"A really good pasta salad that she promised to make for me again, and hasn’t. That part is just for her because I am sending her this answer, and I want my damn salad, woman. It’s been almost ten years with no salad…..
"Then again, I might be forfeiting the salad because she hates this story…. Guess we’ll see."
What. A. Mood!
I love this side of Athena and want to see more. In the words of Thor... "Another!" Your mindset, Athena, is so very entertaining and unique. It's a shame your personality can be too... strong (for lack of a better word) for sOciEty...
Those of us on Quora have been long waiting pointlessly for the details/recipe of this pasta salad, and now just have to accept that they are not forthcoming....sniff.....
I'm 68 & I've been doing the spiritual thing for most of my life. One of my main practices was to watch my mind and stop thoughts I did not want before or as they were forming. This almost eliminated my emotional reactivity and completely eliminated obsession (which contributes to emotional reactivity). Only very rarely do emotional reactions come up for me anymore and when they do, I forget about them in minutes.
That's the background. Dealing with pain took a different approach, but the foundation was this ability to make choices in what I think.
I'm a chronic pain patient. About 15 years ago, I realized pain didn't have to affect my peace and happiness. That was the first step. The second step was to apply my mind training practice to pain. Now, I'm always peaceful & happy (a far cry from my addict, promiscuous, BPD years prior to 1980, before I followed that teaching.)
However, summer 2020, I was up every night from 2 to 6am with intense, deep, knife-stabbing knee pain. I hadn't learned how to deal with that kind of pain. Stopping thoughts was impossible because I couldn't catch them when they started. They were too continuous.
At first, I was in agony. But one night, I found a part of my mind that I can go to that is filled with peace when pain gets so bad that I can't think. I suspect staying in that place eliminated the harsh pain. A knee replacement in December eliminated all of it.
In addition, I'm having a spinal stimulator installed next month that aims at eliminating spinal arthritic pain. So, my chronic pain will soon be completely eliminated too.
I think it's extremely interesting that once I learned to get past the emotional part of pain, healing modalities showed up. I interpret it as simply the way the world works. I learned what I could from the pain. It has no more to teach me. Hence the cure.
So, it is very possible for an nt to disregard pain like a psychopath does. It's a hell of a lot if work tho. But oh so worth it!
I remember talking about shadow work with you on Quora, which also helped.. it's a technique that helped me accept, and thereby, reduced my emotional reactivity.
That is a truly excellent way to illustrate the thinking that goes into this sort of separation. I have had at least one person ask me how I would think that they might go about this, but I lack the ability to parse it out, because I am missing part of the equation. I will direct that person to your comment for better clarification, as I am sure that they will find it extremely helpful.
Obviously, it was just a skeletal view. Feel free to send her my way if she'd like to know details. I don't know if there's a private message option on substack, but Quora messaging is an option.
This is extraordinary, and I am so glad you have found a way to cope. I just wish these mental skills were more easily transferable so that others could reliably benefit from your insights.
There are quite a few mind- training techniques but all of them take time and dedication. I took the spiritual route with A Course in Miracles.
After 8 months of the lessons, I became fairly good at controlling the little thoughts. But the obsessions, ugh. I'd try to bring my mind back to peace and 2 seconds later, I had to do it again. Since then, I followed a lot of paths, none so powerful as this course.
The obsessions continued until 2 years ago, when I realized that what I'd been seeking all this time is within me. I didn't have to search for it; it's here now. At that moment, obsessions and nearly all my emotional reactivity disappeared.
It was a long, long journey, nearly 40 years. I'll bet some people's minds are less stubborn & it doesn't take that long. Even so, I started seeing improvement in just 8 months!
Actually, any spiritual path will get you there eventually & along the way, you'll see improvements. Silva Mind Control is another technique but I don't know if it's a spiritual path.
Jungian Shadow Work is definitely secular, but some authors put a spiritual spin on it. It's aimed specifically at reducing emotional reactivity by the acceptance of whatever emotions come up. It's actually our resistance to feeling them that causes pain. When we accept them, they don't scream so loud for attention. To my knowledge, shadow work doesn't address physical pain; however, the same principle applies - one crucial element is acceptance.
For me, it took the combination of the Course mind-training, dedication, commitment, shadow work, and training to be a spiritual guide. Only when that foundation became a part of me could I deal with intense pain. I'm sure there are tons of other ways.
The way I see it is based on my own experience, plus what I learned in a graduate Buddhism class, shadow work, & from A Course in Miracles (Christian mysticism - words are used differently from Christianity). And probably other paths I've studied.. So I doubt if there's an online reference to describe it.
And I just realized I forgot to include focus meditation! It cultivates clarity. Clarity helps to focus the mind so we're able to direct it. It's just what it sounds like - focusing on something as a meditation.
I'm sure there are other elements I'm leaving out. After all, ACIM is a couple thousand pages long. This book is fairly close to what I was describing, but its mind-training is different than mine: "The Seven-Point Mind Training: A Tibetan Method For Cultivating Mind And Heart" by B. Alan Wallace
Do you know what mindfulness, or vipassana, is? It's a meditation technique that involves watching your thoughts from an observers point of view. It's been gaining widespread acceptance in psychotherapy, but originally, it was an meditation technique from Eastern religions. Mindfulness cultivates detachment and distance from your thoughts. That's what you're aiming for at first. You can find lots of guided mindfulness medications online.
Once you learn to detach from your emotions and your thoughts, mind training becomes easier. In essence, mindtraining is training the mind to recognize when you're thinking thoughts you don't want. Then, you're able to change them. Mind training makes the mind flexible, less rigid.
An example: Let's say someone canceled something you really wanted to attend and you're disappointed. Once you notice the disappointment, you'd tell yourself all the reasons to accept it. For me, that got into my own spiritual views. For you, it may not. Sometimes, all I needed was a sentence like "let all things be exactly as they are" rather than paragraphs of explanations.
At some point, you'll notice a shift in perception. Peace has replaced disappointment.
If disappointment returns, repeat the process & keep repeating until it no longer appears in the mind. These days, I just shift to the silence.
But like I said, it takes a lot of diligence, commitment, and dedication. Mind training breaks up conditioned responses, which opens the way to spontaneous & intuitive thinking.
Did you see my other comment when I suggested different paths? I don't know how to link it - you'll find it a couple comments after this one. I've broken it down into steps here, but the way I learned combined them all in different ways for 365 days of lessons.
You'll see results quicker if you follow one of the paths - and there are many, many more than I mentioned, some of which are secular or almost so, like secular Buddhism. Actually, finding peace within is the goal of every single spiritual path I've ever heard of. Clearing out emotions and the thoughts that cause them makes intuition very very clear. Eventually, it brings about a huge, sudden, permanent shift to peace, clarity, and joy, a state called enlightenment.
I've had some horrible injuries and whilst I know in the moment they were sucky, I don't exactly recall or refeel the pain I felt then, it's more like oof yeah that was painful but I can't experience or recall the extent of the pain, I just remember that it was quite bad.
Recently though, I was making distressed noises, I was unwell mildly reasonable but then someone asked me why exactly I was moaning (not complaining with words, but with sounds) and I actually paused and couldn't find an answer. I then decided to shift my mindset to "I am well"/the feeling of sunlight, and I immediately feel better. No more nonsensical moaning and groaning.
Seems like I'd somehow unconsciously trained myself how to feel (probably because the person themselves had been severely unwell and I witnessed it— i.e. this is how a person behaves when they are with this illness, ergo this is how I will feel whilst I have this same issue )
This is an interesting phenomenon that I have experienced myself. 'Who is that moaning, groaning or kerning?'....'Oh he'll, it's me'. For me though the process was unconscious.
I tend to have the same reaction as you unless I've harmed someone else, in which case I react like your friend did. I also got hysterical when I was a teenager and my brother accidentally dropped a knife on my forehead because I was worried about the scar it would leave. Now scars don't bother me. I see them as beautiful because they're signs of what a person has been through and survived.
I definitely have figured out that anxiety about "when will the pain stop" can be a big part of the negative aspect for me. Sometimes I can squash my own anxiety and pain as well. Maybe it is "dissociation" that I learned as a sort of survival thing or mental technique when young... But if too tired or sick, my control can get eroded too. For me, lots seems to use the same kind of willpower technique, so that gets tired out sometimes...
I did read that autistics might often be using some frontal brain area for lots of functions that NTs have little built-in brain apps, sorta, for.
Yes the dissociation certainly helps when young. I am thinking of physical punishment, and getting into a headspace where it 'doesn't hurt'. But when youre fragmenting mentally, those skills go out the window.
I realized it afterwards, but during the actual meningitis, I was completely out of my mind from the illness, so I have no idea what I thought or what I knew.
I think one of my fun pain stories (at least for my family members) is when my brother accidentally closed and latched my hand in the car door. I fun part was when I knocked on his window and asked him to open it again. Then I got all of the classic "I would've freaked out" type of comments.
Definitely on the stoic end of the pain spectrum, but I don't know how much good it does to try and teach that to people. I definitely think that people need to coddle less do help kids develop and healthier relationship with pain, but there isn't a way to make everything think like me.
A less mature version of me tried to explain how pain is a sensation and everything that follows is a reaction. "So just react differently. You don't have to yell." I don't think that explaination did much good and probably caused more harm. Adult version of me tries to be a bit more nuanced, but I think the end goal should be some middle ground between my version of pain and a typical version of pain. Some kind of acknowledgement of feeling, but not being controlled or reduced to a baby by them.
If your natural pain threshold is such that you can retain such composure when your hand is slammed in a car door, then there is a limit to how much you can understand or advise on pain management for more typical people. With the best will in the world, we can avoid screaming and fussing, but will still be in a blinding ball of agony and no amount of rationalizing will change that experience. After a certain point, pain does control people, it just does, and it's not feeble or pathetic, it just is.
It is indeed difficult to explain to people that pain does not have to dictate your being in the world, and the more reactionary you are to it, the more power you are lending it.
This is a, do unto others situation. If you had a broken leg, and someone gave you their seat, you would find that to be helpful, and be appreciative of the removal of that burden. You likely will be in a place in the future where a similar burden will plague you, and the kindness of another may give you a bit of reprieve.
Being the one that offers that kindness is creating the world in which you want to live, that being the world in which there may be a reprieve for your own pain when the time presents itself.
It's not immoral, but it is rude. If you had a package strapped to you that weighed 40lbs and your back hurts, and your ankles are swollen, from the weight, wouldn't it be nice if someone showed you the kindness of giving you their seat, just because your hurting and they're not?
Well, they *decided* to carry that 40 pound weight out of their own voilition, while it would be a nice thing to do, letting people suffer the consewuences of their own actions shouldn't be seen as "rude", should it?
Cluster Headaches: Psylocibin mushrooms, sub-trip doses. Remission from cluster headaches after a couple of doses. I only stumbled upon this through a person I met traveling a few years ago who had benefitted. This is just about the most exciting thing happening in medicine at the moment. It may well prove the exception to the 'if it sounds too good to be true it probably is'. No. Psilocybin mushrooms are now helping people with intractable depression, and in my country are being used to bring peace to people during end-of-life care. My friend the palliative-care psychotherapist may one day be out of a job. And that's fine. Let the mushrooms ease our pain. It's not just some hippie dream anymore.
This has given me a lot to think about. I do not think I have a strong emotional dimension to my experience of pain, certainly for those pains where they are 'harmless' and don't mean you are gonna die (e.g. bad periods, severe flu, sciatica). I also have never wanted to make a fuss or be fussed over, and I deal with everyday mishaps without theatre (this unnerves people sometimes, you flinch from a stubbed toe or kitchen knife cut and then just carry on talking, it looks weird!). But at the same time I think my actual physical threshold for pain is unfortunately low. I have not experienced excruciating pains, but just ordinary bad ones (various broken bones, malaria, severe rotovirus...), not the worst, but not trivial either, and although I did not react as if they were catastrophes, they still hurt like hell, I did not deal well, and I want my codeine, thank you. I don't bother taking pills for mild pains, but not having access to a pill when pain is severe really freaks me out. So I am wondering if it's possible to have a high pain tolerance but a low pain threshold. The will is there but the physical experience is too much to deal with placidly.
I think that most people would consider some of the things that you have dealt with to be significant pain in their view. Broken bones certainly hurt, and I imagine malaria or rotavirus is unpleasant for certain. The thing about pain is that once we have experienced it, and gotten through the worst part of it, and I believe with NTs part of this is the uncertainty of what the injury itself may bring in the future, once it is sorted out to be something that is able to be dealt with, then the pain lessens.
This makes sense because I do not have any sort of dread recall of those incidents. It's gone. Yeah, malaria felt like hammers had been deployed throughout my skeleton! Rotovirus felt like being eviscerated. These are pains where you cannot move or function. But I have not experienced childbirth, cluster headaches, third degree burns, that's the serious stuff.
I do understand the pain lessening thing once people know that they will survive, but this has not been a part of my experience, maybe because the times in life where my life was actually endangered were not painful, and the painful times were not dangerous. The thing is, I don't spend my life in dread of physical pain. But I do increasingly spend my life in dread and avoidance of emotional pain. The biggest lie in the world is 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. Nope. I despair at my increasing feebleness. THAT stuff is remembered in a way that broken bones are not. Emotional pain is a shocker. You're very lucky!
And yet opioid addiction is a problem. What's also a problem is the overreaction to it, going too far the other way. Once you could reliably expect morphine after surgery, now some hospitals only provide non-prescription pills after, say, a Caesarean, which I find shocking. In my country however the belief is that people recover better without pain.
Yes, I agree with you. It once was that the lie used to sell opioids to doctors was that nearly no one would become addicted. They knew this was nonsense, but they said it anyway.
Now the lie is that no one can have them because nearly everyone becomes addicted. There is no inbetween. It's a bit obnoxious.
And so people take matters into their own hands, trust is gone. I spent two and a half years tapering off a notorious antidepressant, miligram by milligram. The data on withdrawals from the trials was suppressed. Well thank you so much. And yet doctors would still try to tell me I shouldn't do this on my own, or that there was no issue with withdrawing, or that withdrawals were just the return of mental illness, or whatever nonsense of the day. Sorry, you have zero credibility, there's a vast body of patient experience out there, we can talk when you've properly informed yourself.
That is so underhanded. It amazes me the things that they know, and just lie about. It isn't convenient to the narrative, but trust us anyway. I mean it isn't like you don't have a spare brain around to swap out... oh wait...
My experience was typical, and the Venlafaxine case is a famous one. There was a huge delay in the medical establishment acknowledging the issues and I got to watch doctors play catch up in real time, some dishonest, some just arrogantly clueless. Information from other patients on the internet were invaluable. It took several failed attempts over the years under medical 'care' before I succeeded doing it the unofficial way. It makes me angry that there are people out there with protracted withdrawals and permanent neurological damage because they trusted their doctors withdrew too fast. A colleague of mine was told to just stop taking them by his doc and 48 hours later this led to a psychotic break and serious consequences. I'll shut up now.....
This reminds me of friends telling me that the oddest things can happen when I'm around and I just act like it's what I expected all along. When I was a kid my dad severed my left pinky toe and I remember him grabbing my up and carrying me to the house. I was looking at it and told my parents that we could just tape it up good and it'd be okay. Sure enough after dousing with peroxide and other stingy stuff mom taped it up and it all reattached and there's not even a scar now.
I was talking to my brother about it and he remembers when it happened. Our dad isn't very safety conscious at all. Anyway he said he recalls seeing my toes flopping attached with just a little bit of skin with blood squirting and though he wanted to throw up I was staring it intently like it was the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen which is pretty much how I remember it
I did not know this was medically possible! I guess that little flap of skin kept up the blood supply for reattachment. One of the blessings of being a small child is not realising the potential severity of things.
Interesting ideas . I have to have a go replacement next month, it might be a little much but I'll try to test your theory . I should start small i guess but what heck I have constant pain so I'll have some time to practice. Any suggestions on what to tell my brain?
On that, I am not exactly sure since I don't have that relation in my brain. I would guess that it has to do with mentally exploring the physical pain, and seeing what emotions that brings up. Once you are aware of how they interact, you might be able to separate them, and therefore be able to quell the emotional part.
Quelling the emotional part (teenage practice with Dr Ainslie Meares' pain self management/learning to experience pure pain and be indifferent to it) has not yielded the results I hoped for. In fairness it was VERY useful for small pains, all good, but not so much for severe.
You continue to amaze and delight me. I so much enjoy your writing and true stories. This one was of particular interest as I have thought about the mindset you present here many times.
"Did you know that about 58% of women with light eyes apparently have significantly less labor pain?"
Yes, because they are known to be MORE sensitive to pain, thus throughout life their sensation of pain is higher than the one of average women, which means that with time they learn to cope with it better. I've known this intuitively since I was a teenager - the pain I've been through was so obviously bigger than the one my peers went through (on average) and yet I never allowed it to compromise my relationships or health in any way, while they did (they wouldn't go out or they would go the hospital or whatever).
Perhaps it has something to do with sensitivity to dopamine - I can imagine that access to more dopamine would help both light-eyed women and psychopaths to feel less pain than their receptors would have them feel.
Same works for blue eyes and alcohol tolerance - blue-eyed people are more prone to alcohol and drug dependance, but precisely because of that, they have a bigger capacity for drinking and doing drugs. What for someone with brown eyes is a lethal dose, only gets the blue eyes Viking started xD
It's a paradox, really - the weaker you are, the stronger you become. I can't say the same thing about physical pain, but I sure as hell confirm this analogy for emotional pain. And if it works for emotions, well, it's not hard to extrapolate it to a physical level (it's all hormones and receptores anyway).
I had heard the light eyes and pain thing, but the person that told me about it presented it in a very different way. She had light eyes, but also liked wallowing in the "poor me" mentality. Her version was to say that women with light eyes are far more sensitive, therefore suffer more in childbirth. Not that it is coped with better. A very interesting difference. I never looked into it, as it was interesting, but I tended to not entertain her desire for sympathy.
Interestingly, that very same person couldn't handle her liquor. Fascinating.
Yes, wallowing is also a part of that sensitivity xD But contrary to our expectations, wallowing causes even more pain, so we pay the price for such a sympathy begging.
It just goes to show you that we suffer EVEN MORE than your average human, we try all possible coping mechanisms we can and in the end, it either kills us or it makes us stronger.
I don't know about handling liquor, it probably depends on many more variables such as height, weight, metabolism rate, developed tolerance, nutrition and amount of sleep the day of drinking etc
But when you think about why would bright eyes be able to handle more pain (or feel less, whatever, we can't really know now, can we?) only the sensitivity to light comes to mind - more sensitivity to light = less light received = less Vitamin D = less dopamine = more dopamine/reward seeking behavior.
I don't think we can infer anything else. My bet would be light eyes are more susceptible to ADHD and sensory processing sensitivity, that's all we can infer and even that is a stretch. It's possible that with less light we get more Vitamin D due to higher concentration of enzymes needed to produce it, but I wouldn't count on it.
Everything else depends on the rest of our genetic makeup and environment.
Here's a new scenario for you to analyze. I've been told I'm pretty stoic when it comes to pain and I suffer from chronic pain, so I'm sorta used to it. But I can't stand seeing people in pain or watching them get injured. It's like I feel their physical pain. Here's the catch. When it comes to the emotional pain of other people, I feel indifferent and even amused at times. So I practically feel nothing when people are in emotional pain and have to fake empathy. How do you explain it?
My guess is that you do not have a high degree of emotional pain yourself, so that part of your empathy doesn't fire very strongly. You have experienced physical pain, so it does fire there, but if you have a lower experience of emotional pain, you have less connection to it when you see it in others.
I agree , and people do recover better with less pain . In America people always seem to go to far no matter the direction, it's frustrating there should be some middle ground.
"A really good pasta salad that she promised to make for me again, and hasn’t. That part is just for her because I am sending her this answer, and I want my damn salad, woman. It’s been almost ten years with no salad…..
"Then again, I might be forfeiting the salad because she hates this story…. Guess we’ll see."
What. A. Mood!
I love this side of Athena and want to see more. In the words of Thor... "Another!" Your mindset, Athena, is so very entertaining and unique. It's a shame your personality can be too... strong (for lack of a better word) for sOciEty...
The true definition of a hidden gem.
Those of us on Quora have been long waiting pointlessly for the details/recipe of this pasta salad, and now just have to accept that they are not forthcoming....sniff.....
You know, I keep reminding her... but it's still not happened.
Thank you, Eve
I'm 68 & I've been doing the spiritual thing for most of my life. One of my main practices was to watch my mind and stop thoughts I did not want before or as they were forming. This almost eliminated my emotional reactivity and completely eliminated obsession (which contributes to emotional reactivity). Only very rarely do emotional reactions come up for me anymore and when they do, I forget about them in minutes.
That's the background. Dealing with pain took a different approach, but the foundation was this ability to make choices in what I think.
I'm a chronic pain patient. About 15 years ago, I realized pain didn't have to affect my peace and happiness. That was the first step. The second step was to apply my mind training practice to pain. Now, I'm always peaceful & happy (a far cry from my addict, promiscuous, BPD years prior to 1980, before I followed that teaching.)
However, summer 2020, I was up every night from 2 to 6am with intense, deep, knife-stabbing knee pain. I hadn't learned how to deal with that kind of pain. Stopping thoughts was impossible because I couldn't catch them when they started. They were too continuous.
At first, I was in agony. But one night, I found a part of my mind that I can go to that is filled with peace when pain gets so bad that I can't think. I suspect staying in that place eliminated the harsh pain. A knee replacement in December eliminated all of it.
In addition, I'm having a spinal stimulator installed next month that aims at eliminating spinal arthritic pain. So, my chronic pain will soon be completely eliminated too.
I think it's extremely interesting that once I learned to get past the emotional part of pain, healing modalities showed up. I interpret it as simply the way the world works. I learned what I could from the pain. It has no more to teach me. Hence the cure.
So, it is very possible for an nt to disregard pain like a psychopath does. It's a hell of a lot if work tho. But oh so worth it!
I remember talking about shadow work with you on Quora, which also helped.. it's a technique that helped me accept, and thereby, reduced my emotional reactivity.
That is a truly excellent way to illustrate the thinking that goes into this sort of separation. I have had at least one person ask me how I would think that they might go about this, but I lack the ability to parse it out, because I am missing part of the equation. I will direct that person to your comment for better clarification, as I am sure that they will find it extremely helpful.
Thank you for thinking of me, this may help. I'll let you know, as I go. Wish me luck
Obviously, it was just a skeletal view. Feel free to send her my way if she'd like to know details. I don't know if there's a private message option on substack, but Quora messaging is an option.
I linked her to you comment, I am sure she will find it useful.
This is extraordinary, and I am so glad you have found a way to cope. I just wish these mental skills were more easily transferable so that others could reliably benefit from your insights.
There are quite a few mind- training techniques but all of them take time and dedication. I took the spiritual route with A Course in Miracles.
After 8 months of the lessons, I became fairly good at controlling the little thoughts. But the obsessions, ugh. I'd try to bring my mind back to peace and 2 seconds later, I had to do it again. Since then, I followed a lot of paths, none so powerful as this course.
The obsessions continued until 2 years ago, when I realized that what I'd been seeking all this time is within me. I didn't have to search for it; it's here now. At that moment, obsessions and nearly all my emotional reactivity disappeared.
It was a long, long journey, nearly 40 years. I'll bet some people's minds are less stubborn & it doesn't take that long. Even so, I started seeing improvement in just 8 months!
Actually, any spiritual path will get you there eventually & along the way, you'll see improvements. Silva Mind Control is another technique but I don't know if it's a spiritual path.
Jungian Shadow Work is definitely secular, but some authors put a spiritual spin on it. It's aimed specifically at reducing emotional reactivity by the acceptance of whatever emotions come up. It's actually our resistance to feeling them that causes pain. When we accept them, they don't scream so loud for attention. To my knowledge, shadow work doesn't address physical pain; however, the same principle applies - one crucial element is acceptance.
For me, it took the combination of the Course mind-training, dedication, commitment, shadow work, and training to be a spiritual guide. Only when that foundation became a part of me could I deal with intense pain. I'm sure there are tons of other ways.
Do you know if there is anything online that would better explain this process?
The way I see it is based on my own experience, plus what I learned in a graduate Buddhism class, shadow work, & from A Course in Miracles (Christian mysticism - words are used differently from Christianity). And probably other paths I've studied.. So I doubt if there's an online reference to describe it.
And I just realized I forgot to include focus meditation! It cultivates clarity. Clarity helps to focus the mind so we're able to direct it. It's just what it sounds like - focusing on something as a meditation.
I'm sure there are other elements I'm leaving out. After all, ACIM is a couple thousand pages long. This book is fairly close to what I was describing, but its mind-training is different than mine: "The Seven-Point Mind Training: A Tibetan Method For Cultivating Mind And Heart" by B. Alan Wallace
Also I will try to find my place of peace, I get that part, I'm a little lost on the mind training part though.
Do you know what mindfulness, or vipassana, is? It's a meditation technique that involves watching your thoughts from an observers point of view. It's been gaining widespread acceptance in psychotherapy, but originally, it was an meditation technique from Eastern religions. Mindfulness cultivates detachment and distance from your thoughts. That's what you're aiming for at first. You can find lots of guided mindfulness medications online.
Once you learn to detach from your emotions and your thoughts, mind training becomes easier. In essence, mindtraining is training the mind to recognize when you're thinking thoughts you don't want. Then, you're able to change them. Mind training makes the mind flexible, less rigid.
An example: Let's say someone canceled something you really wanted to attend and you're disappointed. Once you notice the disappointment, you'd tell yourself all the reasons to accept it. For me, that got into my own spiritual views. For you, it may not. Sometimes, all I needed was a sentence like "let all things be exactly as they are" rather than paragraphs of explanations.
At some point, you'll notice a shift in perception. Peace has replaced disappointment.
If disappointment returns, repeat the process & keep repeating until it no longer appears in the mind. These days, I just shift to the silence.
But like I said, it takes a lot of diligence, commitment, and dedication. Mind training breaks up conditioned responses, which opens the way to spontaneous & intuitive thinking.
Did you see my other comment when I suggested different paths? I don't know how to link it - you'll find it a couple comments after this one. I've broken it down into steps here, but the way I learned combined them all in different ways for 365 days of lessons.
You'll see results quicker if you follow one of the paths - and there are many, many more than I mentioned, some of which are secular or almost so, like secular Buddhism. Actually, finding peace within is the goal of every single spiritual path I've ever heard of. Clearing out emotions and the thoughts that cause them makes intuition very very clear. Eventually, it brings about a huge, sudden, permanent shift to peace, clarity, and joy, a state called enlightenment.
Does that answer your question?
Yes it does thank you very much.
I've had some horrible injuries and whilst I know in the moment they were sucky, I don't exactly recall or refeel the pain I felt then, it's more like oof yeah that was painful but I can't experience or recall the extent of the pain, I just remember that it was quite bad.
Recently though, I was making distressed noises, I was unwell mildly reasonable but then someone asked me why exactly I was moaning (not complaining with words, but with sounds) and I actually paused and couldn't find an answer. I then decided to shift my mindset to "I am well"/the feeling of sunlight, and I immediately feel better. No more nonsensical moaning and groaning.
Seems like I'd somehow unconsciously trained myself how to feel (probably because the person themselves had been severely unwell and I witnessed it— i.e. this is how a person behaves when they are with this illness, ergo this is how I will feel whilst I have this same issue )
Mind is strange.
This is an interesting phenomenon that I have experienced myself. 'Who is that moaning, groaning or kerning?'....'Oh he'll, it's me'. For me though the process was unconscious.
That is an excellent demonstration of shifting mindset.
I tend to have the same reaction as you unless I've harmed someone else, in which case I react like your friend did. I also got hysterical when I was a teenager and my brother accidentally dropped a knife on my forehead because I was worried about the scar it would leave. Now scars don't bother me. I see them as beautiful because they're signs of what a person has been through and survived.
Scars have never bothered me either. There is a great saying for people that are bothered by them however:
Scars can only tell us where we have been, they do not decide where we are going.
And beautiful people have scars. It is what it is.
Indeed
Wonderful post again, thank you so much.
I definitely have figured out that anxiety about "when will the pain stop" can be a big part of the negative aspect for me. Sometimes I can squash my own anxiety and pain as well. Maybe it is "dissociation" that I learned as a sort of survival thing or mental technique when young... But if too tired or sick, my control can get eroded too. For me, lots seems to use the same kind of willpower technique, so that gets tired out sometimes...
I did read that autistics might often be using some frontal brain area for lots of functions that NTs have little built-in brain apps, sorta, for.
Yes the dissociation certainly helps when young. I am thinking of physical punishment, and getting into a headspace where it 'doesn't hurt'. But when youre fragmenting mentally, those skills go out the window.
That is really interesting. I can understand what you mean by being too tired or sick, and losing the control that you usually have.
While you had meningitis did you ever think that you might die?
Earlier this year I was so sick that I could have easily died. People are
amazed, and angry for some reason, when I tell them dying never crossed my mind.
I realized it afterwards, but during the actual meningitis, I was completely out of my mind from the illness, so I have no idea what I thought or what I knew.
I think one of my fun pain stories (at least for my family members) is when my brother accidentally closed and latched my hand in the car door. I fun part was when I knocked on his window and asked him to open it again. Then I got all of the classic "I would've freaked out" type of comments.
Definitely on the stoic end of the pain spectrum, but I don't know how much good it does to try and teach that to people. I definitely think that people need to coddle less do help kids develop and healthier relationship with pain, but there isn't a way to make everything think like me.
A less mature version of me tried to explain how pain is a sensation and everything that follows is a reaction. "So just react differently. You don't have to yell." I don't think that explaination did much good and probably caused more harm. Adult version of me tries to be a bit more nuanced, but I think the end goal should be some middle ground between my version of pain and a typical version of pain. Some kind of acknowledgement of feeling, but not being controlled or reduced to a baby by them.
If your natural pain threshold is such that you can retain such composure when your hand is slammed in a car door, then there is a limit to how much you can understand or advise on pain management for more typical people. With the best will in the world, we can avoid screaming and fussing, but will still be in a blinding ball of agony and no amount of rationalizing will change that experience. After a certain point, pain does control people, it just does, and it's not feeble or pathetic, it just is.
It is indeed difficult to explain to people that pain does not have to dictate your being in the world, and the more reactionary you are to it, the more power you are lending it.
Hi, I've read a bit of your page and I have a moral question;
If a pregnant woman gets on a packed bus, is it immoral to not offer your seat?
I have Aspergers Syndrome so I lack emotional emapthy to a degree, but even through the eyes of "empathy" it's not immoral to me.
-Keep up the good stuff, Anon
This is a, do unto others situation. If you had a broken leg, and someone gave you their seat, you would find that to be helpful, and be appreciative of the removal of that burden. You likely will be in a place in the future where a similar burden will plague you, and the kindness of another may give you a bit of reprieve.
Being the one that offers that kindness is creating the world in which you want to live, that being the world in which there may be a reprieve for your own pain when the time presents itself.
You're so right
It's not immoral, but it is rude. If you had a package strapped to you that weighed 40lbs and your back hurts, and your ankles are swollen, from the weight, wouldn't it be nice if someone showed you the kindness of giving you their seat, just because your hurting and they're not?
Well, they *decided* to carry that 40 pound weight out of their own voilition, while it would be a nice thing to do, letting people suffer the consewuences of their own actions shouldn't be seen as "rude", should it?
Perhaps, but it also shows no empathy
Cluster Headaches: Psylocibin mushrooms, sub-trip doses. Remission from cluster headaches after a couple of doses. I only stumbled upon this through a person I met traveling a few years ago who had benefitted. This is just about the most exciting thing happening in medicine at the moment. It may well prove the exception to the 'if it sounds too good to be true it probably is'. No. Psilocybin mushrooms are now helping people with intractable depression, and in my country are being used to bring peace to people during end-of-life care. My friend the palliative-care psychotherapist may one day be out of a job. And that's fine. Let the mushrooms ease our pain. It's not just some hippie dream anymore.
This has given me a lot to think about. I do not think I have a strong emotional dimension to my experience of pain, certainly for those pains where they are 'harmless' and don't mean you are gonna die (e.g. bad periods, severe flu, sciatica). I also have never wanted to make a fuss or be fussed over, and I deal with everyday mishaps without theatre (this unnerves people sometimes, you flinch from a stubbed toe or kitchen knife cut and then just carry on talking, it looks weird!). But at the same time I think my actual physical threshold for pain is unfortunately low. I have not experienced excruciating pains, but just ordinary bad ones (various broken bones, malaria, severe rotovirus...), not the worst, but not trivial either, and although I did not react as if they were catastrophes, they still hurt like hell, I did not deal well, and I want my codeine, thank you. I don't bother taking pills for mild pains, but not having access to a pill when pain is severe really freaks me out. So I am wondering if it's possible to have a high pain tolerance but a low pain threshold. The will is there but the physical experience is too much to deal with placidly.
I think that most people would consider some of the things that you have dealt with to be significant pain in their view. Broken bones certainly hurt, and I imagine malaria or rotavirus is unpleasant for certain. The thing about pain is that once we have experienced it, and gotten through the worst part of it, and I believe with NTs part of this is the uncertainty of what the injury itself may bring in the future, once it is sorted out to be something that is able to be dealt with, then the pain lessens.
A pain can only be it's worst once.
This makes sense because I do not have any sort of dread recall of those incidents. It's gone. Yeah, malaria felt like hammers had been deployed throughout my skeleton! Rotovirus felt like being eviscerated. These are pains where you cannot move or function. But I have not experienced childbirth, cluster headaches, third degree burns, that's the serious stuff.
I do understand the pain lessening thing once people know that they will survive, but this has not been a part of my experience, maybe because the times in life where my life was actually endangered were not painful, and the painful times were not dangerous. The thing is, I don't spend my life in dread of physical pain. But I do increasingly spend my life in dread and avoidance of emotional pain. The biggest lie in the world is 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. Nope. I despair at my increasing feebleness. THAT stuff is remembered in a way that broken bones are not. Emotional pain is a shocker. You're very lucky!
I also believe that people in this day and age, should not have to deal with extreme pain without meds.
And yet opioid addiction is a problem. What's also a problem is the overreaction to it, going too far the other way. Once you could reliably expect morphine after surgery, now some hospitals only provide non-prescription pills after, say, a Caesarean, which I find shocking. In my country however the belief is that people recover better without pain.
Yes, I agree with you. It once was that the lie used to sell opioids to doctors was that nearly no one would become addicted. They knew this was nonsense, but they said it anyway.
Now the lie is that no one can have them because nearly everyone becomes addicted. There is no inbetween. It's a bit obnoxious.
And so people take matters into their own hands, trust is gone. I spent two and a half years tapering off a notorious antidepressant, miligram by milligram. The data on withdrawals from the trials was suppressed. Well thank you so much. And yet doctors would still try to tell me I shouldn't do this on my own, or that there was no issue with withdrawing, or that withdrawals were just the return of mental illness, or whatever nonsense of the day. Sorry, you have zero credibility, there's a vast body of patient experience out there, we can talk when you've properly informed yourself.
That is so underhanded. It amazes me the things that they know, and just lie about. It isn't convenient to the narrative, but trust us anyway. I mean it isn't like you don't have a spare brain around to swap out... oh wait...
My experience was typical, and the Venlafaxine case is a famous one. There was a huge delay in the medical establishment acknowledging the issues and I got to watch doctors play catch up in real time, some dishonest, some just arrogantly clueless. Information from other patients on the internet were invaluable. It took several failed attempts over the years under medical 'care' before I succeeded doing it the unofficial way. It makes me angry that there are people out there with protracted withdrawals and permanent neurological damage because they trusted their doctors withdrew too fast. A colleague of mine was told to just stop taking them by his doc and 48 hours later this led to a psychotic break and serious consequences. I'll shut up now.....
This reminds me of friends telling me that the oddest things can happen when I'm around and I just act like it's what I expected all along. When I was a kid my dad severed my left pinky toe and I remember him grabbing my up and carrying me to the house. I was looking at it and told my parents that we could just tape it up good and it'd be okay. Sure enough after dousing with peroxide and other stingy stuff mom taped it up and it all reattached and there's not even a scar now.
That's pretty remarkable.
I was talking to my brother about it and he remembers when it happened. Our dad isn't very safety conscious at all. Anyway he said he recalls seeing my toes flopping attached with just a little bit of skin with blood squirting and though he wanted to throw up I was staring it intently like it was the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen which is pretty much how I remember it
I can see why
I did not know this was medically possible! I guess that little flap of skin kept up the blood supply for reattachment. One of the blessings of being a small child is not realising the potential severity of things.
Interesting ideas . I have to have a go replacement next month, it might be a little much but I'll try to test your theory . I should start small i guess but what heck I have constant pain so I'll have some time to practice. Any suggestions on what to tell my brain?
On that, I am not exactly sure since I don't have that relation in my brain. I would guess that it has to do with mentally exploring the physical pain, and seeing what emotions that brings up. Once you are aware of how they interact, you might be able to separate them, and therefore be able to quell the emotional part.
Quelling the emotional part (teenage practice with Dr Ainslie Meares' pain self management/learning to experience pure pain and be indifferent to it) has not yielded the results I hoped for. In fairness it was VERY useful for small pains, all good, but not so much for severe.
Thanks for the heads up
That's an idea that may help
Another reader detailed her process of obtaining this state of mind, so I thought I would connect you with that comment. Here's the link:
https://athenawalker.substack.com/p/emotional-experiences-of-physical/comment/3190743
That should have read' a hip replacement'
I figured hip or knee as they are the most common.
Well Last year I had a total shoulder replacement . That was very painful, the hip is suppose to be easier, we'll see.
You continue to amaze and delight me. I so much enjoy your writing and true stories. This one was of particular interest as I have thought about the mindset you present here many times.
Thank you, N B
"Did you know that about 58% of women with light eyes apparently have significantly less labor pain?"
Yes, because they are known to be MORE sensitive to pain, thus throughout life their sensation of pain is higher than the one of average women, which means that with time they learn to cope with it better. I've known this intuitively since I was a teenager - the pain I've been through was so obviously bigger than the one my peers went through (on average) and yet I never allowed it to compromise my relationships or health in any way, while they did (they wouldn't go out or they would go the hospital or whatever).
Perhaps it has something to do with sensitivity to dopamine - I can imagine that access to more dopamine would help both light-eyed women and psychopaths to feel less pain than their receptors would have them feel.
Same works for blue eyes and alcohol tolerance - blue-eyed people are more prone to alcohol and drug dependance, but precisely because of that, they have a bigger capacity for drinking and doing drugs. What for someone with brown eyes is a lethal dose, only gets the blue eyes Viking started xD
It's a paradox, really - the weaker you are, the stronger you become. I can't say the same thing about physical pain, but I sure as hell confirm this analogy for emotional pain. And if it works for emotions, well, it's not hard to extrapolate it to a physical level (it's all hormones and receptores anyway).
And yes, I do have light eyes.
https://www.essilorusa.com/newsroom/how-pain-tolerant-are-you-look-at-your-eye-color
I had heard the light eyes and pain thing, but the person that told me about it presented it in a very different way. She had light eyes, but also liked wallowing in the "poor me" mentality. Her version was to say that women with light eyes are far more sensitive, therefore suffer more in childbirth. Not that it is coped with better. A very interesting difference. I never looked into it, as it was interesting, but I tended to not entertain her desire for sympathy.
Interestingly, that very same person couldn't handle her liquor. Fascinating.
Yes, wallowing is also a part of that sensitivity xD But contrary to our expectations, wallowing causes even more pain, so we pay the price for such a sympathy begging.
It just goes to show you that we suffer EVEN MORE than your average human, we try all possible coping mechanisms we can and in the end, it either kills us or it makes us stronger.
I don't know about handling liquor, it probably depends on many more variables such as height, weight, metabolism rate, developed tolerance, nutrition and amount of sleep the day of drinking etc
But when you think about why would bright eyes be able to handle more pain (or feel less, whatever, we can't really know now, can we?) only the sensitivity to light comes to mind - more sensitivity to light = less light received = less Vitamin D = less dopamine = more dopamine/reward seeking behavior.
I don't think we can infer anything else. My bet would be light eyes are more susceptible to ADHD and sensory processing sensitivity, that's all we can infer and even that is a stretch. It's possible that with less light we get more Vitamin D due to higher concentration of enzymes needed to produce it, but I wouldn't count on it.
Everything else depends on the rest of our genetic makeup and environment.
Here's a new scenario for you to analyze. I've been told I'm pretty stoic when it comes to pain and I suffer from chronic pain, so I'm sorta used to it. But I can't stand seeing people in pain or watching them get injured. It's like I feel their physical pain. Here's the catch. When it comes to the emotional pain of other people, I feel indifferent and even amused at times. So I practically feel nothing when people are in emotional pain and have to fake empathy. How do you explain it?
My guess is that you do not have a high degree of emotional pain yourself, so that part of your empathy doesn't fire very strongly. You have experienced physical pain, so it does fire there, but if you have a lower experience of emotional pain, you have less connection to it when you see it in others.
I came to the same conclusion.
I agree , and people do recover better with less pain . In America people always seem to go to far no matter the direction, it's frustrating there should be some middle ground.