Study of Bush’s psyche touches a nerve - The Guardian: more about Bush’s “Dry-Drunk” Syndrome discussed here before.

‘But what drives the psychologists? George Will, a Washington Post columnist who has long suffered from ingrained conservatism, noted, tartly: “The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses.” ‘

My friend Jon is a nice looking bloke - indeed he’s a nice bloke. Genuine and down to earth he is also intelligent, and knows it, but uneducated, and knows that too. He’s also a greedy pig.

I was in my bed for ten minutes having a rest, whilst wiling away the time contemplating the chocolate eclair he offered. They had been two boxes for the price of one, four eclairs for a quid. Eventually I gave in to my desire and got up.

In the lounge I found Jon lost in how to learn assembly language web sites at the computer and two empty eclair boxes on the table. He is a greedy pig.

I’ve been running since forever. Running and running and running. Running away from things and running towards others. Running away from people and places only to run into others, of course.

I can’t stop, you see. It’s how I survived the abuse. Yet I know I have to stop, and in doing so that I will ‘remember’ the rest of what was done to me as a kid. It’s shit - knowing you have to go further into darkness before you can emerge into the light.

Yet emerging into the light, shaking off the last of the psychic scar-tissue wrought in the screams and supressed rage and sadness and hate of my childhood - these things I know I must do. I must do them for myself, but that is transitory. I must do them for others, which is a part of my path as a Buddhist. And, I must do them for I made a pact with the universe to do so. That was before I was a Buddhist but after I was an atheist. It’s the same as the Bhodhisattva vow.

Yet I can’t do it. I can’t stop. I have forgotten how to sit, how to meditate. I used to know how but I am scared to do it. I am scared to remember, to heal, to be healed. I am scared of the void that appears in my mind when I try to think in positive terms about the future. There is nothing there.

Except to find a partner and have kids and get enlightened. Which is a nice impossible dream that keeps me running …

The food thrown out in New York’s garbage today will fill huge holes in the ground. If only our economic system worked. It could have fed the holes in the bellies of the thirty thousand children who will starve today. They are the roadkill of late stage capitalist economics. Enjoy your burger?

At many stages in the recovery process for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse there is great doubt. This is perhaps particularly hieghtened for those who are not certain of the memories or have no certain memories at all. It is useful to recognise that perfectly normal and healthy repsonses to trauma are at work.

The human animal holds memories at bay from the conscious mind when the original events could not be processed and made sense of. In cases of extreme trauma such as sexual abuse memories and whole periods of time can be lost from conscious access as a protection mechanism.

When you start to approach a point of development where you can deal with this stuff it often comes back. For some people this is in big chunks and for others it is speck by speck. Often before memories start resurfacing to allow the trauma to be processed there is a period where the survivor starts asking “was I abused?” or “am I repressing memories”?” or somesuch. The chances are, if you are asking yourself these or similar questions, that the answer is yes.

The mechanisms of protection which have held painful truths at bay are starting to let them through. You will experience great doubt about many things at this stage including your own sanity. It is important to remember that forgetting and remembering are sane mechanisms at work. You won’t remember what you can not deal with.

At first don’t believe everything that comes into your mind. There is no need to solidify and fix things. Let the memories come in their own time as they will do so when you can cope with them. If you try to rush or force things this often backfires. You can end up having partial or false recollection which lets you know something happened but shields you from the full truth. Relax and let time be your friend and ally on this: as you grow stronger and more able to deal with your truth, you will remember it.

This place is not big enough for the number of threads that run here. I have decided to seperate things. A new site enjoyyourburger.com has been created. Some of you may have noticed I started signing of with ‘enjoy your burger’. The more political campaigning stuff is going to move over there. This site will become more Dhamma, and Buddhist. The personal will go somewhere else. Somewhere public but not here.

As the internet unleashes truth wherever it goes, the streets become more and more unreasonable. This is the sign of the end of an age: On the edges a new age based on deeper understanding emerges whilst the greatest victims of the old one suffer breakdown at it’s demise.

Civilisations rise and fall, times change, but many things remain the same. This civilisation, as we have come to know it, must surely be approaching a radical realignment of values. This is because civilisations are divergent whilst truth is not.

Once in a while a civilisation moves so far from truth that discontinuous change occurs: a revoltution; a breakdown; a collapse; or a fundamental reassesment of values that leads to radically different ways of doing things, a re-alignment with reality. If ever a civilisation needed a reality check it is ours today. Around the world, thirty thousand kids will starve today and hundreds of thousands be beaten up, raped, abused, forced to work.

Elsewhere on the planet millions will bask in relative affluence while the “cream of society” will gloat in abundant abhorent wealth. This affluence and wealth is itself leaching the planet dry, let alone starving the rest. To think the rest can come to our standards is to be as foolish as proposing we lower our quality of life to theirs. Neither is possible or desirable.

“Enough is enough” must become the motto of economics. In a world where our manifest destinies are so inextricably entwined with each others we must take care of our neighbour. We must do so if we are to ever establish a peaceful world. “Enough is enough” is about each persons needs being met, not by “markets”, nor by “the system”, but by themselves. When each person takes enough and does not gather and hoard more there will be enough for all to prosper.

For though we may like to think of ourselves as prosperous, in the long run, we will be seen as profligate. Our great grand children will hate us for what we are doing to the planet. Can you handle that? Can you handle that America throws away more food each day than Ethiopians eat in a year. Enjoy your burger.

It seems bizarre in the extreme for me, a man who paid plenty of tax when I was able and working. Strange that doctors wish to save £500 by not investigating matters in a timely fashion. Not only could they have solved my physical problems two years ago but saved the state some £35,360 in benefits and what will now be tens or hundreds of thousands to patch me up. All because the first people I saw at Newham “University” Hospital had no clue and … etc The Rest Is History …

I didn’t grow up thinking of myself as a victim. Just as ’strange’, unusual, clever. I didn’t remember the abuse. I always had certain unusual talents particularly the arts of the mind. I mean sciences, of course. My physics teacher, when I was fourteen took me to one side and said if I worked at the subject he felt I had an unusual talent in the science. He said he thought I “could be one of the top three physicists in the world” by the time I was twenty one. I was, he said a genius.

It was a bit of a head*uck, but my head was so messed up anyway - it did not really phase me. Shortly thereafter my best friend, Michael, was killed. He was run over by a car driven by my brother and in which I was the front seat passenger. We had been in the pub together. His brother Larry ran up to the side window of the car and screamed you’ve “killed my *ucking brother”.

In any case I was at that stage in time shattered into several key personalities and god only knows how many fragmentary parts. The sexual abuse made sure of that. At age one to age seven multiple abusers took their toll on my sanity. It has been hard work growing up which is only something I started doing when I gave up trying to fit in in a world which made no sense. I decided to find out who I was.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. It was six years before I remembered being abused and only then after I had calmed my mind with meditation. Then I was strong enough to start to put the pieces of the puzzle back together. To re-live each horrific experience and integrate its’s aftermath, it’s trauma. The last four years I have well documented here before.

Being raped by two teachers age seven is the last act of penetrative violence I remember. I don’t know if I am still repressing other later or earlier incidences. I know I don’t know everything yet. I know I am still not whole, have still not solved the puzzle.

Letting go can sometimes be hard and sometimes be easy. It all depends on how attached you are to your ideas. For quite a while I hosted freedomforall.net on a free package with the domain name seller I used to purchase the domain. With only 10Mb of storage I often had to let go of whole chunks of my efforts to make way for the new. Occassionally there was a slight heart wrenching as I would watch a piece of writing I particularly valued fall off the end.

Today I added commenting by haloscan to the site, exploring options as I try and move from Blogger to Moveable Type as my publishing tool. I don’t like Blogger anymore because it is not flexible enough. I want to add a list on the sidebar of all previous posts and blogger won’t do it. I want to do this because when I did it manually for a while people found more they wanted to read and stayed longer. Visitors read three times the number of pages per visit when I provided them with this easy way to find stuff.

And now I discover that by installing haloscan I have had to let go of all previouse comments because haloscan can’t import them from blogger. I liked the comments. There was useful feedback and some interesting writing therein. So if you have commented and you find it has dissappeared, accept my appologies, and join me in letting go.