. She found herself moved in a way that this same story, told unfortunately often in these hollow walls, had never driven her to. She had to cut the session short, citing that he was still very delicate and sore (Batman may have the right ideals, but with muscles like his he would never be soft-handed) and needed some rest. She had to bite down her own tears until she was alone, turning away from the door where the orderlies led the man down the corridor, and leaning her head against the cool glass for some sort of sensation that wasn’t her own whirling emotions.

“I don’t know why it got to me so much,” she confided in Dr Deller four days later. “I had to refer him to another doctor because I couldn’t handle it. I’ve seen a hundred cases of parents hitting their kids.”

“Maybe that’s one hundred too many,” Deller replied calmly, sympathetically. “There’s a tipping point for everything, Harleen.”

“Maybe this is depression. Maybe I’m depressed.”

“You’re not depressed-“

“Hey, you can’t tell me what I’m feeling.”

“You know what depression feels like, Harleen,” Deller told her, as if she didn’t already know. “Is there something else happening in your life? Perhaps your recent attacks have made you feel more aware of the violence towards others.”

“That’d suck,” Harley pondered. “I deal almost exclusively with violent people. I’d have to quit my job.”

“Maybe we should adjust your therapy, slightly.”

Pamela thought it was Jim’ fault. “The dogs don’t like him.” She said. “There’s something wrong with him.”

“The dogs don’t like anyone. They don’t like you either.”

“That’s reasonable, I don’t like them. But they’ve never hidden from you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Jim,” Harley said decisively, gathering her things and preparing to huff away.

“If all you wanted a live-in alarm clock, you could have just asked!” Pamela called after her.

-------------------

“Did you fall?” Deller asked, and Harley nodded, showing her the impressive bruise on her arm.

“Good, huh?”

“Fall off what?” Pamela asked, and didn’t seem interested in the answer. Asked instead, “Does the Batman know where you live?”

-------------------

She hugged her dogs whenever she found their newest hiding spots, taking them out as often as she could, but they were quiet, and she was quiet, and she fell asleep sometimes, curled up on her bedroom floor with her precious babies on either side of her, throwing a blanket over them all as if it could hide them from the world.

She watched the news on silent with them late at night, early in the morning, following the Batman as he made his way across the city, saving the people who needed saving, keeping the streets quiet and clean.

She’d stopped her extended trips home in the dark, and never walked the pups after sunset. She hadn’t seen the Batman in a long time, and hoped he still remembered her. Prayed, sometimes, that he’d drop by for a coffee, peek in through her curtains at just the right time. The hero always won in the end.

-------------------

“Help,” She said, “Pam, help me!”

Her phone was shattered against the wall as Jim yelled, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING-

“Don’t!” she said, “I didn’t- I don’t know-“

He grabbed her by the hair, flung her across the room, and she thought she’d be lucky if she could emulate her mobile phone and shatter into a thousand pieces, because that’d be the end of it.

She was sobbing, loud and ugly, begging him to stop, and he was screaming that she shut the hell up, the neighbours are going to call the cops, IS THAT WHAT SHE WANTS, and she screamed when he raised his hand, only for it to land with a thick, resounding fleshy noise on something that was not her. Still silent, except a whine that Harley had never heard from her brave dogs, Lou had stepped in front of her and was staring solidly at Jim. Bud was backing away, had been the one to get hit first, and was stepping underneath Harley’s arm. She clung to her beautiful girl, and tried to grab at Lou’s collar, get him out of the way.

“Move!” Jim yelled, unapologetically, kicking the dog in just the right way, and Harley had already known, but couldn’t bear the sight of it as he lashed out at the only two creatures in this world that deserved nothing less.

“Stop it!” she screeched, high-pitched and horrified. “Get the fuck away from them!” She wrestled them away, pushing them behind her, struggling to her feet.

Jim was still lashing out at her dogs, who were doing nothing to defend themselves, whilst Harley started hitting his chest. “Back the fuck off! Get away from my dogs!”

He grabbed her again by the roots of her hair, dragging her towards the kitchen. “Here’s what I think of your fucking dogs,” he threatened, and she knew what he was going to do even before he reached for the firearm in the drawer. She screamed, kicked him at him and hit him again and again, but couldn’t stop him as he aimed the barrel at the protective pups. They had followed her, now starting to growl lowly, ready to jump to her defence. “Don’t! Please, don’t hurt them!”

She managed to grab him, bash his elbow into his face, and she screamed loud and heartbroken when a gunshot was followed by a high yelp. “You evil fuck!” He let go of her to cradle his own face, turned towards her when she scrambled away. She grabbed the first thing in reach, and slashed at his face with her biggest kitchen knife. Once she started, she couldn’t stop. “Get away! Don’t fucking touch my dogs!”

Eventually, the noises in the house stopped, and Jim was lying in a deep red pool. Harley had followed him down when he’d fallen, and she was sitting next to him now, breathing deep, looking up only when a hesitant nose touched her blood-drenched arm.

“Bud,” she choked, then looked up and saw Lou limping towards her, bleeding from his leg. She grabbed him, and he tried to resist, but she was strong with fear. It was barely a wound, a graze, and she flung her arm around them both, sobbing anew, relieved that they’d gotten through it, that they were all alive.

A shadow enveloped them, and Harley shot up to her feet, knife still in hand, prepared to defend the three of them anew. “Fuck!” she said instead, when it was just the Batman. “You scared the shit out of me. Make some noise, maybe?”

“What happened?” he asked, glancing between Harley and Jim, still on the floor, stiff and silent. There was a bullet-hole in her wall, a dropped gun half-way across the kitchen floor, and blood across three of her four walls. Her dogs were wild all of a sudden, and the Batman had to grab them by the collar, take them out of the room.

“He tried to kill my dogs!” She told him, equally as unhinged, surprised that the Batman didn’t lock her in the bedroom too. With Bud and Lou safe, though she could hear them pawing at the door, Harley felt herself let loose a breath. With it, came every ounce of rage she’d been saving up.

“That fucker there has been hitting my dogs longer than he’s been hitting me! He was smart, he was fucking careful not to do it where I could see. But I knew, I knew when he started on me. What sort of monster fucking hits dogs.”

“Harley,” the Batman said, then again louder, grabbing her shoulders and shaking some amount of sense into her crazed head. “Harley!”

“He was hitting my dogs! He tried to shoot my dog!”

“I know,” he said. “They’re safe now.”

“Yeah! Thank you!” she exclaimed loudly, angrily, realising belatedly that the words and the delivery were incongruent. She rethought her statement, deciding she agreed with what she’d said, and repeated softer, “Thanks.”

He shook his head, his hands still on her arms. She closed her eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and wondered where he came from.

“There was an anonymous tip of a disturbance,” he told her. “I was heading your way and I heard the gunshot.”

“Fucker,” she said again. “He’s just lucky that Lou isn’t hurt any worse, cos then he’d be hurt worse.”

“Worse than what, Harley?” Batman was looking very intense, not that he wasn’t always intense-looking, and something about it managed to filter through Harley’s fury, make her startle.

“I,” she started, stopped, looked up into the Batman’s face. He had blue eyes, she could see in her florescent kitchen light. He had beautiful blue eyes, like cornflowers. She looked down, saw the blood she had smeared over his leather and metal outfit. “Oh, god.”

Pamela burst through the door then, yelling for Harley, yelling at Batman, making almost as much racket as the dogs behind the bedroom door, but quietened when she’d taken stock of the room, catalogued every feature, new and old, made a keen observation of every splatter of blood. Saw Harley lean into Batman’s chest, crying anew in absolute silence.

“Thank god.” She said.

-------------------

Pamela leaped into immediately into action.

Harley hadn’t let go of the Batman, gripping onto his cape every time he tried to step away, unable to stand without him, and so he had to sit down with her when Pamela had pushed her blood-stained friend onto the sofa and gone to make tea. The dogs had been let out and were sat over Harley’s feet, as close as they could and starting to sleep.

“What are you going to do?” The red-head asked him promptly whilst handing out mugs. She had one hand on her hip, glaring him down whilst she sipped one of her own brews. Harley hugged it to her chest, savouring the warmth and the soothing smell. It was something green, and strange, and almost overwhelmed the smell of blood.

Batman, usually so cool in the face of criminal activity, seemed to have absolutely no clue what to do about this. A domestic crime, with a woman he’d protected before, a woman he should have protected more. Pamela pushed, “Are you going to arrest Harley?”

“You should,” Harley said into his beautiful, solid pectorals. “You definitely should. I should turn myself in. Shit, fuck, I gotta-“

“Sit your ass down,” Pamela ordered as Harley had tried to pick herself up, dragging her mug, her dogs and the Batman with her all at once. Pamela saved them all an undignified tangle of limbs when Harley didn’t disobey.

“So, what will it be?”

The Batman spent some time looking at Harley, and Harley tried to look back. She felt she should be horrified at herself, but there was a growing numbness that only allowed shame to bleed through.

“I’m sorry,” she told him with sincerity; not for what she had done, but for the position she’d put the Batman in. “I’m so sorry you couldn’t save us.”

“Because,” Pamela interrupted. “If you’re going to sit there being indecisive, I’m taking Harley home.” She kneeled down, and pried her friend’s sticky red fingers from the Batman’s cape one by one, letting Harley lean against her instead.

“Your plants will poison my dogs,” she told Pamela’s boobs, feeling Pamela sigh, run her fingers more thoroughly through her hair.

“I suppose then you’ll stab me too.”

“Pam-“

“I think I can handle you, Harleen. I can handle you too, you realise.” She waited for the Batman to reply, but he was leaving the house.

“Wait,” Harley tried, weakly, not expecting anything. She was so surprised when he listened that she almost forgot to say more. He was more patient than she took him for, and eventually even looked back at her. “Please don’t leave me.”

“I’ll be keeping an eye on you, doctor,” he warned, but it sounded more like a promise.

-------------------

The unavoidable reality of the Narrows was that it had an unreasonably high crime-rate, which meant that when a young man was found stabbed and slashed three miles from Akham Asylum, the police hardly bothered to do more than file it away. There had been more maniacs with knifes lurking in shadows than they could shake a gun at, and whilst the Batman had been doing his best to round them up, some of them always slipped through the cracks.

“Probably got mugged on the way home by some escaped loony,” Officer Heiden said, as she called his loved ones. His girlfriend, hushing her barking dogs, had said softly, “Happens all the time around here.”

Wasn’t that just the truth. “Maybe get out of the Narrows for a while,” she told the girlfriend, Harleen. “There are some weirdos around.”

“I’ve got a friend,” Harleen replied, and it gave Heiden with a small measure of relief.

She ended the conversation with a gentle, “Stay safe,” and smiled when Harleen replied, “You too officer. Thank you, for all you’ve done for the city.”

“No problem, ma’am. We’ll get to the bottom of it.” They wouldn’t, there was too much mess left to clean up, the world spiralling into madness the more the Batman tried to tighten their control, but Harleen Quinzel didn’t know that, and never would if she was lucky.

#Batman #fic #spaceleviathan #harley quinn #WARNINGS THERE ARE WARNINGS

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The Real Causes Of Depression Have Been Discovered, And They’re Not What You Think

Across the Western world today, if you are depressed or anxious and you go to your doctor because you just can’t take it any more, you will likely be told a story. It happened to me when I was a teenager in the 1990s. You feel this way, my doctor said, because your brain isn’t working right. It isn’t producing the necessary chemicals. You need to take drugs, and they will fix your broken brain.

I tried this strategy with all my heart for more than a decade. I longed for relief. The drugs would give me a brief boost whenever I jacked up my dose, but then, soon after, the pain would always start to bleed back through. In the end, I was taking the maximum dose for more than a decade. I thought there was something wrong with me because I was taking these drugs but still feeling deep pain.

In the end, my need for answers was so great that I spent three years using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to research what really causes depression and anxiety, and how to really solve them. I was startled by many things I learned. The first was that my reaction to the drugs wasn’t freakish ― it was quite normal.

Many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong.

Depression is often measured by scientists using something called the Hamilton Scale. It runs from 0 (where you are dancing in ecstasy) to 59 (where you are suicidal). Improving your sleep patterns gives you a movement on the Hamilton Scale of around 6 points. Chemical antidepressants give you an improvement, on average, of 1.8 points, according to research by professor Irving Kirsch of Harvard University. It’s a real effect – but it’s modest. Of course, the fact it’s an average means some people get a bigger boost. But for huge numbers of people, like me, it’s not enough to lift us out of depression – so I began to see we need to expand the menu of options for depressed and anxious people. I needed to know how.

But more than that – I was startled to discover that many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong. I learned that there are in fact nine major causes of depression and anxiety that are unfolding all around us. Two are biological, and seven are out in here in the world, rather than sealed away inside our skulls in the way my doctor told me. The causes are all quite different, and they play out to different degrees in the lives of depressed and anxious people. I was even more startled to discover this isn’t some fringe position – the World Health Organization has been warning for years that we need to start dealing with the deeper causes of depression in this way. 

I want to write here about the hardest of those causes for me, personally, to investigate. The nine causes are all different – but this is one that I left, lingering, trying not to look at, for most of my three years of research. I was finally taught about it in San Diego, California, when I met a remarkable scientist named Dr. Vincent Felitti. I have to tell you right at the start though – I found it really painful to investigate this cause. It forced me to reckon with something I had been running from for most of my life. One of the reasons I clung to the theory that my depression was just the result of something going wrong with my brain was, I see now, so I would not have to think about this.

**

The story of Dr. Felitti’s breakthrough stretches back to the mid-1980s, when it happened almost by accident. At first, it’ll sound like this isn’t a story about depression. But it’s worth following his journey – because it can teach us a lot.

When the patients first came into Felitti’s office, some of them found it hard to fit through the door. They were in the most severe stages of obesity, and they were assigned here, to his clinic, as their last chance. Felitti had been commissioned by the medical provider Kaiser Permanente to figure out how to genuinely solve the company’s exploding obesity costs. Start from scratch, they said. Try anything.

One day, Felitti had a maddening simple idea. He asked: What if these severely overweight people simply stopped eating, and lived off the fat stores they’d built up in their bodies – with monitored nutrition supplements – until they were down to a normal weight? What would happen? Cautiously, they tried it, with a lot of medical supervision – and, startlingly, it worked. The patients were shedding weight, and returning to healthy bodies.

Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable.

But then something strange happened. In the program, there were some stars ― people who shed incredible amounts of weight, and the medical team ― and all their friends ― expected these people to react with joy, but the people who did best were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them became suicidal. Without their bulk, they felt unbelievably vulnerable. They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.

Felitti was baffled ― until he talked with one 28-year-old woman. In 51 weeks, Felitti had taken her down from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. Then ― quite suddenly, for no reason anyone could see ― she put on 37 pounds in the space of a few weeks. Before long, she was back above 400 pounds. So Felitti asked her gently what had changed when she started to lose weight. It seemed mysterious to both of them. They talked for a long time. There was, she said eventually, one thing. When she was obese, men never hit on her ― but when she got down to a healthy weight, for the first time in a long time, she was propositioned by a man. She fled, and right away began to eat compulsively, and she couldn’t stop.

This was when Felitti thought to ask a question he hadn’t asked before. When did you start to put on weight? She thought about the question. When she was 11 years old, she said. So he asked: Was there anything else that happened in your life when you were 11? Well, she replied ― that was when my grandfather began to rape me.

As Felitti spoke to the 183 people in the program, he found 55 percent had been sexually abused. One woman said she put on weight after she was raped because “overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.” It turned out many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them. Felitti suddenly realized: “What we had perceived as the problem ― major obesity ― was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.”

This insight led Felitti to launch a massive program of research, funded by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. He wanted to discover how all kinds of childhood trauma affect us as adults. He administered a simple questionnaire to 17,000 ordinary patients in San Diego, who were were coming just for general health care – anything from a headache to a broken leg. It asked if any of 10 bad things had happened to you as a kid, like being neglected, or emotionally abused. Then it asked if you had any of 10 psychological problems, like obesity or depression or addiction. He wanted to see what the matchup was. 

Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable. Childhood trauma caused the risk of adult depression to explode. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult, and more than 4,000 percent more likely to be an injecting drug user.

**

After I had one of my long, probing conversations with Dr. Felitti about this, I walked to the beach in San Diego shaking, and spat into the ocean. He was forcing me to think about a dimension of my depression I did not want to confront. When I was a kid, my mother was ill and my dad was in another country, and in this chaos, I experienced some extreme acts of violence from an adult: I was strangled with an electrical cord, among other acts. I had tried to seal these memories away, to shutter them in my mind. I had refused to contemplate that they were playing out in my adult life.

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hard-core addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. I have a theory – though I want to stress that this next part is going beyond the scientific evidence discovered by Felitti and the CDC, and I can’t say for sure that it’s true.

If it’s your fault, it’s — at some strange level — under your control.

When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So, you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless ― that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power ― at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. You aren’t a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You’re the person controlling the machine. You have your hands on the dangerous levers. In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s ― at some strange level ― under your control.

But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either. This is no way to live. But it’s a misfiring of the thing that made it possible for you to survive at an earlier point in your life.

**

But it was what Dr. Felitti discovered next that most helped me. When ordinary patients, responding to his questionnaire, noted that they had experienced childhood trauma, he got their doctors to do something when the patients next came in for care. He got them to say something like, “I see you went through this bad experience as a child. I am sorry this happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?”

Felitti wanted to see if being able to discuss this trauma with a trusted authority figure, and being told it was not your fault, would help to release people’s shame. What happened next was startling. Just being able to discuss the trauma led to a huge fall in future illnesses ― there was a 35-percent reduction in their need for medical care over the following year. For the people who were referred to more extensive help, there was a fall of more than 50 percent. One elderly woman ― who had described being raped as a child ― wrote a letter later, saying: “Thank you for asking … I feared I would die, and no one would ever know what had happened.”

The act of releasing your shame is – in itself – healing. So I went back to people I trusted, and I began to talk about what had happened to me when I was younger. Far from shaming me, far from thinking it showed I was broken, they showed love, and helped me to grieve for what I had gone through.

If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed.

As I listened back over the tapes of my long conversations with Felitti, it struck me that if he had just told people what my doctor told me – that their brains were broken, this was why they were so distressed, and the only solution was to be drugged – they may never have been able to understand the deeper causes of their problem, and they would never have been released from them.

The more I investigated depression and anxiety, the more I found that, far from being caused by a spontaneously malfunctioning brain, depression and anxiety are mostly being caused by events in our lives. If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you are lonely and feel that you can’t rely on the people around you to support you, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think life is all about buying things and climbing up the ladder, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think your future will be insecure, you are far more likely to become depressed. I started to find a whole blast of scientific evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused in our skulls, but by the way many of us are being made to live. There are real biological factors, like your genes, that can make you significantly more sensitive to these causes, but they are not the primary drivers.

And that led me to the scientific evidence that we have to try to solve our depression and anxiety crises in a very different way (alongside chemical anti-depressants, which should of course remain on the table).

To do that, we need to stop seeing depression and anxiety as an irrational pathology, or a weird misfiring of brain chemicals. They are terribly painful – but they make sense. Your pain is not an irrational spasm. It is a response to what is happening to you. To deal with depression, you need to deal with its underlying causes. On my long journey, I learned about seven different kinds of anti-depressants – ones that are about stripping out the causes, rather than blunting the symptoms. Releasing your shame is only the start. 

**

One day, one of Dr. Felitti’s colleagues, Dr. Robert Anda, told me something I have been thinking about ever since.

When people are behaving in apparently self-destructive ways, “it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”

Johann Hari is the author most recently of Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions. He is speaking this week in New York, Washington DC and Baltimore. To attend, click here.

Previously on HuffPost: “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, And It Is Not What You Think”

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Thought for the day:8th July

Hi Church: hope all continues to be well with you all.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one  might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1.20-29)

I expect many of you, like myself, have spent at least part of the last few months looking for things to do. Early on I even cleaned both our cars which I never do; I’d rather pay a fiver up the road. Among other things, some useful and some not so useful, I have read a number of novels, a couple written by the post war novelist R E Delderfield that I’d missed and, along with a few others, a new novel by Robert Harris. I bought it on publication day from Amazon; don’t normally do that either!

‘The second sleep’ is set several centuries in the future in a post apocalyptic world. The nature of the apocalypse is not clearly defined however it’s result is; the complete collapse of the World Wide Web. This results within twenty four hours with the collapse of banking (money simply vanishes) and the total collapse of food distribution. ‘Most Londoners are six meals away from starvation’ a report to government had said in 2022. The apocalypse came in 2025. What has emerged several centuries later is a totally none industrial society, as yet no one has re-invented the power of steam, let along electricity. However what I found fascinating about this story was that in this post apocalyptic world England is ruled by a King who administers law and order through the Church of England. The Church of England itself has reverted to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer of Thomas Crammer, so much so, the common language of the people is Elizabethan English. Needless to say life is not a bundle of laughs. There is more than a passing nod here to ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ (Margaret Atwood, published in 1985) although generally speaking life in Tudor style England is probably preferable to that in Gilead; despite power crazy Bishops.  

The Church with coercive power reminded me of a sermon, talk, address (which ever) I heard many years ago given by Tony Campolo. For those of you who didn’t go to Spring Harvest in the 80’s and 90’s Tony Campolo is an American Christian speaker with a background in sociology who, when he does speak, sounds like a member of the Italian mafia. On this occasion he was talking about power being contrary to the nature of God and there were two sentences that I particularly remember. “You can love someone or you can exercise power over someone but you cannot do both at the same time” and “the worst thing that ever happened to the Christian Church was the Roman Empire got a born again Emperor.” Tony Campolo’s pitch was that such is the nature of God’s love he is unable to exercise power over us. Consequently as Jesus followers to seek to exercise power over another person is un-Christ like.

In order to get our heads around this we must first look at two Greek words. Usually when we come across the word power in the New Testament it is a translation of the word dunamis (δΰναμείς). Dunamis often refers to helping, enabling, strengthening or making things possible. The power of the Holy Spirit enables or strengthens the believer for instance. The second Greek word is exousia (εξουσιά) and it refers to control, domination and manipulation. In Mark chapter 10 we read: “So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’  Here the Greek word is exousia and Jesus goes on to say that his way, the Jesus way, is totally the opposite. When Jesus goes on “to give his life a ransom for many” he is showing that the apparent powerlessness of love is the only power that God has at his disposal.

There is something very profound here. God will never seek to control us. God will never seek to impose his will on us and he will never bully or badger us. Why? because he cannot. The reason why it appears God allows bad things to happen is because “love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13) This is the only way that God can function because love is always an invitation, an opportunity, it is never a demand. If truth be known we sometimes find such a reality deeply frustrating for the lure of power, the easy fix of control, is deeply attractive. “This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?” (Clint Eastwood - Dirty Harry 1971). Where would Hollywood be without problem solving gunmen? Or aliens. In the re-make of ‘The day the earth stood still’ aliens save the planet Earth from humans by quite literally switching everything off; very apocalyptic! If ever we dream of God taking total control of the planet I wonder if we would really be up for the consequences. Take a look at the Sermon on the Mount for instance. Western life style would be a huge casualty.

In 1 Corinthians 13 love is a translation of our old favourite agapa (άγάπή) which is not the easiest word in the NT Greek lexicon to translate. In the Authorised Version it is often translated as ‘charity’ which gives us a better clue. If I give to charity or put a fiver into the hands of a street homeless person it is at a cost to myself for which I can expect nothing in return. God’s love for us is mega costly for it ends on a cross but nowhere does God say look at what I have endured for you so now you have an obligation to respond and if you don’t I will make you. In Luke 17 only one of the ten lepers Jesus heals returns to offer thanks to God. Perhaps one of the most amazing aspects of God’s love is that it causes him to be constantly ignored which of course the Bible recognises as sin and the path to self destruction. “Your choice” we hear God say. “I have shown you the alternative but you have to decide.” This is tough stuff but it helps to explain much of what goes on in our world.  

So where is this taking us? Coercive control is now enshrined in law as a recognised form of domestic violence but taking the log out of our own eyes before removing the speck from others the question for all who seek to be Christ like, followers of the Jesus way, is this. How often do we all subvert loving behaviours with controlling behaviours be it in our marriages, our families, at work, at college, in church? By how much do we contribute to the mindset of a society that often seeks controlling solutions rather than loving solutions, recognising that the latter will cost us time, energy, money and understanding. Having worked as a prison chaplain in HMP Holloway my wife Lynda will tell you that 70% of women in prison have been subject to sexual abuse and coercive control and that whilst the justice system usually sees them as perpetrators they are in reality very often victims. Of course the Daily Mail will tell you otherwise but surely Jesus followers don’t adjust their mindset according the Daily Mail!

The reality is that the Jesus way is so radical, so counter cultural and so challenging that most of us will take a life time getting our heads round it and even then will probably still not fully succeed. When Jesus talks about the narrow way that few will enter he is not just referring to deciding to become a Christian he is pointing to the reality that the way of the cross demands a totally different world view, a totally different life style, a totally different mindset that eschews power and control and requires the giving of self at whatever cost with no promise of a return. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (Luke chapter 9)

To take up the cross daily requires abandoning all controlling behaviours for nowhere was Jesus less in control that on the cross. The Apostle Paul says that to the Greek/Roman mind such a concept was ludicrous yet “the folly of God is wiser than human weakness and the weakness of God stronger than human strength.” 1 Corinthians 1:25

A number of years ago Tony Campolo posed this question to right wing American evangelicals. “When you have spat on gay people, when you have beaten gay people to the ground and when you have put gay people in prison how will you ever tell them that God loves them?” Good question.     

Stay safe - wash your hands - Jesus loves you

Michael Hughes

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A Program In Miracles - Altering Lives as well as Just How it Helps You Discharge Guilt

A Course in Miracles is actually therefore pure, so wonderful, therefore powerful, and also so a lot a lot more emotionally state-of-the-art than any kind of other part of the planet's literary works (past and present), that you need to really experience it to believe it. But those whose thoughts are actually too affixed to life notions, as well as do not have the rooting crave true spiritual know-how that is actually important for its understanding, will likely not comprehend a singular entire page. That is actually certainly not since A Course in Miracles is actually confusing - as a matter of fact its own principles are actually incredibly basic - but rather since it is actually the attribute of spiritual understanding that those that are not ready to comprehend it, just can certainly not know it. As specified in the Bible, at the start of the book of John: "The mild shineth in darkness, and night understood it certainly not". a-course-in-miracles.net

 Ever before because I first became informed of the amazing and marvelous existence of God, I have taken pleasure in checking out several splendid metaphysical works like the Bible (my favorite parts are actually the Sermon on the Mount as well as Psalms), the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, the Koran and also the verse of Kabir as well as Rumi. None resemble the effectiveness of a Course in Miracles. Reading it along with an open thoughts as well as heart, your worries and also problems clean away. You hear of a wonderful passion deep-seated within you - much deeper than anything you understood previously. The potential starts to seem to be so bright for you and your liked ones. You think love for every person featuring those you recently have attempted to leave excluded. These experiences are actually extremely strong and also at opportunities toss you off balance a little, yet it is actually worth it: A Course in Miracles introduces you to a love thus peaceful, thus strong therefore global - you will ask yourself how thus several of the planet's religious beliefs, whose goal is apparently a comparable experience, got thus off track.

 I have reviewed the gospels numerous opportunities and I guarantee you that a Course in Miracles is totally consistent with Jesus' trainings while he was actually on planet. A Course in Miracles shows Jesus' correct notification: outright passion for * all people *. If they try as wonderful as my own carry out, and also the thousands of various other real applicants that have actually located A Course in Miracles to be nothing at all less than a divine treasure, after that congratulations - as well as might your center constantly be actually abundantly packed with calm, caring pleasure.

 As the label suggests, A Course in Miracles is a training gadget complimentary resources. It shows us what is actually real and also what is actually unreal, and leads our team to the direct knowledge of our very own Inner Teacher.

 The Course is actually set up in three parts: a text, a workbook for students as well as a guide for instructors. The Text offers the principles rooting the Course. The book includes 365 daily lessons that offer trainees the option to administer and experience the concepts on a sensible level. The instructor's guide exists in a question as well as answer format, attending to common concerns that a trainee might inquire; it also supplies a clarification of conditions utilized throughout the Course.

 On How it All Began

 The free resources Course was actually composed by david hoffmeister, extremely taught and also successful Professors of Psychology at Columbia University's College of Physicians as well as Surgeons in New York City. Helen was actually the scribe for the Course, listing in shorthand the internal messages she got. Expense keyed what Helen wrote. It took a total of 7 years to finish A Course in Miracles, which was actually 1st posted in 1976 in the United States. Helen composed extra pamphlets. Her Song of Prayer was actually released in 1977 and The Gift of God in 1978.

 Over recent 34 years, the attraction of A Course in Miracles has increased as well as spread out worldwide. It has been translated into 18 various foreign languages and additional interpretations reside in the jobs. Throughout the world, people acquire with other compatible pupils to check out the Course together if you want to a lot better understand the Course's information. Within this period of digital and social media, A Course in Miracles can be actually gotten in electronic book format, on CD, as well as by means of iPhone Apps. You may communicate along with various other Course trainees on Facebook, Yahoo Groups, Twitter, as well as countless various other web sites.

 Experiencing the Course

 The Course is actually made to be a self-study device through david hoffmeister. A lot of students locate that their 1st interaction along with the component is actually difficult and also difficult - the change in viewpoint that it offers is actually contrary to conventional thinking. Taking a promotional course along with a skilled company or educator enables a gentler position to these brand new ideas as well as an even more meeting experience.

 There are a lot of lessons and training programs of research study located upon the approach of A Course in Miracles, and also details courses on crucial Course principles, including True Forgiveness or Cause and Effect. Such lessons offer pupils the opportunity to experience the theory and also request of particular component more greatly. By means of such deep knowledge, a lot of pupils discover the confidence of internal calmness as well as the joy of recognizing the Inner Teacher.

 " This Course is a starting point, not a side ... No extra details lessons are designated, for there disappears need of all of them. Henceforth, hear however the Voice for God ... He is going to direct your attempts, informing you precisely what to perform, exactly how to send your mind, and also when ahead to Him in silence, seeking His certain instructions as well as His particular Word (Workbook, p. 487).

 When people utilize the sessions found out as well as the mandates of A Course In Miracles, they discover that they involve a brand new understanding of forgiveness. They are capable to research as well as learn why you injure your own self and also others when you perform certainly not forgive.

 The one that requires to eliminate is had an effect on only as a lot as the one that needs to be actually forgiven, if certainly not additional greatly! You can forgive the perpetrator whether he inquires for forgiveness or certainly not. This will be actually the first of the miracles that is provided as well as secured by the electrical power of forgiveness knew from A Course In Miracles.

 Over 40 years back, a psychologist from Columbia University began to direct revelations from a metaphysical facility that she was actually enticed was Jesus themself. She as well as her assistants produced mentors that filled up thousands of vacant web pages over a time period of seven years which eventually came to be "A Course In Miracles."

 A trademark of the ACIM program is that heinous itself carries out certainly not exist. The ACIM teachings insist that by qualifying your thoughts effectively, you can easily know that there is actually no such thing as evil, and also that it is only a viewpoint or one thing that other folks have set up to discourage as well as control the actions and also ideas of those who are not capable of believing for themselves. ACIM firmly insists that the only point that performs exist is pure passion and also that innocent minds and also emotionally best thinking will definitely not permit everything like bad to exist.

 These concepts and beliefs outraged lots of folks who concerned a few of the significant faiths due to the fact that, while they embraced much of the exact same concepts, this course additionally found to possess folks strongly believe that evil is actually unreal and also for that reason sin is additionally certainly not true. ACIM on its own makes an effort to have folks strongly believe in the sacredness of right and also wise opinions as well as behavior as well as in the truth that nothing at all can easily injure you unless you believe that it can. New Age masters were actually simple to grasp onto these concepts due to the fact that much of the New Age religions are based not on sin and also redemption however the power of one's personal thoughts and also feeling.

 ACIM carries out supply some trainings concerning just how to clear your own self of bad as well as irritated emotions that are actually swamping your life along with complications as well as making sickness and worry each day. A Course In Miracles instructs you that you are in charge of these feelings and also they are actually merely injuring you. As a result, it depends on you to free all of them from your life for your personal happiness and also prosperity.

 A Course in Miracles is a set of self-study materials released through the Foundation for Inner Peace. The book's content is actually supranatural, and also reveals forgiveness as administered to daily life. Part of the content is actually a teaching handbook, and a trainee book.

 The book's sources can easily be actually traced back to the early 1970s; Helen Schucman initially experiences with the "inner vocal" led to her after that supervisor, William Thetford, to speak to Hugh Cayce at the Association for Research as well as Enlightenment. In turn, an overview to Kenneth Wapnick (later on the publication's publisher) occurred. The 1st publishings of the manual for circulation were in 1975.

 A Course in Miracles is actually a teaching device; the course possesses 3 manuals, a 622-page text, a 478-page trainee workbook, and an 88-page instructors guidebook. The products could be researched in the purchase selected by reciters. The information of A Course in Miracles deals with both the academic and also the useful, although request of the manual's product is actually highlighted. The text message is actually primarily academic, and also is actually a basis for the workbook's lessons, which are actually sensible uses. The book has 365 courses, one for every day of the year, though they do not must be done at a speed of one lesson every time. Probably most like the books that recognize to the normal audience from previous knowledge, you are actually asked to utilize the product as directed. Nevertheless, in a departure from the "regular", the viewers is not required to believe what is in the book, or perhaps take it. Not either the workbook nor the Course in Miracles is planned to finish the viewers's learning; merely, the components are a beginning.

 A Course in Miracles compares know-how and also perception; reality is firm and everlasting, while belief is the globe of modification, analysis, and time. The globe of understanding improves the dominant tips in our minds, and maintains our team separate coming from the truth, and different coming from God. Viewpoint is restricted due to the physical body's limitations in the bodily planet, hence limiting awareness. A lot of the encounter of the planet reinforces the self-pride, as well as the individual's splitting up coming from God. But, by approving the vision of Christ, and also the voice of the Holy Spirit, one finds out forgiveness, both for oneself and others.

 On the internet assaults in the neighborhood for A Course in Miracles (ACIM) are actually via the many remarks, quotes and also other postings in which our experts respond to our analysis which then ends up being the reason for our feedback (T-12. All pupils have a fundamental confusion in between kind and also content as effectively as what it implies to sign up with therefore permit's certainly not sugar coat it: Social media is actually forms (forecasted content of the self-pride inappropriate mind) from joining with the wrong thoughts.

 Even in the Course, all of us kick back online along with some form of a digital unit mindlessly doing our ego factor. Okay, some may be standing up, leaning or passing time:

 Kicking back as well as discussing the Course is actually not the same point as doing the challenging work of researching the text as well as placing the guidelines right into method to discover what the Course implies (Kenneth Wapnick, Rules for Decision).

 In the exact same Rules, Wapnick also points out, "What provides the ego its electrical power is your having participated in along with it, your recognition with it." Types are forecasted as a protection against the contrary and also are actually merely with the ego inappropriate thoughts as well as thereby they carry out certainly not matter.

 Because social media is actually all concerning kinds which are actually broken forecasts of the pride, our company are actually after that recognizing the Sonship as broken which brings in the inaccuracy true. Specialness is valued as a beloved put before the Love of God and also those regarded variations preserve the separation in the thoughts. Positively any fragmented feature we evaluate in an additional online (or even anywhere) needs to be viewed with all of the Sonship since we're truly One essentially. That is actually why assault isn't separate and must be relinquished (T-7. VI.1).

 Distinct methods, "Distinct as well as separately different." Due to the fact that it strikes (pieces) the Sonship using variations as an alternative of parity, all attack in any kind is the same and also is actually implied to split the entirety of the Sonship. Our team can find why Wapnick would say that it is ridiculous to use the Course as a weapon when it is actually plainly a Course located in oneness.

 Allow's include pair of other phrase symbol interpretations considering that these are each used throughout the Course:

 Demonstrate: Clearly show the presence or truth of one thing by providing evidence or proof.

Tip: A point that triggers someone to keep in mind something.

 Unloving Reminders

 In the Course, "To show is actually to confirm (M-in.2) and our company are consistently showing, or even confirming the vanity or God every instant, i.e., the material mind with which our company have chosen to join or even recognize. For contrast, the material of the vanity is several projected and also different types; and also the information of the sanity is actually unity, solidarity, i.e., Love (no estimates). There are actually no exceptions. It is actually one or even the other.

 They are the ones who educate us who our team are for our understanding is actually an end result of what we have instructed them (T-9. We taught splitting up or a homicidal attack believed against God and also so our company all show claimed strike in lots of fragmented kinds. If our team forgive our own selves for what we have actually taught (picked) as an alternative of attacking, we discover who we are actually with our siblings that are the very same.

[studiochristensen]

Ideas, Formulas and Shortcuts for Acinetobacter Baumannii

Kids, Work and Acinetobacter Baumannii

Facts, Fiction and Acinetobacter Baumannii

Carbapenem resistance is a significant threat to public wellbeing, he explained. It remains to be determined whether one or more of these agents could have a role inside this clinically important infection. It appears clear that there's compelling evidence behind several usually complimentary but occasionally conflicting approaches, suggesting that several interventions to deal with environmental hygiene might be used simultaneously. www.wdrugs.com

Research is being done to attempt to find better antibiotic choices for these infections. These data emphasize the chance of the spread of this gene in the nation. The new WHO list is an effort to obtain the pharmaceutical industry centered on the bugs which are wreaking the most damage, and encourage governments to determine how to incentivize research.

A tissue biopsy is a fast procedure. Fluid accumulation in the breast is called edema, and it may produce the breast appear inflamed. Normal signals of infection don't always occur. Heat is always valuable for relieving the sharp pain connected with pleurisy. Lymphedema Treatment for lymphedema is dependent upon where it is and the harshness of the swelling.

An epidemic strain is most frequently introduced through an undetected carrier patient. Unfortunately, older antibiotics are somewhat more toxic than current medications and can result in serious side effects. Thomas Sydenham argued that the indications of hysteria will possibly have an organic cause. Patients may also ask their doctor why antibiotics are suggested for certain infections. As a result of multiple comorbidities, seriousness of the disease and remain at ICU, it was challenging to establish the infection associated mortality per se. A number of these infections may respond to older kinds of antibiotics which are rarely used today.

The Tried and True Method for Acinetobacter Baumannii in Step by Step Detail

If you don't understand the directions, ask your pharmacist. Persons utilizing assistive technology may not be in a position to totally access information within this file. Facilities don't want to have the state involved.

The Acinetobacter Baumannii Cover Up

Scientists don't understand how this happens, but they understand that the microbe has many methods to acquire resistance genes. Every time a little subset of bacteria survives antibiotic therapy, an infection can escape control fast. ZOSYN consists of no preservatives. Persister cells are thought to be a component in the recurrence of biofilm-associated infections. Even airborne transmission was suggested. The bacteria lack flagella for motility but instead have quite a few virulence factors like harmful toxins and antimicrobial resistance mechanisms which make it a thriving pathogen. https://www.foodsafety.gov/poisoning/causes/bacteriaviruses/index.html

Atypical pneumonias diffusely impact lung tissues instead of anatomical lobes or lobules. Lipids can likewise be utilized to make ethanol and can be located in such raw materials like algae. The gain in meningitis due to multidrug-resistant (MDR) Acinetobacter baumannii has caused a substantial decrease in available treatment choices. Obesity is understood to be excess adipose tissue. You are more inclined to obtain an infection from Acinetobacter baumannii if you've got a disease like diabetes or COPD.

What Is So Fascinating About Acinetobacter Baumannii?

Results were unexpected and unprecedented dependent on the literature to date. Health care-associated infections (HAI) are among the most popular adverse events in care shipping. Hand hygiene ought to be performed immediately afterward.

Typically, imipenem has become the most active agent against A. baumannii. To sum up, intravenously administered colistin is a powerful choice for the treatment of VAP due to multidrug-resistant A. baumannii. A. baumannii survives for prolonged periods beneath a wide array of environmental problems.

For the exact same reason, it is likewise employed as the active fluid in alcohol thermometers. Wearing gloves does not mitigate the demand for suitable hand hygiene. In the event the fever gets high, the packs could be changed to cold ones. Use towel to switch off the faucet.

Garlic will bring down the temperature together with the pulse and respiration within two days. Purchase an electric temperature probe and make certain all meats are appropriately cooked to temperature before eating. Including a pinch of chilli powder and turmeric can offer extra benefits on account of their antimicrobial propeties. Acinetobacter is a sort of bacteria that may be seen in many sources in the surroundings, including water and soil.

What the In-Crowd Won't Tell You About Acinetobacter Baumannii

Additional practitioners have to ensure that they're using sterile technique with all procedures. This caused self-policing, usually considered the best way for achieving compliance. As in this preceding study, the precise mechanism of resistance in our strain couldn't be determined. This makes it hard to judge the caliber of the clinical sources, which were described as very heterogeneous and with different degrees of validity. But further studies in various transmission settings are needed to rate the functioning of the RealAmp method as compared with other routine diagnostic tests.

The results might be illuminating. These data should be taken into account when designing measures to restrict the spread of MDR A. baumannii. Logistic regression was applied to rate the consequences of therapy on each one of the 3 aforementioned outcomes. Several combinations are tested and the outcomes of the majority of them show synergy and even the capacity to stop drug-resistant strains.

The challenge we face is that numerous VOCs aren't unique to a single pathogen, Ting explained. Patients are put in contact isolation in the event the pathogen was determined to be MDR. Infection is whenever the bacteria has started to result in an infection in it's host.

Ethanol has been shown to stimulate the virulence of A. baumannii. You might need to be put in isolation. Some strains are isolated from foodstuffs. These hospital-adapted' strains of Acinetobacter baumannii are occasionally resistant to a lot of antibiotics and the infections they cause can therefore be hard to treat.

New Questions About Acinetobacter Baumannii

This new test in addition provides a guide in the choice between the exact few remaining treatment choices for infected patients. The changes which should be set in place are simple. The approach has to be multifaceted.

The source of the prior positive isolation and the present admission diagnosis did not influence the length of carriage. The chance of spreading and contamination is high as it can survive on environmental surfaces for lengthy amounts of time a mean of 27 days in healthcare settings with the capacity to survive up to three decades! The physician responsible for the patient decided on the term of treatment.

The potency of cleaning after the individual leaves the area also needs to be evaluated. The people most inclined to be infected are people who are already ill and who've been admitted to the hospital. At home, generally, you need simply to use decent hand hygiene.

Though the damage can be minimized it is essential for doctors to stop the spread of infectious diseases. Supportive care is supplied to the patient to eliminate secretions and enhance gas exchange. Caregivers will clean this region of your back. To start with, the individual ought to be kept on a diet of raw juices for five to ten days, based on the seriousness of the disease.

[thestripedraven-blog]

Second to the table!

About seven months had passed by since I’d hit and killed the cyclist. After the man had been cremated, I received a nice cheque through the post, from my insurance company. I’d also received a sum of money from the man’s family to try and ease the burden of the situation. In no way did they blame me for the accident and if anything, they were feeling guilty of putting me through such an experience. Truth be told, it really didn’t bother me one bit and over the days, weeks and months, i kind of forgot about it but the money received was welcomed. 

I managed to pay of some small debt, purchase myself a newer vehicle and save a friends life. Chris had called me on my mobile phone crying his eyes out, his life was in danger and he didn’t know what to do.

Chris and I had known each other since nursery and had gone through the school system together, we were in the some football team, same drama classes and even joined the army cadets with one another. Our parents used to joke that we were like a married couple. We played the same video games and when online gaming became popular, we would play together when ever we had the time. As we got older, we both had our first sexual experiences in the same night. We were at some random party and we had hooked up with these two girls from out of town. By the end of the night we had grown from boys to men!

The online gaming would continue and so would our weekend partying. We both experienced alcohol together, we were drunk and hung over together. We got to the point were would would see who could sleep with more girls, who could conquer more and as far as i remember, our scores were pretty close if not even. It was at one of these parties that we would meet two girls who introduced us to something that would see our lives go in complete and opposite directions. 

Cocaine. I didn’t really get a buzz and couldn’t see the attraction to the drug especially when I heard from one of the girls how much it costs. “F*ck that!”I thought to myself, I could buy the latest video games with that kind of money. Chris however, loved it. Every Friday and Saturday night he would be somewhere doing cocaine, Friday and Saturday evenings would then stretch to Sundays and before long, I had heard he had lost his job for not showing up. Evidently, he was on a constant cocaine binge or a come down. 

I remember being in a pub one night and bumped in to a friend of Chris who told me he was worried about Chris. He had turned to Heroin and was a right state. Apparently his parents had paid thousands to put him through rehab but as soon as he was out, he would binge again. They would try ‘tough love’ and kicked him out of their home. They didn’t want to see him on the streets so they paid 3 months rent at a property in the less than desirable part of town, hoping this would make him see sense. The truth is, this was paradise for him because he was surrounded by like minded people, scum, and if he wasn’t high, he was asleep. 

The next evening is when I received the phone call from Chris. He told me he had no food, no clothing (apart from what he was wearing), no electricity and no money. I told him to call his parents or sister but they’d all gone on a family holiday to Turkey. I asked him why he had no money and he blurted that he had been stupid and lost his job. He said he was addicted to the drugs and needed help. I thought to my self he’d been to rehab but that wasn’t the help he was looking for. He had literally two hours to find money to pay his dealer otherwise he would get ‘it’. He needed 5 grand. I asked who his dealer was and he mentioned a name that was familiar, low and behold it was one of my brothers’ good friends. Some one i would never have guessed was in the drug business. I told Chris i would be over within the hour with the money, I mean the guy was a childhood friend and i kind of disassociated myself from him when he started participating in drug usage, maybe I should’ve been more pro active. As he was talking, good memories came back to me, from school trips to join family holidays. 

You may be asking yourself who the hell has five grand in cash just ready to dish out? Well, I did because i’d always dreamed of going into a bank and ordering a large sum of cash. It was nothing special. Never the less, I drove to where Chris was living and he met me outside, the idiot never even invited me in for a coffee. Then again, he probably didn’t have any, hell the guy didn’t even have any food. Chris hugged me and said thank you. I looked in his eyes and held him tight, I said “Bro, we’re going to get you better. Sort your shit out and tomorrow we begin to pull you from the hole you’ve dug yourself”

I felt confident. On the way home I decided to pop in and see my brother, who made me the best steak I had ever tasted. I was chilled out and my brother offered me a beer, needless to say, one turned into two and so on. Later in the evening, one of my brothers friends dropped in and handed him a bundle of cash. I knew the guy, it was Chris’s dealer. Without hesitation I asked i Chris had made his payment. 

“What payment?”

What payment? You kidding me? I learnt over the next few minutes that Chris never owed any money, he always paid up front for his drugs. That bundle of cash was mine! I was so outraged that I never even questioned as to why my brother was receiving the cash. How was Chris getting this money? He had nothing to sell any more and no job. Oh, he was playing on peoples emotions! I suddenly sobered up and said good bye to my brother and his friend, speeding off in pure anger.

I arrived at Chris’s resident, ignoring all the rubbish in the hall way. The carpets were stained, cigarette ends were all over the place, the whole premises was filthy and I was pretty sure that I could smell human shit in the living room. That is where Chris was, alone, laying on his sofa and groaning. He didn’t even know I was there. His eyes were glazed and he was on a total different planet. On the floor next to him was a used syringe which I picked up. I looked at the state of the place and decided maybe I should clean up a little and deal with Chris once he slept off his drug induced psychosis. I looked under the kitchen sink for some black trash bags but there was nothing there, just ‘Supa-Kill’ which was a liquid formula to kill rodents. It was industrial strength. Now, you must be thinking why on earth would any one have industrial vermin killer in their kitchen? When a property or small area is this filthy, it attracts vermin such as rats. They feast on left over food and human shit! It’s easier to leave poison out for the vermin than it is to have a little bit of respect for yourself and clean! I guess the reason why Chris hadn’t been eaten alive by the rats was because he used this poison to kill them. 

I looked at the syringe and I looked at the poison. I didn’t think about anything, i automatically plunged the syringe into the side of the container and filled it with the poison. I marched into where Chris was laying and without any hesitation I plunged the needle into his thigh, a vein was still protruding and was an easy target. At least I didn’t have to mess around trying to find a half decent entry point. Chris didn’t even flinch, his eyes were closed and he was still breathing. I went back to the kitchen to collect the poison and administered seven more injections of the poison. Each time, Chris didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes, didn’t flinch, he just snored. I watched him for a while and his breathing became a little shallow, he seemed so peaceful. There was no noise from outside, Chris had stopped snoring, it was beautiful. I waited for him to start jerking around, foaming at his mouth, bleeding from his eyes but there was nothing. He simply just stopped breathing, he didn’t take a deep last breath nor try clinging onto life. What a let down, I had been robbed by Chris earlier on in the evening and had been robbed by him yet again. I wanted him to suffer and he didn’t.

I whipped the syringe down and placed it in his hand and left the poison next to him. I left the property and went home to bed. I didn’t hear anything of his passing until a few days later when I received a call from his somber father. He had no emotion in his voice when he told me Chris had over dosed and passed away, the coroner believed that Chris was so high that he’d injected the poison into his system himself, in a short amount of time. There was no sign of foul play. Months later at his inquest, it was said that his death was caused by an accidental overdose of Heroin and other substances. 

My next entry into this journal will tell you of how I murdered my third victim, the feelings that went through my and why I done it.

#murder #serial killer

[trendingnewsb]

The Real Causes Of Depression Have Been Discovered, And They’re Not What You Think

Across the Western world today, if you are depressed or anxious and you go to your doctor because you just can’t take it anymore, you will likely be told a story. It happened to me when I was a teenager in the 1990s. You feel this way, my doctor said, because your brain isn’t working right. It isn’t producing the necessary chemicals. You need to take drugs, and they will fix your broken brain.

Image credits: iStock

I tried this strategy with all my heart for more than a decade. I longed for relief. The drugs would give me a brief boost whenever I jacked up my dose, but then, soon after, the pain would always start to bleed back through. In the end, I was taking the maximum dose for more than a decade. I thought there was something wrong with me because I was taking these drugs but still feeling deep pain.

In the end, my need for answers was so great that I spent three years using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to research what really causes depression and anxiety, and how to really solve them. I was startled by many things I learned. The first was that my reaction to the drugs wasn’t freakish ― it was quite normal.

“Many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong”

Depression is often measured by scientists using something called the Hamilton Scale. It runs from 0 (where you are dancing in ecstasy) to 59 (where you are suicidal). Improving your sleep patterns gives you a movement on the Hamilton Scale of around 6 points. Chemical antidepressants give you an improvement, on average, of 1.8 points, according to research by professor Irving Kirsch of Harvard University. It’s a real effect – but it’s modest. Of course, the fact it’s an average means some people get a bigger boost. But for huge numbers of people, like me, it’s not enough to lift us out of depression – so I began to see we need to expand the menu of options for depressed and anxious people. I needed to know how.Image credits: iStock

But more than that – I was startled to discover that many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong. I learned that there are in fact nine major causes of depression and anxiety that are unfolding all around us. Two are biological, and seven are out in here in the world, rather than sealed away inside our skulls in the way my doctor told me. The causes are all quite different, and they play out to different degrees in the lives of depressed and anxious people. I was even more startled to discover this isn’t some fringe position – the World Health Organization has been warning for years that we need to start dealing with the deeper causes of depression in this way.

I want to write here about the hardest of those causes for me, personally, to investigate. The nine causes are all different – but this is one that I left, lingering, trying not to look at, for most of my three years of research. I was finally taught about it in San Diego, California, when I met a remarkable scientist named Dr. Vincent Felitti. I have to tell you right at the start though – I found it really painful to investigate this cause. It forced me to reckon with something I had been running from for most of my life. One of the reasons I clung to the theory that my depression was just the result of something going wrong with my brain was, I see now, so I would not have to think about this.

**

The story of Dr. Felitti’s breakthrough stretches back to the mid-1980s, when it happened almost by accident. At first, it’ll sound like this isn’t a story about depression. But it’s worth following his journey – because it can teach us a lot.

When the patients first came into Felitti’s office, some of them found it hard to fit through the door. They were in the most severe stages of obesity, and they were assigned here, to his clinic, as their last chance. Felitti had been commissioned by the medical provider Kaiser Permanente to figure out how to genuinely solve the company’s exploding obesity costs. Start from scratch, they said. Try anything.

One day, Felitti had a maddening simple idea. He asked: What if these severely overweight people simply stopped eating, and lived off the fat stores they’d built up in their bodies – with monitored nutrition supplements – until they were down to a normal weight? What would happen? Cautiously, they tried it, with a lot of medical supervision – and, startlingly, it worked. The patients were shedding weight, and returning to healthy bodies.

“Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable”

But then something strange happened. In the program, there were some stars ― people who shed incredible amounts of weight, and the medical team ― and all their friends ― expected these people to react with joy, but the people who did best were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them became suicidal. Without their bulk, they felt unbelievably vulnerable. They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.

Felitti was baffled ― until he talked with one 28-year-old woman. In 51 weeks, Felitti had taken her down from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. Then ― quite suddenly, for no reason anyone could see ― she put on 37 pounds in the space of a few weeks. Before long, she was back above 400 pounds. So Felitti asked her gently what had changed when she started to lose weight. It seemed mysterious to both of them. They talked for a long time. There was, she said eventually, one thing. When she was obese, men never hit on her ― but when she got down to a healthy weight, for the first time in a long time, she was propositioned by a man. She fled, and right away began to eat compulsively, and she couldn’t stop.

This was when Felitti thought to ask a question he hadn’t asked before. When did you start to put on weight? She thought about the question. When she was 11 years old, she said. So he asked: Was there anything else that happened in your life when you were 11? Well, she replied ― that was when my grandfather began to rape me.

As Felitti spoke to the 183 people in the program, he found 55 percent had been sexually abused. One woman said she put on weight after she was raped because “overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.” It turned out many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them. Felitti suddenly realized: “What we had perceived as the problem ― major obesity ― was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.”

This insight led Felitti to launch a massive program of research, funded by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. He wanted to discover how all kinds of childhood trauma affect us as adults. He administered a simple questionnaire to 17,000 ordinary patients in San Diego, who were were coming just for general health care – anything from a headache to a broken leg. It asked if any of 10 bad things had happened to you as a kid, like being neglected, or emotionally abused. Then it asked if you had any of 10 psychological problems, like obesity or depression or addiction. He wanted to see what the matchup was.

Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable. Childhood trauma caused the risk of adult depression to explode. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult, and more than 4,000 percent more likely to be an injecting drug user.

**

After I had one of my long, probing conversations with Dr. Felitti about this, I walked to the beach in San Diego shaking, and spat into the ocean. He was forcing me to think about a dimension of my depression I did not want to confront. When I was a kid, my mother was ill and my dad was in another country, and in this chaos, I experienced some extreme acts of violence from an adult: I was strangled with an electrical cord, among other acts. I had tried to seal these memories away, to shutter them in my mind. I had refused to contemplate that they were playing out in my adult life.

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hard-core addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. I have a theory – though I want to stress that this next part is going beyond the scientific evidence discovered by Felitti and the CDC, and I can’t say for sure that it’s true.

“If it’s your fault, it’s — at some strange level — under your control”

When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So, you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless ― that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power ― at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. You aren’t a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You’re the person controlling the machine. You have your hands on the dangerous levers. In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s ― at some strange level ― under your control.

Image credits: iStock

But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either. This is no way to live. But it’s a misfiring of the thing that made it possible for you to survive at an earlier point in your life.

**

But it was what Dr. Felitti discovered next that most helped me. When ordinary patients, responding to his questionnaire, noted that they had experienced childhood trauma, he got their doctors to do something when the patients next came in for care. He got them to say something like, “I see you went through this bad experience as a child. I am sorry this happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?”

Felitti wanted to see if being able to discuss this trauma with a trusted authority figure, and being told it was not your fault, would help to release people’s shame. What happened next was startling. Just being able to discuss the trauma led to a huge fall in future illnesses ― there was a 35-percent reduction in their need for medical care over the following year. For the people who were referred to more extensive help, there was a fall of more than 50 percent. One elderly woman ― who had described being raped as a child ― wrote a letter later, saying: “Thank you for asking … I feared I would die, and no one would ever know what had happened.”

The act of releasing your shame is – in itself – healing. So I went back to people I trusted, and I began to talk about what had happened to me when I was younger. Far from shaming me, far from thinking it showed I was broken, they showed love, and helped me to grieve for what I had gone through.

“If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed”

As I listened back over the tapes of my long conversations with Felitti, it struck me that if he had just told people what my doctor told me – that their brains were broken, this was why they were so distressed, and the only solution was to be drugged – they may never have been able to understand the deeper causes of their problem, and they would never have been released from them.

Image credits: iStock

The more I investigated depression and anxiety, the more I found that, far from being caused by a spontaneously malfunctioning brain, depression and anxiety are mostly being caused by events in our lives. If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you are lonely and feel that you can’t rely on the people around you to support you, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think life is all about buying things and climbing up the ladder, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think your future will be insecure, you are far more likely to become depressed. I started to find a whole blast of scientific evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused in our skulls, but by the way many of us are being made to live. There are real biological factors, like your genes, that can make you significantly more sensitive to these causes, but they are not the primary drivers.

And that led me to the scientific evidence that we have to try to solve our depression and anxiety crises in a very different way (alongside chemical anti-depressants, which should of course remain on the table).

To do that, we need to stop seeing depression and anxiety as an irrational pathology, or a weird misfiring of brain chemicals. They are terribly painful – but they make sense. Your pain is not an irrational spasm. It is a response to what is happening to you. To deal with depression, you need to deal with its underlying causes. On my long journey, I learned about seven different kinds of anti-depressants – ones that are about stripping out the causes, rather than blunting the symptoms. Releasing your shame is only the start.

**

One day, one of Dr. Felitti’s colleagues, Dr. Robert Anda, told me something I have been thinking about ever since.

When people are behaving in apparently self-destructive ways, “it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”

More info: Johann’s Book

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The Real Causes Of Depression Have Been Discovered, And They’re Not What You Think

Across the Western world today, if you are depressed or anxious and you go to your doctor because you just can’t take it anymore, you will likely be told a story. It happened to me when I was a teenager in the 1990s. You feel this way, my doctor said, because your brain isn’t working right. It isn’t producing the necessary chemicals. You need to take drugs, and they will fix your broken brain.

Image credits: iStock

I tried this strategy with all my heart for more than a decade. I longed for relief. The drugs would give me a brief boost whenever I jacked up my dose, but then, soon after, the pain would always start to bleed back through. In the end, I was taking the maximum dose for more than a decade. I thought there was something wrong with me because I was taking these drugs but still feeling deep pain.

In the end, my need for answers was so great that I spent three years using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to research what really causes depression and anxiety, and how to really solve them. I was startled by many things I learned. The first was that my reaction to the drugs wasn’t freakish ― it was quite normal.

“Many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong”

Depression is often measured by scientists using something called the Hamilton Scale. It runs from 0 (where you are dancing in ecstasy) to 59 (where you are suicidal). Improving your sleep patterns gives you a movement on the Hamilton Scale of around 6 points. Chemical antidepressants give you an improvement, on average, of 1.8 points, according to research by professor Irving Kirsch of Harvard University. It’s a real effect – but it’s modest. Of course, the fact it’s an average means some people get a bigger boost. But for huge numbers of people, like me, it’s not enough to lift us out of depression – so I began to see we need to expand the menu of options for depressed and anxious people. I needed to know how.Image credits: iStock

But more than that – I was startled to discover that many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong. I learned that there are in fact nine major causes of depression and anxiety that are unfolding all around us. Two are biological, and seven are out in here in the world, rather than sealed away inside our skulls in the way my doctor told me. The causes are all quite different, and they play out to different degrees in the lives of depressed and anxious people. I was even more startled to discover this isn’t some fringe position – the World Health Organization has been warning for years that we need to start dealing with the deeper causes of depression in this way.

I want to write here about the hardest of those causes for me, personally, to investigate. The nine causes are all different – but this is one that I left, lingering, trying not to look at, for most of my three years of research. I was finally taught about it in San Diego, California, when I met a remarkable scientist named Dr. Vincent Felitti. I have to tell you right at the start though – I found it really painful to investigate this cause. It forced me to reckon with something I had been running from for most of my life. One of the reasons I clung to the theory that my depression was just the result of something going wrong with my brain was, I see now, so I would not have to think about this.

**

The story of Dr. Felitti’s breakthrough stretches back to the mid-1980s, when it happened almost by accident. At first, it’ll sound like this isn’t a story about depression. But it’s worth following his journey – because it can teach us a lot.

When the patients first came into Felitti’s office, some of them found it hard to fit through the door. They were in the most severe stages of obesity, and they were assigned here, to his clinic, as their last chance. Felitti had been commissioned by the medical provider Kaiser Permanente to figure out how to genuinely solve the company’s exploding obesity costs. Start from scratch, they said. Try anything.

One day, Felitti had a maddening simple idea. He asked: What if these severely overweight people simply stopped eating, and lived off the fat stores they’d built up in their bodies – with monitored nutrition supplements – until they were down to a normal weight? What would happen? Cautiously, they tried it, with a lot of medical supervision – and, startlingly, it worked. The patients were shedding weight, and returning to healthy bodies.

“Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable”

But then something strange happened. In the program, there were some stars ― people who shed incredible amounts of weight, and the medical team ― and all their friends ― expected these people to react with joy, but the people who did best were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them became suicidal. Without their bulk, they felt unbelievably vulnerable. They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.

Felitti was baffled ― until he talked with one 28-year-old woman. In 51 weeks, Felitti had taken her down from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. Then ― quite suddenly, for no reason anyone could see ― she put on 37 pounds in the space of a few weeks. Before long, she was back above 400 pounds. So Felitti asked her gently what had changed when she started to lose weight. It seemed mysterious to both of them. They talked for a long time. There was, she said eventually, one thing. When she was obese, men never hit on her ― but when she got down to a healthy weight, for the first time in a long time, she was propositioned by a man. She fled, and right away began to eat compulsively, and she couldn’t stop.

This was when Felitti thought to ask a question he hadn’t asked before. When did you start to put on weight? She thought about the question. When she was 11 years old, she said. So he asked: Was there anything else that happened in your life when you were 11? Well, she replied ― that was when my grandfather began to rape me.

As Felitti spoke to the 183 people in the program, he found 55 percent had been sexually abused. One woman said she put on weight after she was raped because “overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.” It turned out many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them. Felitti suddenly realized: “What we had perceived as the problem ― major obesity ― was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.”

This insight led Felitti to launch a massive program of research, funded by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. He wanted to discover how all kinds of childhood trauma affect us as adults. He administered a simple questionnaire to 17,000 ordinary patients in San Diego, who were were coming just for general health care – anything from a headache to a broken leg. It asked if any of 10 bad things had happened to you as a kid, like being neglected, or emotionally abused. Then it asked if you had any of 10 psychological problems, like obesity or depression or addiction. He wanted to see what the matchup was.

Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable. Childhood trauma caused the risk of adult depression to explode. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult, and more than 4,000 percent more likely to be an injecting drug user.

**

After I had one of my long, probing conversations with Dr. Felitti about this, I walked to the beach in San Diego shaking, and spat into the ocean. He was forcing me to think about a dimension of my depression I did not want to confront. When I was a kid, my mother was ill and my dad was in another country, and in this chaos, I experienced some extreme acts of violence from an adult: I was strangled with an electrical cord, among other acts. I had tried to seal these memories away, to shutter them in my mind. I had refused to contemplate that they were playing out in my adult life.

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hard-core addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. I have a theory – though I want to stress that this next part is going beyond the scientific evidence discovered by Felitti and the CDC, and I can’t say for sure that it’s true.

“If it’s your fault, it’s — at some strange level — under your control”

When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So, you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless ― that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power ― at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. You aren’t a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You’re the person controlling the machine. You have your hands on the dangerous levers. In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s ― at some strange level ― under your control.

Image credits: iStock

But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either. This is no way to live. But it’s a misfiring of the thing that made it possible for you to survive at an earlier point in your life.

**

But it was what Dr. Felitti discovered next that most helped me. When ordinary patients, responding to his questionnaire, noted that they had experienced childhood trauma, he got their doctors to do something when the patients next came in for care. He got them to say something like, “I see you went through this bad experience as a child. I am sorry this happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?”

Felitti wanted to see if being able to discuss this trauma with a trusted authority figure, and being told it was not your fault, would help to release people’s shame. What happened next was startling. Just being able to discuss the trauma led to a huge fall in future illnesses ― there was a 35-percent reduction in their need for medical care over the following year. For the people who were referred to more extensive help, there was a fall of more than 50 percent. One elderly woman ― who had described being raped as a child ― wrote a letter later, saying: “Thank you for asking … I feared I would die, and no one would ever know what had happened.”

The act of releasing your shame is – in itself – healing. So I went back to people I trusted, and I began to talk about what had happened to me when I was younger. Far from shaming me, far from thinking it showed I was broken, they showed love, and helped me to grieve for what I had gone through.

“If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed”

As I listened back over the tapes of my long conversations with Felitti, it struck me that if he had just told people what my doctor told me – that their brains were broken, this was why they were so distressed, and the only solution was to be drugged – they may never have been able to understand the deeper causes of their problem, and they would never have been released from them.

Image credits: iStock

The more I investigated depression and anxiety, the more I found that, far from being caused by a spontaneously malfunctioning brain, depression and anxiety are mostly being caused by events in our lives. If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you are lonely and feel that you can’t rely on the people around you to support you, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think life is all about buying things and climbing up the ladder, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think your future will be insecure, you are far more likely to become depressed. I started to find a whole blast of scientific evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused in our skulls, but by the way many of us are being made to live. There are real biological factors, like your genes, that can make you significantly more sensitive to these causes, but they are not the primary drivers.

And that led me to the scientific evidence that we have to try to solve our depression and anxiety crises in a very different way (alongside chemical anti-depressants, which should of course remain on the table).

To do that, we need to stop seeing depression and anxiety as an irrational pathology, or a weird misfiring of brain chemicals. They are terribly painful – but they make sense. Your pain is not an irrational spasm. It is a response to what is happening to you. To deal with depression, you need to deal with its underlying causes. On my long journey, I learned about seven different kinds of anti-depressants – ones that are about stripping out the causes, rather than blunting the symptoms. Releasing your shame is only the start.

**

One day, one of Dr. Felitti’s colleagues, Dr. Robert Anda, told me something I have been thinking about ever since.

When people are behaving in apparently self-destructive ways, “it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”

More info: Johann’s Book

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2EpSOXE via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ