"For the life of me
I cannot remember
what made us think that we were wise
and we'd never compromise"

- "The Freshmen", performed by The Verve Pipe.

Again, this page just documents my past. In the first time I thought I had things all figured out, I would had never believed how much I could have lost track of good stuff amidst drawing a continual utter blank that had me longing for all I had known, instead of looking ahead. I feel I have more bases covered now.

Of course, how I lived was almost bound to make me a bit socially inept, but surely not to such the extent I began to feel. Being typically wary and overcautious (a Neich family failing to a degree, I think), I then let myself become so deluded and confused, that I quite absurdly did wonder if my cerebral palsy had indeed affected my intellectual capacity and my empathetic ability, which only manifested now that I was an adult. Something had gone deadly wrong. As a child, I would wonder what it was like to be intellectually disabled. Were such people still aware of their limitations? As I grew, an emotional capacity began to seem much more important than intellect. Both intellectual disability and autism can occur with those who have cerebral palsy - I've seen it myself in some schools I've attended. I've pondered as to what kind of awareness those kids have had of their own circumstances. I've asked what kind of world would that be. Would they know? Would I know if that actually was my situation ...

This page twists towards the end, in that, I come to document the way I react as reminiscent of what I believe I've been at the receiving end of.

"Independence" began to feel nothing but cold ... I wanted nothing to do with it if I had just seen what it could do to others. I ended up avoiding investigating and organising any disabled services I could well need in preparation for independent living (as I used to really look forward to as a crip when growing up).

There was enough in my life making it hard for me to relax and physically get things done.

Forgive if some of this subject material on many of my webpages is a bit awkward to read about in passing - I try to maintain that there is other content here as well that is worthy, and becomes well articulated in these circumstances. I'm nonetheless still not so sure that anyone will have the patience to read all this page, but I hope it can also serve as going towards an apology to those in my life who have wanted the very best for me, and who have wanted to mutually share in life with me, and all I ever did was act in a way similar to those I've remained very preoccupied over trying to come to terms with. I could have been there for many, when I was not.

When "independence" is revealed as being the strangest form of it that I have ever known, is sadly bourne out of mistrust, is excessive, and runs cold ...

I am at odds with my own "slick" presentation of this, given the very solumn nature of what I'm trying to hold the interest of any readers long enough to have them understand.

My experiences were minor against many wider perspectives, and in a "relationship" more often than not declared to be very casual. Feel free to ignore my own pretty self-inflicted particular disaster. One can read what has been put on this page to perhaps gain insight into a variation of what people other than me go through.

A fraction of the neurobiology possibly involved in how people can become too disillusioned to make the most sensible of changes, as easily as they would otherwise, is interspersed through this page. In simple terms, I think it's as though one becomes far too adept at spending all their energy on clinging onto defenses because it feels like nothing else left has proved reliable anymore.

Do counsellors go over the possible neurobiology involved as thoroughly as they perhaps could with some clients, or is it mostly about building up as much esteem from thin air when you've just bourne the brunt of someone who acts as though they've got too much esteem anyhow? The last thing you want is to become like the person who has behaved so confusingly towards you in the first place, yet that is just so damned hard to articulate as a real concern.

Conversely, I found it daunting to look at the lost ground in areas of my life, and face what was needed for me to catch-up on. Thoughts of having to prove capabilities that I worked so hard at successfully before were conflicting with all I had grown to understand about not having to feel so on trial. I was overwrought grappling with knowing what I still needed to summon all the energy that I could for, and what I could afford leave as having no consequence anymore. To relegate this all down to just being an esteem issue, can be very disheartening in a time of such dispair. I had just had enough gung-ho antics in life. I couldn't stomach using any more to claim how I could get on my feet again. I was stalled in a fear based on many presumptions that help would be just as likely to make matters worse.

In the course of learning about what I needed more grounding in, a healthier esteem seemed to develop incidentally along with what I trust now to be a solid basis in the understanding that I acquired.

I'm also trying to offer an understanding in lieu of being able to reach out, but moreover, as I write familiar with the circumstances under which words have been taken, it only makes me wish for even more calming to be conveyed. Three months after writing this has left me suitably embarrassed since I've opened up and begun to see more of the world again, and more of what others face in life.

Please understand that if all this presentation seems at odds with all I say that I want to catch up on, I too have qualms with how self-contradictory this might all be. I still couldn't seem to win back and focus my concentration on other things easily. I thought I kept uncovering features I had to review again once I seemed psychologically able. I was also concerned that I would forget what did recur amidst any further impending depression. I was scared that more depression would have increased in likelihood of manifesting if I just went ahead as before with life regardless. Was this all an excuse? I have been working with an incessant need to have this writing all down properly and responsibly whilst trying to convince myself that I've done such processing and can feel safe from having all this relegated into the background. I was once able to have such an attitude in geting on with life before, and am determined to reinstate and retain this ability to get on with what really matters beyond my own life again.

My Undoing : Click to a briefing of increasing texture and reconsolidation, depending on the initial approach
(this gets tedious as one page of many on the same subject, but was great for those who just wanted a succinct finalising summary without necessarily reading the rest AND before I expanded on some of it even more below ; also in retrospect, I think another page called "Within" doesn't finish off as making me sound like such a bloody frail little bimboid ... )

Well worn and still dribbling occasionally : A shorter version of a page that may help bring those interested, up to speed (recommended only and less and less for those who are new to my websites and want some background; continuing with reading this page should be more than sufficient)

Proceed on instead to the original main menu about my wider background of personal thoughts without reading on below ...

I began writing this page as just an abridged version of another, and once again give way to what just becomes a source of embarrassment at other various times :

Although I know that I have plenty of reasons to relax about things working for the best, the excitement in organizing my independent living was entirely lost for the terror of falling into a screaming heap over a person that my mind had unnervingly convinced itself to completely associate with such matters. When we met, I was on the periphery of what was his life's vocation - improving the life and rights of disabled people like ourselves ... This contributed to frustrated tears at how my younger adulthood became pretty wrecked ... it went nothing like I once believed it would go ... I had grown up working so hard to overcome a lot in trying to get things underway. Instead, I allowed some of my most basic of skills, the ones that most everyone needs, to deteriorate to the point that left me so apparently vacant ... I was not in a state to follow anything through. I had reached a state of thinking where it seemed all the hard work and "independence" in the world would still become meaningless, if along the way, I had somehow lost my ability to love, to care, to feel. I believed that I had just seen how that could happen. But I was being unreasonable and vowed all too much like a caricature that I would rather waste away and die than end up treating people terribly when they got near. If that's what my life was going to be like, I couldn't see any point - I never needed one before - and it certainly was out of the question for me to get all religious or mystical to compensate ... I just didn't want to end up latching onto whatever was convenient in that state I was in. I didn't feel I had grounds anymore to know how to take any advice shooting at me from all angles. Neither did I want to end up only disrupting or challenging whatever it was that many loving people around me seemed to need in life. It took some time before I could live through this phase. Life has continued to involve a bit of a toss up in trying to just go along with what I could without opening cans of worms, either consciously or inadvertently, and thus further risking not being able to get on with pressing matters. Although I now think I really can grow from this, it was hard never knowing how much to look into what happened, just to carry on with my own unfinished studies instead. Crazily, it felt as if all I could do was carry on with writing to hopefully make it more likely that my droning on will be read long enough to see that there is a gentler context that I wish would be taken above all else. I think, at last, writing has helped decrease what became a very disturbing sudden reactivity towards daily triggers of conflicting emotional extremes in my otherwise subdued memory ... [augmented with sections from an older page found at "My Undoing", as also noted elsewhere on this page].

From a different and relatively more formal angle also taken up later on this page and over a few years of pulling a bit of it together for myself, some material that is readily accessible online describes what I ended up venturing into further, very well :

"Repeated uncontrollable stress can sensitize the sympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight system). Sensitization is the opposite of desensitization. Ideally, when you're exposed to an anxiety-provoking situation repeatedly, you become calmer about it-usually when you approach the situation in gradual, graded steps (e.g., giving speeches to increasingly large audiences). In the face of overwhelming stress, however, the opposite can happen; you can become more reactive to stress rather than less so. This is the "last straw" effect: a small stressor can set off a large reaction if your nervous system is sensitized. You may be criticized for "making mountains out of molehills" ... Thus part of recovering from trauma is desensitizing yourself by coming to terms with the trauma and learning emotion-regulation strategies..."

Coping with Trauma
Jon G. Allen, The Menninger Clinic [http://www.menningerclinic.com/
resources/staff-articles.htm]

I have also seen, and related to others, who speak of a continual and gradual wearing down that one doesn't notice until it's too late. However, I don't know now if that's just pop-psychology that suits my views. I'd suggest that repeated stress of an erratic nature would keep progressively wearing a person down, and I hope this doesn't sound just too convenient to advance.

Learning a bit more specifically about the exaggerated hyperstartle response really helped me, and this is what I discuss much later on towards the end of this page with ramifications as possibly having some effect.

It gets far too tempting to give into making broad and sweeping claims that any quick internet search on disabled women would soon yield up discussion on how vulnerable and susceptable to abuse we are. It would supposedly reveal how activists are crying out for how research and more data are needed on this. I've skimmed papers at the websites of The UK Disability Forum for European Affairs (UKDFfEA) Women's Committee and Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA). From my simplistic cursory glimpses in merely an afternoon, I saw it commonly suggested that supported independent living initiatives would be a likely way that women could escape abuse, namely at times from institutional and family carers as well as partners. This I don't doubt is an extremely vital concern to explore remedies for. It is recommended that supported independent living agencies are seen by shelter and refuge groups as points to liason with.

I've been close to where I have known of such agencies admirably making it possible for women to leave terribly bad situations.

I'm not being very disciplined at this point in what I say here at all, but am alluding to what had felt like such a cruel, twisted and painful irony to me where someone involved in this very work could not see what was happening within a dynamic that was so much closer. He just would not be able to accept how emotionally hard this was for me, but this was out of a naivity and an immaturity we both shared at the time.

Knowing this may help in understanding how the magnitude of my reactions to what I say I went through, along with other totally unrelated stressful reasons, just seem so pathetic and silly in the larger scheme of things. I feel I'm writing about how emotionally difficult some circumstances can become, not at all about anything intentionally meant to be emotionally abusive - there certainly was not anything delibrately done to cause harm - just a lot of hurt on all sides which I think was systematic enough to raise a more generally applicable concern about.

I accept if my own case must sound a pretty contrite situation indicative of youthful ideas, dreams, schemes and exuberance gone very awry. It could well be difficult to consume as if the matter is as deadly serious in retrospect. However, it did matter once to me as a big part of my life and has contributed to my continual development as a person.

This repititious rant is worked into more sense further down on this page after the contents of what is written in this red box. There is absolutely no way I'd have such accounts open in the public domain if these were simply about a relationship demise. I hate how that's probably what these seem at times. There is a tinge of this when I do try to indicate that there was a depth to my thoughts that I found hard to articulate afterwards. Those then helping me were not in a position to nurture the sounder rationales I tried to employ before. It was as if these never occurred to me as these did, even if such rationales did need review and reworking. I just let what I could have still grown from, be thrown out with the bathwater.

When you're told - by such a well-backed exponent of what the most underestimated of people are actually capable of - that you don't know what it's like to care for another, and don't know what love is, and don't know what life is until you've lived like this other person who you've known much more personally than he says most have, given as much space as possible over a ten year period of watching him come and go without explanation, taken him in at times when he's really been broken down and has said that no one else understands, have withstood sudden rages at the simplest of crossed-wires and shouldered any part of the blame necessary to placate, and thought any weakening of one's own character just showed how right he was and that I had absolutely failed in my own strivings for independence and in my own life ...

... all this waffly shit seeps into your own mind ...

Going by his responses, it was really scaring the life out of me to think that I was trying to clamp down so much on someone else's way of living and thinking. It seemed that I had become everything that thoroughly infuriated me, and I could not get it through as to how acutely alert I was as to how controlling and unfair on others that could be. My life as seen from the surface just did not indicate the depth of being as close to the issues as I had been all my life. I was just becoming mature enough to deal with how this involves others more quietly, assuredly, and without a sledgehammer. This latter approach was starting to pay off big dividends, but I can only claim that the time to reap the returns was thoroughly disrupted in it's fledging infancy due to my own devastating confusion that amassed. I still struggle with how well I think I had my life coming along up until that stage. Others just have no concept of what I believe I lost ground in - I once worked so hard in order to build trust in others, and I've been a relative clueless, helpless and hopeless shell since. I can't really forgive myself for this. I languished down to nothing. I knew all too well of what he had such a violent aversion to, and towards the end I guess he just thought I was dumb and gutless. I would have thought the same. There was no way I would have allowed another to become that involved with me if I really was such a drain after all. It looked as if that was always going to be the case. I think I became so much of a useless flop, because the issue of living our own lives at that age had still been so dear to my heart. I hated and was disgusted by myself.

 At my weakest point, when he said I hadn't lived yet and hadn't loved yet, it felt as if all my life that I was dying to let him share in for all those years since we met, meant entirely nothing. He could always say that he was trying to encourage me to live a good life. The room spun as I once read him in the paper saying that some attitudes in society towards him, implied to him that no one thought his own life had any quality. He is the only person in this world from which I've eventually taken such a message that my life had been worthless to my heart at a depth unexplicable. That is, when angered, it came across clearly that that was how he saw my own life, irrespective of how similar attitudes had caused him so much pain.

Words to convey how this cumulated in so much of a sickly confusion will never do.

The hurt felt like a death.

I tried hard to not take it as I did, but, evidently, what I was giving meant nothing, was of no value (I never thought about life in such terms before listening to what he always had to say regarding "value"), and then slowly the realization in retrospect came upon me that maybe the man involved was hurting far too much in his own way for me to reach. That's by far much more painful to resolve along with all the emotions I've been through as a result of knowing him, rather than just parting company. I couldn't just discard what I think I had some understanding of, notwithstanding the fear of being patronizing with misguided pity, or with the fear of my state being only a sheer inability to accept that my feelings were never reciprocated. There was more I just could not dispel at such a stage.

... intellect wasn't enough to guard against what was said by who I once perceived as the best placed man there was, for all I could see, to really imply that I could never be the person for anyone in a way that I was even too afraid to admit that I could ever want to be. Moreover, with all else in life, it was seeming to me too that I just could not seem to function. The words exchanged still upset me when I allow these to.

Feelings throughout my own life have often not been believed - that is usually just par for the course, and something to accept and get on with.

Much of our lives seemed so similar, as were our thoughts on what we had experienced. I realise now that I had been continuously going over some matters in my mind that I felt were on the verge of being understood by him, but not quite, and which I thought could possibly open up quite a world for both of us to explore further. There were numerous sudden rages when I was actually in agreement or even in glee at his thoughts that rang very true. Then he wouldn't accept that I meant absolutely no harm. Therefore, increasingly I tried to make the most of every example that occurred to illustrate whatever I was attempting to express at the time. I became dreadfully conscious that I could really end up forcing matters. To start with though, it was almost an application of my usual tendancies to turn any current source of perceived animosity into the calm that I thought it could be. I wasn't just being naively optimistic, but was up against someone I believed would relate, even in negation, much more reasonably than he actually could. I was wearing down. I had taken having a mutual responsibility for relating for granted. I think he could say whatever he liked without feeling so bound, and I hung onto every favourable utterance that came forth.

Was I always just far too fucked up, and destined to always be? I let it always come back to my lack of "independence", and he always could too. How the hell was I to recognize and not fall for anyone like that again? He presented himself being as what I really do admire and what I really could relate to. I was thoroughly sick of just sounding like such a whiney overgrown teenaged girl wondering what had kept going so wrong.

Earlier on, the many questions I now see as superfluous and naive and which had me feeling like such a stupid bimbo, would echo away like mad incessantly in my head. Although I was forever trying to iron out irritating misunderstandings that I believed could almost be made consistent if I were patient enough, the most basic form of these questions were hard to put away towards the end ...

Had he not understood how my life actually did espouse all that his did too, but just in a different way and with a big long-term investment still reliably pending at that stage? Couldn't he had just let things end a lot more respectfully? Were allusions to the grief and delays he knew I went through, just lip-service? Had he not even tried to listen to me at all? Had he thought absolutely nothing of me and all that I tried so hard to be patient with?

It was then when he so aggressively went off, still proclaiming publically how much disabled people like us need to feel more valued in our society than what we appear to be. Today, I realise now, how I think he has always apparently picked himself up from his very formidible downfalls in life so quickly. I used to do it too. I remember myself as a teenager claiming so much that I had to be so strong, and just could not afford to have anyone dragging me down. This thought has merit with every Tom, Dick and Harry thinking that you just can't handle a thing. The response can become automatic though, preventing just what is a natural growth in emotional subtlety, and the latter can become just as managable.

It is still with sorrow that I think I've come to understand more of what I have glimpsed and what is usually so vehemently occluded from view. This man wants to give a better life to others just so much. My interpretation at this point largely just has to be left, I can't express more of it with detached words.

My sorrow I think, has something to do with what I had been trying to give. It was not pity, and it was never meant to be a competitive threat. It was very far from that indeed. The more practical and tangible ramifications of a relationship would have actually depended on each of us to decide together on the continuing form. I wouldn't dare impose a frame already set, upon someone else. This seemed to be the fear, but I now understand matters as more layered. There were just so many ways of doing things which I felt at the time were never given a chance. In my haste to put things forward, I always came up with ridiculous joking in order to ease in to what I had really wanted to discuss. I think I eventually became too run down to keep trying. It seems my intention to always gently offer an out through humour as equally as anything else, was taken when it suited him, as adding to the notion that I had no grasp on reality.

He said he had contemplated a future with me at times, and it was one thing he never confided in me with as to what he could have taken into account when he always glibly went onto say it would never work. I'd accept his right to such reticence to a large degree, but it was hard since he confided in me with so much else, more than I expected a casual relationship to entail, and I've known so many of his opinions to change. I was right there, when a lot of his circumstances did change, and these times were more taxing on me than I could ever openly admit. I just did not want to put others under pressure worrying about me, but this happened anyway. Life has often been very lonely for me, as my future often looked too. I don't want to know really, how much hope I often ended up clinging to here, in spite of what my head was saying. It embarrasses me a lot. I felt stupid enough anyway, just from merely entertaining that I could be loved in such a way, and that I should be investing my time and energy into something as profoundly personal and unnecessarily complicating as any sexual relationship at all. In retrospect, I realise that although my naivety does not excuse the behaviour of the other party, my terrible lack of judgment of the particular situation notwithstanding is also in evidence.

Much of what was said towards me through the years was so extreme relative to how reasonable and thoughtful he could otherwise come across as being, I felt sure for a long time that I was just misreading him and that all we needed was better discussion when we were less stressed. In all my own life, I cannot convey how much I have thoroughly appreciated when people have done this for me.

I gave up and could not seem to love life anymore. I could not seem to propel myself forward, making it so much easier for myself and others to also reach the same conclusion that he did in how I just didn't know what life was, and just couldn't handle any of it. It took me years to work out an understanding of all this that I could live with, in order to simply just live on. I had my concentration wavering terribly, as was my memory and ability to sometimes carry out everyday problem-solving which I used to really enjoy and throw myself into. I could not have given independent living or just anything in life all I could in that state. But now I see much of that as just a settling into something fuller and richer, also settling with age, and requiring a humility that I couldn't ever seem to grasp in other ways. I've always said I've been one to let things turn out for the better, but some understandably find what I say to be a big inane nothing.

I wrote the page "folded" before, and thought that was a great big carry-on, but the bulk of that and this piece gets balanced out when read together. Initially, "Folded" does sound even less balanced than the above.

March 2007 Update - Personal Meanings Embued in a Steven Rose Lecture

There's a narrow street called Alfred St that bisects the two main parts of my old campus that I used to dart across between zoology, maths, physics, three libraries, my friends and my lunch umpteen times per day. I was weaving between buses and cars that were waiting for the lights further down the hill. I had Fraunhoffer diffraction gratings, Fourier analyses, critiques on applying hypothetico-deductive arguments and critiques on experimental methodology, the transmission of male saddleback song dialects and all the bits of notes and references loose in my bag that were also on my mind as I sped along in my electric mobility scooter.

I probably also had a few invoices and bills thrown in my bag in case I had time to duck downtown to sort those out, and a few loose coins I was dreading having to find when I needed a snack.

I looked down that street recently from a car on the way to a public lecture where Steven Rose briefly mentioned the amygdala in getting out of the way of a bus. I've been reading Steven Rose for probably over a decade now for his insights in evolutionary biology. It was the first public lecture in years where I actually thought nothing of "risking" being amongst a crowd similar to, and including, some of the bunch from my own part of the university. My ability to speak was worse than ever, and I could no longer jump out of my wheelchair onto a seat without the help of my father. That's nothing and I hope to fix it with an exercise regime.

Overhearing some of the chatter before the lecture, I knew that I could have easily participated in some of these conversations, if I had not been speech-impaired. It reminded me that I must have felt some loneliness before and that I shouldn't be too hard on myself for going all out for a relationship all those years ago. This was when I thought I had finally found someone to mutually bridge aspects in life with me at that idealistic age I was at.

I am glad though that that youthful characteristic of really putting myself forward at times has been duly tempered down.

There have still been terribly lagging delays in my research (that writing is partly to do with the nature of how adaptation is understood in conservation ecology - it is not neuro nor psych stuff) and I don't know if it will be able to go anywhere at all more formally.

I'm sick of annoying people about promising what I think I will be able to do without so much as a draft manuscript in hand. In contrast though, I think in effect, I'm continuing to rudely avoid them ... But having been reminded of how I had read up a bit on brain structures such as the amygdala, and considering how much being at home in that lecture theatre was brought to my attention, I was beginning to have faith that one day I'll be crossing Alfred St and others like it without undue fear and feeling under constant alarm again. Confidence in geting out during the day as I used to do so easily on my scooter is something so ridiculously basic that I'm starting to know I will be ok with again. Describing this face-to-face with anyone just seems way too overly-dramatic.

A Continual and Conveniently Neverending Excuse?

I had effectively dropped completely out of what I once thought was an excitingly building academic life, even though for a large part of me, dropping-out was never the case, and I was trying to get my life back on track as I still am doing to date. I want to see my research through and to continue with my scientific interests in some capacity. I reflect on how I was once with many people who had absolutely no clue nor respect for how enthralling that kind of life was for me in my own terms. They totally dismissed it as always being ivory-towerish. I had always given credence to such reservations, but it never occurred to me as to how much I couldn't share some of my life because of this. This also contributed to my depressed state but taught me much over time, finally making me calmer with some things I had to accept. All I thought it would take to have them understand me, was to read some of what I had been reading. That notion took ages for me to discard as freely as I do now.

(I will hybridize some of this now, I think, back a bit into having a more intuitive feel for arguments over what adaptations are - are these manifestations of responses and selection over generations to external features in the environment, or do we have enough resolve in practice to investigate how the integrity of an organism is kept intact given all the ways in which it can live? I am being a bit wreckless in couching what is in my head at this point ... Apparent fanciful schisms don't always have to be reduced ... But, another interpretation of this has always been glaring me in the face too.)

To repeat what I've also claimed before, I physically felt and visibly looked like a flop on wheels - just like people I knew at school. Some were sent away to institutions for their adult life. Everyone assured me that that would never be me, but I had let myself reach the stage where I just did not care anymore.

Maybe some people had been right. Life was too hard. I had left that attitude so far behind, I didn't know whether I was more deluded then or now. What was I thinking? Most of the time my earlier struggles with life as a kid growing up were extremely distant memories, and I had wondered just what in the hell people were going on about when some once said I was brave. Then I was reminded more and more in my head of some people had said failure was inevitable. I regressed into a little girl. I felt like I was back listening to whispers of being sent to a sheltered workshop after I was to leave primary school. I was frail and pathetic. I had let down so many who had gone in to bat for me, and who had believed in me to do so much more.

As I suggest on another page about my relationship, I had to guess the covert rules suddenly expounded at whim, and had always got them wrong. It was decided for me that there were never going to be ways to negotiate what became more and more severe shortfalls. I was already disgusted at my own quite apparent uselessness and glaring failings by then.

Additionally, I think I threw much of the following onto a webpage seeing as it might put me at ease as something to refer to when I just used to freeze. Moreover, it seemed all I could do was to research what could have been involved, and still somewhere along the way, I kept wanting to put the notes I found myself writing anyway into more substance. The pieces I've brought together below may explain a bit of what has seemed inane ruminating on my part that I should no longer allow to develop necessarily for whatever various reasons that come about further. I have hopefully found the basis on which to use conceptual tools such as self-soothing and more purposefully recalling from now on that I'll get through initial sudden reactions.

I found all sorts of techniques didn't work because at the heart of what was happening, I just felt so much was so poorly explained. Yet, I've read a bit of neuroendocrinology as alluded to below, that suggests this continual justifying in itself could be partially due to what I've experienced. Although it could seem important to me, the underpinning neurobiology may explain why some memories have been so irritatingly present for me to date, and understandably just plain irritating for others.

To start with, I was conceptually trapped and now believe that no one ever enters into interactions ever thinking that what did happen, was possible. Particular circumstances only attenuated the severity of the effects which I had to read about, firstly in object-relations literature, in order to make any sense over. I wrote Dysfunctional visionaries - what a political mob rule can end up sanctioning..., and it turned out to include my most succinct and focused attempt at expanding on another main reason why I don't think I am only moaning over just typical growing pain and usual disappointment that I should be equipped to deal with. I was losing far too much trust in myself than I ever dreamed possible, and I became too lost to attribute this to things in a way which would bring about effectual change in recovery. I also felt trapped because my concerns had no meaning in the perspective often recommended for me to have.

But if I was seeing the same elsewhere, then surely I was just reading in too much?

Initially, my questioning was vague. Why didn't some of my friends, those who just happened to be crips too, also see the funny side when I more generally joked things like about being a lab chimp raised as human that no one knew what to do with anymore? It was the usual sort of thing that the rest of us laughed at. Why did they get so angry when I was actually just having a ball laughing my heart out at how stupid some human conventions are? Couldn't they hear the sheer love of life, and my want to impart that, as so implicit? If I was only harping on about this one example, I would think me pretty bloody petty and clueless in that instance, but no matter what I did and just as I thought a warmth in understanding was so evident, there was an explosive rage that kept recurring. It became pretty obvious that behind that were people hiding who seemed very wounded. What was I missing? What was the pain so great that they said would creep up on me sooner or later? I know I've cried bucketloads for days on end as a child and as an early adolescent at how ignorant some people could be towards me, but I thought I had grown through that. How damned insensitive could I have been to have been so light in tone now? What was still making them just so bitter? Was I that dumb and naive? Gradually, I only ended up responding in kind. I hated that with my general attitude towards life, I only ever seemed to be hurting those I loved very much with no matter what I did. This was when I began not to bother about doing anything in life at all.

What I had come to know in mutual friends I had also gotten very close to, but especially in a relationship with this one man in particular, was pretty much seeming like the reverse of what intimacy entails. More given examples with this man would still just go towards making matters seem like nothing without knowing there was an intense climate of struggling with a deepening mistrust in what was going on. It seemed to spill-out into increasingly more of my life. This I barely acknowledged underneath such an eagerness to understand and to be able to give more.

On one day I was told that I had kept himself sane over all of those years of all he put me through, and that he thought the world of me. On another I was being told that I had never known how to live and had no clue as to what life was about. This was when I had been patiently waiting and trying to accept and work in with everything all this time, and was very much longing to share with him how great I believed life had been and could be. But I was losing it.

There was so much in my life that I thought I already worked through and overcome, and now none of that seemed to amount to anything for me to convince myself, or anyone else as far as I was concerned, that I could go further. I just could not find it within myself to keep going - that very absurdity alone frightened me as well.

I think whatever I went through took it's gradual toll - with much of it erratic, rather than graded, levels of continual stress. The stress was about not knowing just what was happening or what to expect. This prolonged stress that was upon me is something I can only see now in retrospect, and it is very difficult for even myself to reconcile with the enormous resultant effects coming seemingly from just final incidents. However, my own temperment possibly made me more susceptible to begin with.

I'm thankful for one way a participant on an often-criticised support group still put the following :

"By the time I called it quits with him, I was a gibbering basket case since 'yes' meant 'no', 'up' meant 'down', and 'have a nice day' meant 'let's have dinner out'. Language and communication lost all coherent meaning and I was constantly on fight or flight mode since I didn't know what would set him off.

He would say one thing, I would question, and he would deny he'd said it in the next breath."

I hope that participant is alright now, and I'm sorry for what she had to go through. Similarily and very likely from long before they met, life probably hadn't been a bed of roses for that other person mentioned, either. There is a chance that the individual in my life even blamed his disability, when a little boy, for not being able to protect himself, his sisters and his mother, from one hell of a lot of strife at home.

It had been an effort to know at times if many of my words made sense anymore. The habit of trying to put together all that I can, sometimes far too frantically and unnecessarily, only fades slowly. Usually, anomalies and quirks in language can be made into a load of fun, but this couldn't. I notice that I stare for ages and ages now, at my own pieces of writing, wondering if it makes the slightest scrap of sense - and such increased vigilance doesn't actually help at all with what I end up producing. What I try to communicate, just gets me fairly listless for a while. It always has been like that to a degree, though.

I am still very grateful to be able to have references like the selections above and below that I've used here to relate to, and for helping me to find some ways to articulate about what I think happened. Intimacy, by definition, opens one up to a load of vulnerability, and this in itself can feel threatening to those very wounded.

Initially, the rage I came across sounded akin to what I saw had been written about shame. The following reference was a good one in that it started me off in my investigations ; investigations which eventually taught me to broaden my focus from such a starting point [not as evidenced yet as written here] and gradually I relearnt not to solely adopt one view to hold too rigidly.

Risking the propensity to become too encumbered with metaphor, some people articulate the phenomena thus, and there are merits in doing so :

"Concealed deep within the human psyche lies an enduring world, a kingdom which exists and yet is separate from our awareness. Within this shrouded domain reside the remnants of intensely painful experiences that were propelled out of sight for safe keeping... [...] ...when an infant experiences acute pain caused from powerful breaks in the emotional connection from parent to child [as in the most expected example from this critical developmental period], the intensity is so severe it cannot be emotionally or intellectually processed. This unprocessed or disorganized material can be referred to as chaotic or overwhelming. Out of the necessity to make order out of chaos, an internal system forms to manage these elements so that they remain secure and safe from exposure. We refer to this system as the shame/envy/rage/guilt cycle...

The projection of this rage pain onto others is the hallmark of the shame/rage condition. In this way rage operates as a paranoid process, shifting in a fundamental distortion causing the perpetrator to believe that they are entitled to their rage. This license to rage exists because the person believes that he is the victim and therefore becomes the aggressor ... The chain of shame/envy/rage/guilt either toward the self or others transpires instantly, distorting reality to fit an unconscious need to rid the self of the shame/envy/rage. Once the rage is dissipated the reality becomes clear again and the recognition of what has happened becomes intolerable, stimulating guilt, rage and shame which is then directed at the self.

Christopher Bollas defines shame as an "unthought known." What he means by the term is that on some level we know about our shame but we are too ashamed to reflect on it. The presence of shame compels us to hide it because the pain is so acute. Shame conceals itself from conscious recognition..."

Rage, Shame and the Death of Love
Bill Cloke [www.bshrunk.com]
- added note and all square parenthesis mine

"People who have been exposed to shame will do anything to avoid it in the future. They develop a hypersensitive radar to the possibility of humiliation, and they are almost phobic in their overreactivity. They tend to project blame and perceive the worst in others. These men are, tragically, usually the ones most desperate for affection and approval, but they cannot ask for it. Sometimes the smallest signs of withdrawal of affection will activate the old narcissistic wounds, and they lash out at the perceived source of this new wound. They can describe none of these feelings; they don't even know where the feelings have come from..."

The Broken Mirror : A Self Psychological Treatment Perspective for Relationship Violence
David B. Wexler [http://jppr.psychiatryonline.org
/cgi/content/full/8/2/129
((1999) J Psychother Pract Res 8:129-141)]

I want to be very clear that absolutely no physical violence was experienced by myself whatsoever. We had been responding, I think, to similar feelings of inadequacy in our own ways. The thought that we could not use what we had known to turn that around, and be a source of immense comfort and understanding to each other, has often shattered me to pieces. So much I thought comparatively felt like a real depth we shared at the time.

Although still venturing into very speculative possibilities, similarities found from within myself have not escaped me, either ...

"[…] ... unable to put the trauma behind them, their energies were absorbed by keeping their emotions under control at the expense of paying attention to current exigencies. They became fixated upon the past, in some cases by being obsessed with the trauma, but more often by behaving and feeling like they were traumatized over and over again without being able to locate the origins of these feelings (2,3). […] ... like chronically and inescapably shocked animals, seem to suffer from a persistent activation of the biological stress response upon exposure to stimuli reminiscent of the trauma. […] ... are prone to go immediately from stimulus to response without making the necessary psychological assessment of the meaning of what is going on. This makes them prone to freeze, or, alternatively, to overreact and intimidate others in response to minor provocations (12,20)… "

Above and below in this section, these are quotes I have thrown together without seeking permission so far from Van der Kolk (1994) [The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Post Traumatic Stress. Harvard Review of Psychiatry. 1(5), 253-265], and references as these have been cited within. The paper stands as a good available source to use in quickly explaining some mechanisms of interest to me regardless of any diagnosis I may, or may not, be given - (I'm still very nervous to think that maybe I go overboard, but take the chance at having the above and the following laid out roughly in the interests of time. I realise that such a layout at just plonking down so many chopped up pieces of someone else's writing would be considered extremely poor practice if I expected this page to be taken as disciplined commentary - of which there is none from me, nor in how I've spliced up a resource I thoroughly appreciate):

"The failure to habituate to acoustic startle [ASR] suggests that traumatized people have difficulty evaluating sensory stimuli, and mobilizing appropriate levels of physiological arousal (30). Thus, the inability ... to properly integrate memories of the trauma and, instead, to get mired in a continuous reliving of the past, is mirrored physiologically in the misinterpretation of innocuous stimuli, such as the ASR, as potential threats…

"In an apparent attempt to compensate for chronic hyperarousal, traumatized people seem to shut down: on a behavioral level, by avoiding stimuli reminiscent of the trauma; on a psychobiological level, by emotional numbing, which extends to both trauma-related, and everyday experience (15)…

"When people are under severe stress, they secrete endogenous stress hormones that affect the strength of memory consolidation. Based on animal models it has been widely assumed (3,46,94) that massive secretion of neurohormones at the time of the trauma plays a role in the long term potentiation (LTP) (and thus, the over-consolidation) of traumatic memories. Mammals seem equipped with memory storage mechanisms that ordinarily modulate the strength of memory consolidation according to the strength of the accompanying hormonal stimulation (95,96). This capacity helps the organism evaluate the importance of subsequent sensory input according to the relative strength of associated memory traces. This phenomenon appears to be largely mediated by norepinephrine (NE) input to the amygdala (97,98, figure 2). In traumatized organisms, the capacity to access relevant memories appears to have gone awry: they become overconditioned to access memory traces of the trauma and to "remember" the trauma whenever aroused. While NE seems to be the principal hormone involved in producing LTP, other neurohormones secreted under particular stressful circumstances, such as endorphins and oxytocin, actually inhibit memory consolidation (99)...

"Endogenous opioids, which inhibit pain and reduce panic, are secreted after prolonged exposure to severe stress. Siegfried et al (70) have observed that memory is impaired in animals when they can no longer actively influence the outcome of a threatening situation. They showed that both the freeze response and panic interfere with effective memory processing: excessive endogenous opioids and NE both interfere with the storage of experience in explicit memory. Freeze/numbing responses may serve the function of allowing organisms to not "consciously experience" or not to remember situations of overwhelming stress (and which thus will also keep them from learning from experience)…"

[I chopped up the excerpts above from a copy found at http://www.traumacenter.org/]


As a part of my cerebral palsy, I had experienced an extreme startle response to sudden loud noises when a child, but had become habituated to any loud noise as a teenager (it wasn't going to stop me from rock concerts!). After a number of bouts of depression as a young adult, this response increased in marked severity again to the point that I would remain as frightened as hell for a few minutes afterwards. The fear was a feeling of desperately wanting to run for cover and curl up into a ball. I felt so idiotic, ashamed at how much comforting I just had to end up accepting in public and I was gutted that I proved incapable of dealing with such simple occurrences.

I was being reminded of such feeling, I realized, and it was even more widespread than just a reaction to loud noises for a while. Firstly, it occurred when hearing from who I had been involved with, not knowing at all if I would find him as being very glad to have time with me, or if any contact with him would just end up inflammatory for us both. Would I know how to reassure him when communications got out of kilter? Was he just as in need of understanding as I? I would be shaking in intrepidation, and then, depending on some outcomes, I felt almost physically ill and experienced quite a surreal feeling as though I was about to faint. The latter result happened when what I found was a tirade of angst (and fear, I think) if whatever I said had hurt him rather than made him happy. I never admitted this to myself at the time, and thought nothing of it apart from me having just some stupid nerves. I had never wanted to let my own nervous characteristics stop me from life's opportunities when these surfaced. Secondly, I still experience a weak racing of thoughts sometimes now when communicating with anyone, scared that I'll just cock up. Thus, I don't believe I'm actually listening and taking in as much as I could be. But, I am improving with time.


[In retrospect of writing even this, it may just hold that I just didn't know of certain susceptibilities of my own to still be aware of in any due course. No need necessarily for me to delve into any massive neverending inventory of historical events other than that written here. It has helped to write this and the following all out just to see inasmuch.]


With what I ended up having to consider, I hope to end up actually as more relaxed with myself and others as I have ever been. I really don't know where anyone would take an adequate measure of any baseline capacity for my interacting and emoting from, and say what's really happened unusually since - as if that was empirically possible. I become relaxed when I have some possible reasons for some of the past, and how I won't keep putting myself into such situations which precipitated in depression and bad relationships.

As I have frustratingly gone over and over again elsewhere, it took ten years of trying to accept however things were going to turn out, only to be very indignantly told by the one I had waited to openly love and believe in the most, that I just did not know what life or love was, and that I just could not deal with any of it. Those were defensive words spoken with such chilling contempt in a pained rage not just aimed at me - but the words wracked me so much, eventually ringing true, I guess...

I allowed my realities to continually be broken down just as an incidental consequence, ending up in such an unretractable mess - I let that happen. It was my fault that I kept making the very incompetent decision of always allowing him to return when some of his more formal and public relationships kept falling through. I believed then that we were just both a bit lost and taking very careful consideration of factors in our lives that we were trying as much as we could to be honest about as we muddled through.

I could see that any fragile hope of mine, that had never completely died out, really had to end. It still reduces me down to shreds as I think an immense need for compassionate listening was so evident, yet so well hidden, and I no longer had any strength at all to give and face more rejection.

How many damned times had I also known though, what it is like to try and convince others that they had got me all wrong? Was this situation in reverse so different?

I do remember as a child having a sense of urgency about taking any opportunity to emphasize wherever it was easy to show how people shouldn't feel as free as they thought to assume what I needed.

My occasionally forthright manner often had me cringing. It was initially was for all the other times when my speech could not be understood, and what I as a child perceived would be dangerous if too much just was assumed. I think I then lost track a bit of what I was actually feeling at times, because I was focusing so much on physically getting a point across.

I might have not given myself much time at all to just feel how feelings change as these occur, and moreso as I kept developing. Specifically a bit confused from all of this, I sometimes suppose this gave me more nagging doubts that went in with everything else that is more usual for a child to take, and that confusion I kept on denying.

What the man I knew had gone through in childhood years was by far much more acute.

I don't know what hurts more ; how much I could not go to someone in pain, or how much I wished we could have turned what we know of that pain around together if we had listened to the similarities still. Trust is the only thing that could prevent my written accounts from sounding so absolutely loopy in romanticism.

I mention the importance of trust in that, no matter how deluded and unreasonable I may be, I write in the vain that these feelings had a profound effect on me that I had to try and find some understanding of. I can only trust that this comes across as feelings that I needed comforting in, regardless of how my words could be ripped apart.

Trying to be tough all my life, I found how much I needed love to be a real shock too. It seems I had to accept a whole lot of what this meant, and how I was going to approach the future happily and able to give, whether or not I had anyone to come home to. It enabled glimpses into how much I was being affected at the time, and struggled with denying.

Past views on "independence" just continued to look increasingly silly, and yet I had still been drawn into upholding these in my eagerness to relate to who I was with and to join in growing with them. I lost many threads of many plots.


In a letter to a friend a while ago, I've just realized I wrote, "I know it's not as simple as just letting go. It's a process. Our brains have been running like mad trying to find sense and meaning in ways we've no reference for". That's what it was like to interact with someone else who, I think, was relating to similar confusion in his own way. I felt as if I was never doing enough, was constantly wondering what I could do to make things go calmly between us, and wondering why we couldn't carry over times that really seemed to work into more of our lives. My brain sometimes now seems set in this mode of a sinking confusion, but less frequently.


When I do try to explain much of the above, my mind goes blank, I get very tongue-tied, and I wonder how really manipulative I'm really being, as well as throwing time away even more than I already have done. It really seems to be helping as I've just started to remind myself that neurobiological processes may explain what just seems so impervious to reason in other ways.

"My Undoing" is the page that much of this page grew from. It essentially just stands to document a profound loss in a sense of proportion as indicated by my very writing in itself overall.

In light of all the animal suffering it probably took to gain some understanding of the mechanisms mentioned on this page, it is my wish that such knowledge will go towards ensuring the greatest capacity possible for retaining a sensitivity towards all life around us. May it propel us into proactivity for a better world somehow.

A message for potential future employers who are patient enough at listening

Although tending to focus on one topic on most of these pages, I hope my writing hints at a lot more in life that I really could grow and explore from.

Please feel welcome to contact me (Kay Neich) at kay.neich@clear.net.nz with any comments or concerns with what I really have just thrown together. The earliest page I ever wrote on this subject can be found at http://oocities.com/kayneich/postsecular/unspoken. Anyone can have difficulties involved with balancing out the narcissistic tendancies present in us all from time-to-time. Some other options of pages to visit may be found at the illustrative menu, http://oocities.com/kayneich/online.html, and I hope that at least occasionally, a lighter tone for those who rather have one is revealed. I indeed needed to know how I could still relax and enjoy life and work, and what I could comfortably consign away.

Krishnamurti - seeing the true in the false is what sets the mind free : http://www.oocities.org/kayneich/postsecular/emergent

Krishnamurti - going against something is still reacting to it : http://www.oocities.org/kayneich/postsecular/formative


... or just visit my page of pretext...

Another explanation for some of this is that life can just get absolutely shitty for anyone, and it's all too tempting to try and find reasons for this.

Problems with my own past had just been exasperated, and to me it was like too much had been brought right back into life. I ended up feeling so much like a child, who had never met all the obligations she actually had done to get her life up and running. This striving began to mean absolutely nothing to me.

When one does cursory reading about declarative and explicit memory as a complete novice, I think it would still be congruent with everything to suggest that the idea of rage building up becomes more colloquial in the sense that particular memories of feelings just seem to be recalled and mistakenly associated with current thoughts and feelings. But I can completely understand why there is continued wide usage of such metaphor. For me to postulate on this subtle shift does seem presumptuous of me.

Note that there is no necessary connection between concepts of shame presented here, and the neuroscience mentioned. It does seem like rage eventually triggered off extreme levels of stress and anxiety in me, but once I read some more of the lax literature on shame that develops into notions about a person's "true self" / "inner child" etc, I still find this far too much of a dubious extrapolation to continue with.

That we create our own reality, I don't think is narcissistic in itself. A clinical definition of narcissism involves an all-pervasive mindset, and a rigidity in what a person is inclined to perceive. Given this alone, I think is a hint suggesting that to hold such certainty in what one believes as being universal for all others to hold, is more the issue with unhealthy narcissistic constructions of reality.

In more general terms, trying to find connections and relations between all our conceptions, and to ensure these can grow while showing us more of the world that we share, is the balance I would love to have.

THRASHING THE SELF-EVIDENT (I accept that to mention the following to most readers would seem encumbered, myopic and exceedingly irrevelant):

If any neurobiological accounts were blanketly discounted as if these could never be used to inform anything sociopolitical in nature, I believe it would be a fairly impoverished view to take. I'm thinking of those who refuse to take in researched findings whatsoever as part-and-parcel of everything else in life.

I find it sad that explanations do not have to be pitched against each other. However, these can be made oppositional by some who latch onto a so-called social/medical dichotomy interpreted as being quite rigid, and this is disappointing when the combined knowledge could otherwise be used to compliment each aspect of many discussions superbly.

I hope I am just knocking over a strawman. If not, for want of a less polarizing way of putting it in such terms so as to still be understood, I am a proponent of what I think can be an appropriately non-cartesian view of science.

I have felt dumbfounded when a very outdated mechanistic view of the world has been ascribed as representative of a group of people when such homogenous groupings really don't exist. Thus, to my mind, I have rendered this paragraph and the preceeding three or so as a bit nonsensical and want this reflection to be taken as having empathy with those who were on both sides of any fence just kicked over once more ...

[albeit, that I realize I haven't made my awareness of some reservations about certain matters of any contextually-relevant commensurability clear and suitably addressed - this would easily widen into a scope much too vast to tackle for my purposes, including the misuse of science when this is illadvisedly conflated with indistinct political ends]

My lack of vocal control is such that the appropriate emphasis on what I want to say does become easily unbalanced in the social milieu that I have inevitably used as feedback in continuing to develop upon. How half-cocked, half-baked and skew-whiff this has all made me become, moreso than average and not only in a vocal context, is anyone's guess really.

I'd allude to the perceptive work of Marsha Linehan for when cases become so much more severe, but only to suggest that indeed, there seems to be systematically identifiable aspects in describing what does happen in very extreme circumstances where similar factors are so much more attenuated.

With a very broad brush to involve my very own concoctions, I also mention how one understanding of autopoiesis could be used to support how societal feedback makes it thus important for everyone to be accommodated for by society at large. I, however, using Maturana and Varela's tools in other ways, take society as being pretty incidental and composite, athough nonetheless, it still shapes each and everyone of us inexplicably.

Therefore, I believe that society can never be solely looked upon as providing life's direction to the extent that it can be said to provide that direction more consciously. I obviously go to pains to not allow myself to become interpreted as saying that society somehow simplistically dictates all of what our values become in a way that doesn't depend on how we individually construe anything.

To be clear and reiterate, neither do I deny at all that of course there are societal influences that contribute to what we are. I'm speaking pre-emptively in the face of ideologues only, who can become so polemic. Such polemic views are by no means inherent in the knowledge I have discussed here, and would seem to be ridiculous to bring up without acknowledging my attention to the concerns of some of the audience who might be reading this.

One of the many papers I read to piece together what happened in the past was one that helped in terms of proposing a distinction that had been unclear to me and thus was really dragging me down :

Campbell, W. K., Rudich, E., & Sedikides, C. (2002). Narcissism, self-esteem, and the positivity of self-views: Two portraits of self-love. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 : 358-368.

I didn't want to forge ahead whilst becoming what I didn't want to be to others. The aforementioned reference would have been a good starting point for what I had felt compelled to look into. Their introduction, as well as their research, provided just a slightly different aspect to consider that I hadn't read elsewhere. Although, "self-love" is something I definitely only view as a necessarily simplistic artefact for what these kind of papers try to demarcate and discuss.



... One can just visit "integral" for softer stuff now more solidly reinstated