#and the memories of you flood my hippocampus

[enrapture]

I took off work today because I can’t stand one more second at my job.

[infinitesplinters]

Summer Song

They rolled in mud again. The cycle of the ages, making these friezes out of worse bx: some method out of the Xterra swerving on our back. I haven't missed anyone as much as you who I haven't met. Will it linger like a lifetime you never wished for? A precious consciousness, even knowing the pain of not touching this vortex that is silence and every thought I ever fought. Little liquid hippocampus, memory in the rough cut, letting go feels like humiliation this start and stop, yearning for Ketir, yearning for the flood. Picture books with no words, this is how you figure into the algebra of believing myself to be true. A thousand suns of voice over telephones: if you're feeling better - come over, come see the damage, come breathe with abandon, the lessons scatter my inseam, unmeasured unbounded un diluted into whispered noise, a hand on the back, light sweat from too many sheets, the bank accounts gone, shopping cart's empty again, likely story, buried in the forest, many whippoorwills singing.

[cherrynojutsu]

Title: Like Silver

Summary: A companion series for Like Gold.

It’s challenging to finish up discharge summaries and operative reports when one’s vision keeps blurring, as it turns out. And when one keeps pressing fingers to their lips in disbelief. A poetic sort of procrastination, indeed.

Blank period, canon-compliant, Sakura-centric, some expanded plot points from Like Gold, fluff and pining, eventually becomes a smut fest with feelings.

Disclaimer: I did not write Naruto. This is a fan-made piece solely created for entertainment purposes.

Rating: M (eventual nsfw-ness)

AO3 Link - FF.net Link - includes beginning/ending author's notes

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Chapter 2/?: A Poetic Sort of Procrastination, Indeed

Sakura saunters home late in the evening, admiring the stars above her in a daze of spring air and clutching her tote bag to her shoulder as if her very life force is tethered to it.

In the flurry of emotion, she completely forgot about returning her library books, but she doesn’t give a damn.

She drudged through her entire pile of paperwork, though it was an almighty effort requiring every ounce of her discipline. Even after Sasuke left, she kept tearing up and just gawking at the impossibly beautiful gift he’s given her, affection requited bubbling up inside her ribcage and unleashed into the air she breathes like some sort of ambrosial perfume she can finally afford to bask in. She has always known there is a softer side to him, that there is much more beneath the surface than he lets on with his laconic demeanor, but this is something else.

It’s challenging to finish up discharge summaries and operative reports when one’s vision keeps blurring, as it turns out.

And when one keeps pressing fingers to their lips in disbelief.

A poetic sort of procrastination, indeed.

She hangs her tote on its entryway hook and carefully removes the box inside once she reaches her apartment. After she’s padded her way to her bedroom, she flips on the two lamps before placing it tenderly on her bed.

Sakura briefly contemplates taking the lid off then and there, but she knows she really should shower first, because otherwise the evening is going to quickly spiral away from her, whirlpool of tender feelings that it already is.

It’s the quickest shower she’s ever taken in her life; berry-scented soap floods her body and seems to take forever to rinse clean in her haste, although it can’t actually be more than a minute or two in reality. It’s also the quickest she’s ever toweled off and changed into pajamas, scurrying back to her room and grabbing the first pair she lays eyes on from her dresser drawer.

Once she has shimmied them on, she opens the box again, and just looks.

It still exists - it doesn’t disappear or dissolve as a figment of her imagination - so she picks it up with careful hands.

It is so, so pretty, exquisite in a way that makes her heart hammer relentlessly against her sternum, a catharsis in her chest sweeter somehow than anything she’s ever experienced.

It’s unavoidable; her eyes well with tears again, because he said he had it made for her. Not found in an antique shop off the beaten path or some happenstance market who knows how many miles away. Not just something that reminded him of her.

Made for me.

Which means he thought of this himself. Silk that shifts colors like the Uchiha crest, fastidiously stitched petals, and a cherry blossom tree, carved light wood that is startlingly similar in tone to the accents here in her bedroom.

And the way he looked at her, after, a storm of silver and obsidian that took her breath away.

And he kissed her.

Sakura doesn’t know how she’s supposed to fall asleep tonight, deliriously happy as she is, or how she’s going to spend any of her free time from here on out not staring at this supernal treasure. She strokes the wood with careful fingers, bringing the carving upwards for closer inspection. Every inch of it is gorgeous; she is especially enamored with the pink and pearlescent stitching, coruscant in the low light. She assiduously counts the slivers of bamboo, too, and follows the rivulets of fine branches stretching upwards to the boundaries of the framework. Upon her inquest, she notices an impossibly tiny etching, faintly whittled on the interior of one of the slats of bamboo. Tai Ro, it says; she assumes that must be the craftsman’s signature. She wonders where it came from, which far-off land Sasuke traveled through to commission something so resplendent.

She has never seen anything so bewitching, except maybe silver flecks.

Tearing her gaze away from the fan, Sakura eyes the vanity by her balcony door, an idea brewing.

It’s an aged piece, of a bygone style featuring small drawers on each size and a sunken point in the middle, from which rises a large circular mirror. A framed copy of their original Team Seven portrait sits pushed against the framing, right in the center. She placed it there because she enjoys seeing it as she gets ready for the day. It’s a good memory, one of her favorites, sentimental in a way that makes her heart swell, after everything. A pale wooden hairbrush also sits perched atop its surface, given to her by her mother forever ago while she was still at the Academy.

“I found it in the market today, just after swinging by to pick up rose food from Ino’s mother. It’s old, an antique, but I think it suits you, my dear,” she’d said, ruffling her hair, still long at that point and chattering a mile a minute in the overbearing way she has always tended to. She’d brushed her already combed locks in the manner that Sakura thinks all mothers must with their daughters, even when they are starting to become too grown for that sort of thing. “What I wouldn’t give for your hair! So unique; you should have something lovely to brush it with. You’re already such a pretty girl, but someday you’re going to bloom, and when you do, heaven help the boys.”

There’s a cherry blossom on it, too, adorning the back simply with five perfect petals.

When Sakura moved out of her parents’ house, she chose the tones of her bedroom accents, inclusive of the frame, with it in mind; she’d been using it for years by then, and had developed a fondness for pale wood rooted in familial nostalgia. Most of her actual furniture in the room is secondhand, of an older variety and painted with a white stain to make them somewhat match - she prefers things with a little bit of history, has since her mom gifted her that hairbrush - but the few frames and wall-mounted shelves are lighter washes of wood.

Many of the surfaces in her apartment are cluttered with books and other knick knacks she has accumulated through the years, but she tries to keep the vanity’s top clear, almost like an altar, an ode to the things she finds lovely atop it to give her hope with which to greet the day.

Still clutching the gift tenderly in her hands, Sakura ventures over to it.

She holds the fan close to the frame as well as the brush, comparing the color, near an exact match, a fresh memory making her heart swell in a completely different way, a way she had previously thought was maybe unrealistic.

She’ll get a stand for it, she decides, and display it in the spot the frame currently sits; it would look perfect there, the curvature echoed above it in circular looking glass, a hairbrush of a similar stain beside it. Then she’ll be able to gaze at it every morning and evening. There is no way something this precious to her could ever be stored away in a box and only seen on special occasions; it’s the same reason she struggled with the idea of hiding his letters away in one.

No, Sakura is resolutely sure that admiring it will be a daily ritual.

She can relocate the photo frame to her bedside table, maybe, next to An Introduction to Electrocardiography , or perhaps to her living room, though it doesn’t really match the wood out there.

That gets her thinking. We’re... together now, right? He’s kissed her, and she really hopes he will again, surprisingly soft lips against hers, an aroma of woodsmoke, and butterflies unleashed in her stomach. Maybe she should put the frame on the shelf in the main room. He might come over, sometime; it would be good to have it visible, situated in a place where he can see it.

With the utmost care, she lays the fan on the surface in front of her. Sakura combs through wet locks, coaxing out tangles with an old gift and appreciating a new one with watery eyes. When she’s finished, she carefully clutches it again and admires it atop a lavender comforter for the better part of an hour, alternating between mentally mapping its fine stitching within the confines of her hippocampus and paging through her book of Sasuke’s letters in a way that is more than fond, affection freed from her chest after so very long. The jubilance crests to a sense of omneity as she does so, moon glow filtering in by way of the gauzy white curtains that shield the balcony’s glass door.

She absolutely can’t wait to see him tomorrow. She sincerely hopes she’s not dreaming all of this.

She is so enamored with it that she doesn’t even drink her customary evening tea, her being warmed in an entirely different manner she is as of yet unaccustomed to, better than earl grey or some variety of dessert. It’s immensely difficult to pry it from her own hands when the time comes to do so.

Always is the last word she thinks of before she succumbs to slumber, curled up in soft colors and hoping he has found somewhere comfortable to sleep. Treasured memories emanate from objects old and new, brewing together before a looking glass where she’s placed them for safekeeping and admiration.

XXX

When she awakens in the morning, Sakura jerks upright in bed, turning to her vanity to ascertain if it was all a dream, cozened in by her subconscious as she slept.

It wasn’t. The fan is still there, precious and so enchantingly beautiful, dawn flavoring the memory of Sasuke’s return just as sweet as it had tasted yesterday with his lips on hers.

She brushes her hair again, working at the task way longer than necessary and trying not to cry out of sheer happiness. She feels so light, as if being pulled upwards by a latterly existent force of gravity, theoretically possible in terms of relative physics and with the right circumstances, but never actually experienced.

Birds are singing on the balcony when Sakura finally steps outside, snacking on seeds from her bird feeder as she gives her fledgling plants a drink before leaving for work.

It is such a lovely morning.

XXX

Sakura makes it through work as if encapsulated in a brand of inertial navigation system, floating as if she’s a bizarrely sentient cloud from patients to test tubes. She feeds the mice and records the brief observations she usually does on Wednesdays, and then a Genin is being brought in with a linear fracture in their tibia, twisted wrong and impacted during training. She gives instructions to nurses, too, taking care of smaller tasks in between, part of her feeling like she is barely there.

Well, not barely. She still keeps her wits about her and heals people; she takes pride in what she does. She just… daydreams a little, too, sage, smoke, and silver occupying her spare moments, flitting in between the corridors of her head as she flits from exam room to exam room.

She’s sitting at her desk, eating an early dinner and working on a new pile of paperwork before her next appointment arrives at five thirty, when one of Naruto’s clones bangs on her window.

Her gaze shifts to the glass at the familiar boisterous whining of her name - “Sakura-chaaaaaaan!” - and she rises to open it the rest of the way, allowing him entry into her office, an easy grin coming to her lips.

“Naruto!” A million thoughts run through her head. He has to know Sasuke’s back at this point, right? Has he seen him? He must be so happy.

Cyan bores into her, and he grins as he steps down. “Sakura-chan, teme’s back! Can you believe it? Though I guess you knew since yesterday.”

Sakura’s cheeks warm at the implication of that, wondering how he knows this information, but her friend is plowing onwards.

“Anyways, wanna have an original Team Seven reunion dinner on Saturday night? Or maybe Sunday night? Kakashi-sensei said Saturday would be better for him, if it works for you. And we should also make it a housewarming party for teme, but Kakashi-sensei says DON’T tell him that, or he won’t agree! It’s a surprise.”

Laughter erupts from her chest, rich and joyful, because it is crystal clear in that moment that Naruto is as elated at Sasuke’s return as she is - okay, maybe not quite on the level that she is, but close - even through a clone. “Of course, we should! I don’t have anything planned for Saturday night.”

Her teammate grins, all infectious happiness in the way that is so utterly characteristic of him, eyes crinkling at their corners. “Good, great, awesome! Be sure to mention it to him when you see him at seven. I’m sure if you suggest it, he’ll definitely agree.” Sakura blinks in surprise, cheeks staining darker. “Man, this is gonna be so great! Team Seven is fucking back ! I can’t wait to get a mission! It’ll be just like old times. I gotta tell Hinata-chan, too!”

She can’t help it; she smiles so wide that it hurts her face, tears paying her another visit. Sasuke’s back. He’s really back. And-

“Well, anyways, I’ll leave you to eat your dinner, Sakura-chan, but we have to force him to be social. I can’t wait to spar! But also, we gotta have a picnic, and no tying me to the pole this time. We could even challenge Kakashi-sensei to get off his ass and give us another go at the bell test. And, and! We should have a movie night. And go drinking! I’ve never seen teme drunk. I bet he’s a lightweight, and he’ll probably say all sorts of embarrassing shit! And-” Naruto’s clone’s expression turns unexpectedly serious, blue eyes suddenly narrowing in a way that is all-seeing and a tan finger suddenly pointing at her accusingly.

“-I mean social outside of you and him, Sakura-chan! Don’t think for a second that you’re gonna escape my questions later, when my brain isn’t fried from staring at that stupid scroll Kakashi-sensei has me slaving over. I want answers. ”

And then Naruto’s clone disappears in a puff of smoke, leaving her blinking in a strange combination of bewilderment and somehow, shyness, too.

And ebullience. Mostly ebullience.

She stands there grinning like an idiot for a long time. She can’t wait to see him at seven.

[kjsadd]

(Michelle Frank, ADDitude podcast #305)

My notes:

* Neurotypical behaviors are not only seen as normal, but also idealized, held as the gold standard.

* ADHD people tend to idealize the neutrotypical and minimize their difficulties. Gets in the way when Appraising our own behavior.

* Can you imagine a world where people were trying to act more neurodivergent, to act more like their ADHD friends? It’s hard to even conceptualize because the mould is so strong.

* Treading water just to get by, just to stay afloat.

* Feelings coming out as issues with food, body. We put a lot on our body

* Trouble regulating arousal states. Hyper aroused, hypo aroused. Fall asleep when bored or understimulated—alertness and arousal pathways aren’t properly regulated. Can’t start, can’t stop. Struggle to put foot on gas, take foot off gas.

* Stress significantly impacts ability to regulate arousal. Regulating our energy levels, our feeling of being able to get going, ability to fully engage and be present.

* Default mode network: processing network, best buddies with the task mode network. In neurotypical brains, it’s the internal background chatter; pauses or shuts off when engaged in a task. The handoff between the two networks is more disjointed in ADHD brains; the default mode network won’t shut off. Leads to ruminating (esp if anxious), wandering mind. But another word for that is creativity. Linked to hippocampus which processes memory, which is why we often ruminate on the past.

* Difficulty seeing ourselves in the future, and holding our future in high regard in order to act on it now. Future goals very abstract. Doesn’t hold weight, or does hold weight but “can’t meet the future with the present.”

* Brain craves stimulation; connected to disregulation of dopamine, the pleasure/reward chemical. “Being bored physically hurts.” If your dopamine is crashing, your mood is going to crash too. If your dopamine isn’t working as it should, it’s a quicker rise but a deeper fall.

* The adhd brain craving stimulation leads to hyper focus. Can be a good coping mechanism, but leads to pseudo-productivity. Get lost or stuck in the things that cause dopamine rushes (old habits)

* Routine gives us the predictability that the world can’t. But often a love-hate relationship: doesn’t give sense of satisfaction when doing it, but also know it’s good for you.

* When the vagas nerve is overstimulated, we go into fight/flight, or if we can’t escape, freeze (looks like under stimulation)

* Think of a time when you were in the window of tolerance. Content, able to be engaged. What are the cues? Where were you? What helps you get to that state?

* Stress = hyperarousal. Amigdala overload. ADHD loves this state. Nervous, irritable, reactive. Don’t try to problem solve here. Can’t access reasoning and executive function.

* When can’t escape, freeze: go down to hypoarousal. Protective state of last resort. Very disconnected, physically tired or out of it. Can be more profound in people who’ve experienced trauma. Can’t act. “I can’t”. Dorsal vagal shutdown.

* What if it’s ok to just survive?

* Pausing is the first step. “Mindfulness is a pause—the space between stimulus and response: that’s where choice lies” (Tara Brach, “radical acceptance”). Pause to create space to regulate.

* Create safety; pre-plan. Coping ahead: what does it look like to cope ideally with XYZ situation? 20-30 minutes for nervous system to drain the flood, sometimes more. Can’t regulate if you don’t feel safe.

* Physical safety — minimize stresses.

* Emotional safety. Women tend to become people pleasers when things get stressful, keep the peace. But need to set boundaries, take space.

* “Name it to tame it” no “should” when it comes to feelings. Increase emotional awareness by increasing emotional identification. Name feelings, observe them, don’t judge them. Nonjudgmental compassionate witness to experience. Emojis are fine.

* Ways to regulate: mind-body practices, somatic experiences, designed to shift stress response back to the window of tolerance. Get back to the body.

* Insight timer’s free app has body scans and other good stuff.

* Deep breathing, focus on exhale: 7-10 seconds. Activates vagas nerve.

* Don’t put off the pleasurable/positive stimulations just because you haven’t done all the chores, etc. Essential to keep up the positive stimulation; it keeps the dopamine flowing in better ways.

* What is the essence of the thing you think you want? When struggling with the shoulds. What is the experience underneath the tidy house that you want? Is it clarity, peace, space? Can you create that in a different way, or achieve it in a more fun way? How can you experience the essence of the thing you think you want in a way that’s small, realistic, and true for you.

* Instead of “how do I live up to the standard,” live from the inside out. ADHDers are great at living from the outside in.

* Attunement: sways experiencing misattunent with the world and our loved ones. Heal that by tuning to ourself, and not recreating the neglect, rejection, and judgment we experienced earlier in our lives.

* We’re taught as kids how to deal with fight or flight; take a breath, calm down. But we’re not taught how to rev ourselves up when we’re hypoaroused. Try different ways of getting into your body (safe space, mindful techniques, progressive muscle tensing), and creating shifts in energy/body (eg, open the window, music). We start disconnecting from ourselves and numbing out.

* Reframe productivity: What is the one thing I want to do today that will feel good for me?

* Create a bridge from what’s worked for you in the past, what works for people with ADHD, to the present moment.

* When you give yourself permission for it not to be perfect, it makes space for it to be good.

[brother-hermes]

DEAL WITH ANGER BY UNDERSTANDING IT

It’s so easy to get swept up in our anger. Especially when it’s that justifiable, self righteous anger where we absolutely know we’re right. Often times we justify expressing our anger whenever we are afforded the moral high ground. We judge, we belittle, and we completely throw out all the spiritual lessons we’ve learned along our journeys .

What we feel as anger is a biochemical reaction within our bodies to something we are afraid of and find aggressive. Little neurotransmitters from all over the body relating to stress and tension send signals to the amygdala which triggers the emotion based on our past experiences. The amygdala stimulates our brains to remember what happened to keep us safe.

Luckily, our brains are wired with a tiny connector between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex that helps us control the anger. Research has proven that the cerebral cortex is less developed in death row inmates than it is you or I.

Meditation, especially single pointed concentration, has been shown to help develop the frontal regions of the brain. It increases cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs our memory and learning. If also decreases brain cell volume in the amygdala which is why it eases our fears and anxiety over time.

Great. So meditating daily will eventually rewire the way we think and increase our ability to respond without reacting to our anger, eventually, but I’m angry right now. I want to fight, scream, or whatever, RIGHT. NOW. What do we do in the heat of the moment when the adrenaline is rushing through our system and our heart rates elevated?

Well, this is why we practice meditation. So when moments of duress occur we can return to that calm place within us. The first thing I always do is get quiet before doing an assessment. I start by monitoring my breathing and paying attention to what is going on in my body. I look for that tension, usually found in my shoulders, of my muscles contracting preparing my body to spring into action. I tend to become more alert and scan the room to make sure there aren’t any other threats.

Once I’m aware of my anger and where I’m carrying it I start to relax those muscles. I breathe in deep through my nostrils and exhale slowly through the mouth. Once I have myself in check I go through a mental checklist:

-Is this life threatening to me or my family?

-What emotional memory did it trigger?

-Is this person/situation responsible for what happened then?

-Should they pay for my past trauma?

-What set me off?

-Have I ever done this to someone else?

This usually puts enough space between the initial flood of chemicals when it started and the present to keep me from reacting in that classic fight or flight mode. Then, after I’m calmer, I can look at whoever, or whatever, it is that’s upsetting me a little more objectionably. This also creates the space for the others involved to calm themselves down on their own terms and possibly spared you both.

This is the difference between reacting and responding. A reaction would end in the same way all of those past experiences did and we’ll never grow past it. This is how we end up in those emotional cycles of self destructive behavior being tossed around by our emotions.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to share it with whoever you think may need it.

[stefciastark]

Time Travel ~Webpril Day 23

A/N: After Endgame, Peter needs some closure but he doesn't quite anticipate the hurt. This one references a previous fill for the prompt "Please! I-" from a few days ago. Short and sweet, but definitely on the sadder side x

~Read it on AO3

~Read it on FFN

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah. I just want a chance to say my goodbyes, y’know?”

Bruce handed Peter a pair of glasses with a grim closed-lipped smile; they looked comically small in Bruce’s now Hulk-sized hands. The frames were thick and dark. They looked like something that the hipster kids at Peter’s school wore, but he knew these cost infinitely more than anything any student could afford. It was so strange to hold something in his hands that would give him the ability to essentially travel back in time. Not literally, but it would allow him to relive a memory he had wished was different.

B.A.R.F. Peter could almost laugh at the name. Bruce had to explain to him exactly how Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing worked, and the technology blew Peter’s mind. It would connect to his hippocampus, creating a holographic projection that would find a specific memory that Peter wished to alter - in this case, one that Peter found retrospectively traumatic or regretful in one way shape or form - and project it externally for Peter to re-experience. Bruce had gone into a lot more detail than that, but he had spoken so quickly and passionately that Peter couldn’t remember half of it.

Peter steeled himself for the rush of emotion he was sure to be flooded by. He was looking for a chance to get closure after Tony´s death, the sudden loss of his mentor, role model, and father figure feeling like a massive steel weight on his chest. Peter had so much left unsaid, and he had expected that they would have all the time in the world after the Battle of Earth. No one had expected Tony’s passing, and ever since he felt like he couldn’t really take a full breath.

Stepping into the centre of the large square room, Peter looked back at Bruce for the go-ahead. They exchanged a nod, and Peter placed the glasses behind his ears. Nothing happened for a moment until slowly but surely, his surroundings began to change as the glasses drew the memory out from his subconscious.

He was momentarily surprised at the memory that was chosen. It wasn’t particularly traumatic, but Peter had wished it had ended differently. Peter was once again in the Avengers facility third floor hallway, face to face with Tony who was currently voicing his disappointment. This was the day he had piloted a plane and safely crash landed it in the Upper Bay area. His first big screw up since the Ferry Incident.

“I’m not going to take your suit, so don’t give me that whole ‘deer in the headlights’ thing.”

And there Tony was in front of him. “Thank you Mr Stark. I just really want you to give me a chance, y’know?” Before Peter could think too much, he felt his lips forming the familiar words. This was a memory he had replayed in his head many times before, the shame and guilt of his failure having kept him up at night for countless months after.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in you, Pete.” Tony placed his hand on Peter’s shoulder and worried his bottom lip for a second before continuing. “You did great today.”

Peter had to blink back the tears that formed at the corners of his eyes. He knew that Tony wasn’t really there in front of him. He knew that Tony’s hand wasn’t resting on his shoulder either, but somehow he felt the warmth and weight of Tony’s presence. It was as if they were back in that moment, transported back in time to before. To Peter, there was only before and after. After hasn’t been so good.

The warmth of Tony’s hand lifted off of Peter’s shoulder, and he turned to watch as Tony walked down the hallway towards his domain inside of the Avengers facility.

Peter was still momentarily frozen in place, his mind not quite catching up with his emotions, and he was worried for a moment that he would forget to even speak.

“Wait, Mr Stark!” Peter finally managed to call out.

Tony stopped mid-stride, turning on his heel to look back at where Peter stood silhouetted against the golden afternoon sun. “Yeah, kid?”

Peter did a half-walk half-run to where Tony was standing, slowing down to a walk once he was only a few feet away. He took the time to take it all in. The way Tony looked so real; it was hard for Peter to process that this was only a memory. Taking a deep breath, he found the words he was looking for.

“Thank you... for everything, Tony. Over the last few years, you showed me how to be a hero, and how to trust myself. I never really had a dad in my life, and I’m so lucky to have been able to consider you my father.” Peter swallowed against the lump in his throat that just wouldn’t go away, the tears beginning to flow freely despite his best efforts. “Sometimes I do the wrong thing and I mess up, and whenever I don’t know what to do, you’ve been there to guide me and show me how to be better than who I was yesterday...What I’m really trying to say is thank you.”

Peter stepped in closer to Tony and wrapped his arms around him. He could feel the generated phantom sensations of Tony’s suit fabric against his fingertips, the familiar smell of his cologne, and the warmth of the embrace that Peter knew wasn’t real, but he couldn’t bring himself to let go.

“It’s part of the hero gig, kiddo. If you ever need to talk or whatever, I’ll always be here.”

Peter felt the two gentle pats on his back before the hug faded into nothingness once more, the illusion crumbling around him. As the last of Tony’s projection dissolved, he felt a trembling start in his fingertips and spread like a wildfire throughout his body as he crumpled slowly to his knees. His heart felt like it was filled with lead. He thought having his chance to properly thank Tony, to see him again, to alter the ending of a memory he resented for so long would make him feel whole again. Instead, it twisted the knife in his chest and made him realise how lost he felt without Tony in his life.

Through a blur of tears, Peter saw the large green form of Banner approaching where he had sunk in the centre of the room. Slowly kneeling down in front of Peter, Bruce gently plucked the glasses from Peter’s face, and set them aside gently on the ground beside them. Bruce reshuffled where he was sitting so he was situated beside the young Avenger, and placing one arm over Peter’s shoulders, drew him in for a side hug.

“I’m sorry, Peter.” Peter felt the hum of Bruce’s voice from where his ear rested on the side of his chest.

“I just really miss him.”

“I know, me too.”

[honestsycrets]

Medusa II: Make Her Sing

❛ summary | After Ragnar cheats on Aslaug, or so she believes, she seeks revenge on Ragnar’s favourite son. Following the myth of Poseidon and Medusa. Sy’s pick.

❛  warnings | non-con in chapter two, revenge, aggression

❛ pairing | poseidon!bjorn x medusa!reader

❛ type | multishot

His world was insanity.

Ivar, god of madness, they called him. Not fit to rule Tartarus, they said. He had snapped, they said. Not fit to rule anything but booze and the rage that burst through his veins. For that, they would pay one by one.

Bjorn would pay.

“What is wrong brother!?” Ivar bellows, his arm thrown around his beautiful wife’s back. “Are you feeling sick?”

It was time for the celebratory event of Athens. Lagrtha sat upon her throne as queen while Ragnar so happened to amble around her, not unnoticed by Aslaug, the great mother. Ivar came with his dark-skinned nymphs bearing the booze and dance to join the gods in Olympus in celebration. Bjorn’s hand was deep in his grouped braids. His headache was growing, and growing, and growing. The figures in front of him waving in his stepmother’s aurelian clouds.

“He should lay down.” Torvi, the mother of his sweet Demeter, guides him to stand up. His feet stagger, sloshing drink over the ivory floors underneath his feet.

“He’s far too drunk for that!” Ivar chortles. “Or perhaps he’s seasick, are you seasick brother?”

“No.” He answers in a gruff voice. “I just… need… need…”

“Get him out of here, he is drunk!” Ivar laughs, bringing his beloved son up to kiss his forehead. “Tell your uncle Baldur, tell him to go.”

“Go!”

Apart from the jovial festivities of the night, no one follows him. No one but his loyal Torvi, guiding him down fluffy cloud and cloud until they hover about a great body of water. She helps him into his chariot. Then her hand extends to the hippocampus that guides his fleet to ensure all was well with them. She comes back to his side.

“Are you going to be alright, Bjorn?” She asks him. Bjorn leans up, grasping the braided side of her head to lay one chaste kiss upon her forehead.

“It’s Ivar.” He sways, fisting his leads. She stares into his piercing blue eyes to find her answer, clouding over. Torvi knows his trickery and source of deceit. She could spot it before it came to a head. Bjorn’s eyes were glazing over.

“Are you sure Ivar has not pricked you?” Torvi asks. Bjorn’s nose scrunches up.

“Why would he if we relieved him of Tartarus?” Bjorn asks. “He can be as loose and free as he wants.”

“Because we gave Hel to Harald,” Torvi says. “Do you not think that embarrassed him?”

“You know nothing about my brothers, Torvi.” Bjorn flicks his wrists, commanding the hippocampi with an ethereal slap. “Prósō!”

Hooves thrash the smooth surface of still waters and carry the god across the seas. His triton jabs the ocean and causes violent waves to stir over one another. The ocean cries out, waves folding one over another and slapping the grainy shore.

Bjorn was upset with something-- or someone. You knew upon the relentless waters that were coming down upon Athens. For five straight days, rainwater coursed the streets, spilling over even to your temple where you and the temple priestesses desperately swept away the water from extinguishing the lamps.

“He is angry!” A priestess of blonde hair calls out to you, chasing baskets from down the steps where they were flowing. The wind made child’s toys of you all, tossing you one way and then another. You grasp the weaved rim of your basket, tugging it back within the temple where water was cast out enough that a thin layer formed under your feet.

“I know he is angry!” You call back to her, bouncing off the golden pillars of the temple you called home. “But what can be done?!”

“Speak to him, Medusa!” She responds together with the cries of the other priestesses there. “The crops and children are drowning in this water! It won’t cease!”

You come to an amphora, draining your skirt of the excess water that clung to your skin like a second skin. The crops were drowning-- there would be no food for harvest if this rain continued in the way it had. You had to talk to him but you fear his reaction.

What was the source of his rage?

Seven days pass. Two since your voice rippled through the waters, reached him under the seas where he sat upon his throne listening to wretched flutes tainted with illusion. Your voice, moans, beg his most basic of instincts to react. His hands flex around his triton, curling with pesky ivy even under the seas.

“Bjorn!”

Make it stop.

“Bjorn!”

Incensed, Bjorn throws his shaved head back, hissing in vehement rage. He wretches his Triton back, whirling it through a pillar coated in strange sea creatures. Fine, he thinks-- if this was what you wanted, the god could give it to you. His mother, after all, couldn’t. She was only a woman. The waters stilled, draining back out to the sea.

Priestesses were all away, save you, his mother’s beloved princess with skin as smooth as his still waters. Your long hair was unbound as you put out the temple fires, finished with a day of desperate sacrifice to the Goddess of Wisdom. However, most were begging for a dought at Poseidon’s, some came for knowledge in how to handle this flood. Others had come to grieve.

Your skin is chill to the touch, covered in the salt of the sea as earlier you had been the one to sweep away the water that might damage the temple floors while the others helped with soiled baskets and remnants of sacrifice. You loosen the leather strap binding your hair, running your fingers past salt licked strands of hair. Tying it on the strap of your dress, you pull the sodden fabric about your legs up, coming to the last of the lamps that needed to be put out. A distant caw of a bird stops you, followed by the appearance of a sudden shady figure. Outlined by the pearly sun behind him, you almost don’t recognize him if but for the eyes like a fine jewel.

“Bjorn.” You stop from putting out the last lamp and pull up your skirts, slapping your smooth skin as you pull it up from your legs. You step up, then stop, realizing that Bjorn hasn’t said anything at all.

“Bjorn?”

He remains unmoved in speech but takes a step forward. One harsh one that forms cracks under his steps. Cracks pierce through the ivory floors. You quickly find the realization that this isn’t the Bjorn you knew. His shaved head a sudden change, but none so different as his unkempt features that match the hate in his eyes.

“Why do you keep calling me?” He hisses.

“I--”

“You keep calling me!” This time a bellow that causes the temple to quake. Frenzied footsteps of other priestesses become scarce.

“I did-- I didn’t mean to anger you.” You say meekly and it only serves to enrage him further. “The floods were drowning the crop.”

“I know.”

“Then why would you…” You begin, eyes darting around as if attempting to make sense of it. When you look back up, it's to Bjorn’s large hand closing around your throat. A pathetic squeak slips free of your lips. Bjorn rips your dress free off your shoulder, then the other, staring at your exposed breasts.

“What are you doing! I don’t understand!”

“Of course you fucking understand.” Bjorn rips your dress the rest of the way down your stomach and hips. It pools around your toes. The god’s hand crosses your wet waist to savor the exposed skin that he’s so often desired, despite how you shake in the cool air before him.

“Did you think I didn’t hear you?” He hisses, twisting you around and forcing you to cling onto the pillar before you. His wrap falls from his hips and when he again takes your hips, you feel the tip of his hardened flesh seeking your unused hole.

“Please--” The word is stretched when he plunges his cock into your hole, pounding his hips just as quickly as he got in. The god’s size is thick, claiming and filling your sex with every pounding thrust that he makes. Your breath is tight as you cling onto the pillar, ignoring the fact that your blood spills down his cock in a way that even a virgin wouldn’t bleed. Then, moments later, turning your head to face the statue of Lagertha that sits proudly. You swear you see her leering eyes, shifting from the sight of your bodies to raise her shield.

Rejecting you. Rejecting the madness of Bjorn’s union.

You slump over the column.

The god wakes out of his weeklong slumber upon the ivory tile. Underneath him, stained blood. On top of him to his startle is your ruined body, your hair glistens over the tile in streams. He jolts up, globs of his cum ooze over his flaccid cock and in his horror, he puts everything that has happened together.

“You’ve deflowered her in my temple.” His mother’s woven sandals are beside him. Bjorn’s gaze snaps up to her, desperate in nature. Lagertha’s voice churns hateful quick. “She’s ruined.”

Bjorn looks down to your bruised body. Last night is a blur. Not just last night, but the entirety of the week. He reaches for his wrap and stands up to bind it in its proper place.

“She’s not ruined.” Bjorn insists. “It is only virginity.”

“This is my temple!” Lagertha clangs her spear upon the ivory floors. The gorgon upon the floor doesn’t move, but between them, there is an understanding. If Lagertha had done the same to Bjorn’s temples, there would be a punishment to any of her lovers. The same should go for you.

“This was not her fault.”

“It was,” Lagertha says. “Unless you take the blame?”

Bjorn says nothing as he looks down to your crumbled body upon the floor. None... because there was none for him to take. As a privileged god, he had no one to answer to. He’s convinced that this was not his fault. It couldn’t be his fault… right? He did not remember it.

But he knew he did it. The memories-- they flood in. He recalls your body squeezing him, tight as the virgin you were. You weren’t conscious, but like some animal, he pumped himself into you in the dead of night. Like an animal contaminated by the desire that he kept so controlled, finally unleashed.

“No.”

Rapist.

“I did not think so. Go then.” Lagertha sneers. Then she jerks her head to the side. “I’ll deal with my priestess.”

Was his mother going to hurt her? Likely. Lagertha’s wrath was well known throughout. Bjorn’s hand forms a fist as he thumps out of her temple. His steps crack the earth outside of the temple, early morning screams ripping through his mother’s beloved Athens. The lord of the sea pounds forward, going back into the sea from which he came. In the cloud above, the youngest of the sons of Ragnar reclines on a fluffy cloud, his legs bound.

“Athens is screaming.” He cackles.

Bjorn’s wet tears churn the sea. Boats rip onto the shore and see their deaths in the spiky rock. He looks to his fox-like mother, whose hair is thrown over one shoulder by a line of beautiful lotus. She leans into her favourite son, kissing his precious cheekbone. When you run free of the temple, hair hissing, Aslaug speaks.

“And so is Medusa.”

@igetcarriedawaywithyou, @kylobien, @titty-teetee, @breathlessouls, @nejijjeoroo, @bcat1291, @readsalot73, @mslothbrok, @romanchronicles, @captstefanbrandt, @ailucascen, @michaeliskindahot, @cbouvier23, @naaladareia, @cbouvier23, @the-geeky-engineer, @dorned, @lisinfleur, @funmadnessandbadassvikings, @tephi101, @akamaiden, @ethereallysimple, @venusloviing, @happylittlepuppydog, @beyond-the-ashes, @slutforrpg, @hipsternoionlylikeunicorns, @mixedwiththemoon, @sparklemichele, @alicedopey, @lif3snotouttogetyou, @rubyquartzshades, @noregretsandyeteveryregret, @dangerous-like-a-loaded-pistol, @deathbyarabbit, @unacceptabletatertots, @beyond-the-ashes (no sig), @babypink224221, @ivarandersen, @queen-see-ya-in-valhalla, @moose-squirrel-asstiel, @icarus-fell-in-spring, @end-of-night, @gruffle1, @lol-haha-joke @arses21434,  @smileyparrots, @Moosemittens13, @miss-artemis-wild, @two-unbeatable-beaters, @wonderwoman292, @wish-i-was-a-mermaid, @fangirls94, @mcuimxgine, @killerb00sdeath, @heartbeats-wildly, @boo20017, @acacheofstrange, @shaelyn102, @astoryoffireandlight, @smokealone, @shaelyn102 @laketaj24, @peaceisadirtyword, @ly--canthrope@cris101071 @daughterofthenight117 @unassumingviking , @inforapound @wichesterwife27 , @ladyofsoa

[convervative-blog]

so, ptsd is the only dsm v recognized disorder which is classified as a psychiatric injury and not a congenital, inherited expression (ok blah ignoring that of course many things like bpd are now becoming known as typical complex trauma/abuse responses but thats not what this post is about, marsha linehan was robbed i will fight everybody...anyway...)  alot of ppl really seem to misunderstand what ptsd is. it is an injury to our brains, it is a psychiatric injury which clearly and visibly affects our limbic system, our amygdala, our hippocampus. it literally lights up how we process memories events circumstances. it activates our pons, the area in our brainstem responsible for controlling stress, our “lizard brain”, the part of our brain that instinctively knows when shit is wrong and reacts and slams the 10/10 button before u have time to think. the adrenal system, the part that floods ur body with cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins, epinephrine, your muscles tighten, your pupils dilate, you know you can put your fist through something if you have to, you know you can make a run for that closet and hide in it if you have to, you know you gotta do something because shit is going down motherfucker!!!!!!!!!!  ok so like some ppl with ptsd can be violent. we see this in media portrayals of ptsd all the time, the guy had a gun he was in iraq he went crazy. like thats the normal narrative, and ok within our community we really dont want to discuss how this is real and could be real for people. ok of fucking course that narrative is bullshit because most people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violent crime not perpetrators and we need more positive inclusive healing narratives of ptsd because we want to see representations of ourselves! but this isnt about that because weve seen those posts, weve done the discourse, were doing the discourse, so im gonna talk about something else. something thats gonna piss everybody off so buckle up cowboys yeet haw.  some ppl with ptsd become abusers, thats a fact. because some people cant deal with stress at all, they become hyperreactive and that reaction is fists, yelling, screaming, throwing things, becoming incoherent and nonsensical, etc etc. when your heart reaches 180 bpm (and it does with virtually any indistinguishable environmental or emotional trigger, it absolutely gets that high when your lizard brain takes over), you stop being able to think logically.  part of having ptsd for me was learning that this is me, i dont hit but when little things happen my brain completely sheds the part of my personality that is logical reasonable and calm. my decision-making part, my risk/reward analyzing part, my organizing part. frontal lobe? lol seeya. i immediately become enraged and if i do nothing else ill usually yell/scream at TOP VOLUME and then after about 30 seconds, 60 seconds, when it cools off ill feel bad about it. sometimes when im having a bad day and multiple little things have gone on, ill get progressively worse and storm around swearing and slamming things, simmering, trying trying trying to get it under control, trying to fight through the hormone surge to claw back my reason, my sanity. its something i literally cant control, i have tried my whole life. im not denying responsibility for it of course im responsible for it, but thats reality, its my reality. its my reality that the person i live with has secondary ptsd because of me because of my life because i was a sex trafficking victim from age 8 and i cant deal with dropping a cup of water anymore because of it. my brain is literally damaged, literally, literally, literally.  and i have hurt people because of it. maybe not physically but that doesnt matter. theres a person on this planet who is affected by the things ive done and will always be affected, and there is nothing i can do to fix that, or change it. as long as im alive it will be their reality as my caretaker (because atm im unemployable obviously for those reasons).  and you go to therapy and they say “try writing about your anger,” you know. “try focusing on what makes you angry.” nothing makes me angry its not about that, its not about that at all and it shows a distinct lack of comprehension of what ptsd is. ptsd is your brain being unable to deal with minor, mundane, ordinary stress. and ppl dont grasp what the word stress in neurological contexts means. it means novel, sudden actions. there are even good stressors and bad stressors. sex is a good stressor! lots of action! lots of cognitive shit going on! going on a date, going to a movie, riding a roller coaster, meeting a stranger, being startled accidentally, dropping/breaking things, running out of meds, being late for something. theyre all ordinary things that most ppl can deal with even if its inconvenient. people with ptsd cant. because our brains are conditioned to view every stressor response as a potential trauma.  funny thing is when trauma is actually going down our brains are pretty damn good at entering the fun zone, its that latent logical shit, ya know what i mean. everything gets slow-motion and youre able to shut down your emotions and just act and do the shit that has to be done, just clench up and freeze and let your eyes drift and you’re ready to endure.  when you spend your whole life like that, every little thing becomes something your brain assesses as potentially traumatic, potentially going to harm you, your brain doesn’t know the difference between the telephone ringing unexpectedly or a masked intruder about to rape you. its like the fucking tumblr algorithm. beige tones?????//? ThIs iS nOt My SAfe PLAacE?!!! bam adrenal response. and im not trying to justify abuse, this isnt my attempt to justify it, but it is a real issue that exists for alot of people? probably people who arent involved in our community bc this seems to affect ppl who dont have regular access to online resources proportionately more (there is a link between being well-educated on ptsd and being better able to manage your ptsd, shocker water is wet etc etc, but its not imminently an obvious correlation! i dont hit people or break down the doors specifically because ive devoted my life to learning about and understanding my disorder) but there are people. we dont want to talk about this shit bc its like an open fucking secret, some of us get crazy some of us go fawn-like and become people pleasers, some of us get violent (’violence’ as a word im using to refer to ppl who explode outwardly and impact their environment in some way, not necessarily physical 100% of the time, you dont need to hit someone to be a violent person) anyway just thought id rant about this good luck chiddlers

[mayakyan]

I was 14 or 15 when this first aired on Mtv. I think it was 1994-95?

Sam Keith's The Maxx, inspired me to draw In a style similar to his own, but eventually it wore off and I found my own style. My enjoyment for this series never faded even as I forgot about this series, when reminded of it, nothing but the fondest memories flood the hippocampus part of my brain. Sam's style is His own and noone elses. I Love the cerebral and existential feel with some multidimensional aspects of this comic series. It goes pretty deep, yet still not deep enough for me. Inception me till I beg for you to stop!

Altern84 made a fan edit of this making it into a movie, editing out intros, outros and other tidbits. I am about to watch now for the first time. I am quite excited!

If anyone is interested visit Altern84 on Tumblr and/or YouTube to see what he edited. He gives a 9:37 min explaination. I'd subscribe to him too because he makes a bunch of fan edits for movies and such. A Huge Thank You to Altern84 for making this Fan Edit!!!

P.s. the mask raindrop transition into the bridge scene, creative editing, It's seems like a remastering. Professional quality.

The Maxx Movie

HD LINK: https://mega.nz/file/BRYk1YCb#fforoC5K2Zw-LGf4NajrR5qbEkqFwA-NKxSe8CQamNM

LINK: https://www.bitchute.com/video/bxqFubo5GxVJ/

TRAILER: https://youtu.be/fUXtvrofSBo

[rilenerocks]

The year 1990 was more than the beginning of a new decade for me. I had just survived three years of traumatic losses, hits to my primal weakness, abandonment. My cousin had committed suicide in 1987. My best friend committed suicide in 1988. In 1989, both my parents were diagnosed with cancers. My mom survived hers, but my dad died. My husband ran for public office and won after having lost an election 4 years earlier. All the walking door to door ultimately took out his back. After writhing in pain for weeks, with me sleeping on the floor because he couldn’t get comfortable in bed, he had surgery. Everyone was in a physical mess but me. I was working, helping my parents, helping Michael and taking care of my kids who were seven and two and a half. What a mad time that year was. I just ran from place to place, tending to people and trying to keep up with the daily demands of life. I knew I was changing inside but I couldn’t tell how those changes would manifest themselves. I was 38 years old.

  When 1990 began, I decided to try fixing what I could. I planned a trip with my mom and kids, wanting to meet a long held dream of hers to visit Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. My dad wasn’t a big traveler. I thought that I could give her a dream and also get a few goodies for my tired brain. I’d spent years studying the Civil War and figured that I could pack in a few sights of my own that were near enough to be reasonable add-on destinations. What an ill-conceived plan. My mom never got a driver’s license, so I took off as the only driver on a 12 and a half hour trip with her and my two kids in the back seat. We managed a stop at Jefferson’s Monticello and then spent a few days walking the cobbled streets of Williamsburg. My mom had a bad knee. She’d stubbornly refused surgery and was favoring it a lot as we roamed around. I was excitedly getting ready to head for Richmond to check out the history and hit a few battlegrounds before we turned for home.

Our first stop was Jefferson Davis’ White House of the Confederacy. We drove down Monument Avenue, the site of many enormous statues which have since ignited controversy about celebrating the heroes of a slave-owning culture.( A story for a different blogpost.) When we arrived at our destination, I was immediately anxious as the house had multiple stories and no elevator. I tried to talk my mother into staying on the first floor but she insisted on seeing everything, stairs or not. Up we went and down we came. By the time we reached the first floor again, she could barely walk. We made our way to our hotel where the kindly matriarch of a family reunion there, dispatched some young men to help me get my dependent menagerie to our room. In those pre-cell phone days, I went down to the lobby to call Michael and both furiously and tearfully told him I was bringing everyone home the next day. I was angry and despondent. This was supposed to be the corner-turning time for me. Instead, it just felt like a continuation of the previous years.

We made it back home with me driving through some white-knuckle rainstorms in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. We dropped mom off at her place and arrived at our house, the kids still miraculously alive. When we got there, Michael told me that the day before the return home, our dog Sydney had run out into the street to chase an animal and had been hit by a car. She was alive with a new thousand dollar leg. I felt battered in almost every way. But there was nothing to do but move on. During catastrophic 1989, I hadn’t any extra time to work on my burgeoning garden. Too many sick people.

We’d been in our home for almost 12 years. For the first eight or nine, we’d been reclaiming our old house from its life as a three apartment rental building. In 1930, at the height of the Depression, such a large home was too expensive to maintain. We were slowly converting it back into a single family residence. The yard was mostly barren except for some overgrown shrubs along the front sidewalk which were filled with huge weeds and volunteer trees. Over time, we reclaimed that space. We fenced the back yard and Michael started thinking vegetables while I gingerly began making my way through the world of flowers, shrubs and ornamental trees. I started with petunias and marigolds. Then the ball began rolling.

  I decided to attack the ground. My dear friend Joanne heard what I was doing and showed up one day carrying a big flat of perennial plants that had been sold on the cheap after a flood wiped out a lot full of flowers. Perennials. I knew enough to realize that you couldn’t just slap those any old where, and after reading what they were and what they needed, I decided to de-sod a large section of my south front yard to give them a proper home. Every evening after work and on the weekends, I became a human rototiller, digging 6-8” deep until I was in the dark rich soil for which this part of the world is famous. I heaved all the grass and roots into a wheelbarrow which I carted away every day. I planted all 36 of my new plants and then added more. Water and hope came next.

In the meantime, I’d crippled myself. My right side ached from hip to foot. I went to the doctor who prescribed painkillers and muscle relaxers which didn’t do much but make me groggy and feel as if my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. While chatting with a friend, I found out about a unique Norwegian massage therapist who practiced the art of reflexology. I wasn’t sure what it was but was game for anything to relieve the pain. And in those days, I had health insurance that covered the treatment. I remember my first appointment. You would lie on your back on a table with otherworldly spacey music playing softly and Bjorg would gently begin elongating your body. Her motions were smooth, gentle and slow. I had the sense of being heated taffy, pulled into a shape other than the one I’d brought to her. The pace of each soft tissue pull was glacially slow and I found myself relaxing into it. As she went along, Bjorg asked me questions about my activities, basing those on what she was feeling in my body. On the first day, she told me that both my hip area and my heels were crunched up into balls that didn’t much resemble the normal feel of long muscles, tendons or ligaments. I wasn’t exactly sure how she knew all that but after she worked on one side of me, I could tell that it definitely felt longer than the other. I decided to make a series of successive appointments. After four of them, the initial pain which had driven me to her was gone.

That was terrific but even more interesting were the discoveries that she helped me make along the way. She would stop at a place like my thumb muscle and ask why I thought it was unusually large. I started remembering all the things I’d done with my hands. I remembered angrily squeezing a baseball bat while in elementary school when getting teased about my softball prowess and thinking angrily about how I was going to hit a ball far over the head of anyone trying to catch it. I could feel myself lifting my Danish cast-iron casserole and pots that I stupidly chose when I got married, never thinking about how heavy they’d feel after years went by. They never broke so I didn’t replace them – I just got more tired of lifting them. Why didn’t someone tell me about lightweight stainless steel? Bjorg told me that my neck felt like I was someone who hurled myself headlong against life. That sounded right to me. While working on my soft tissue in my thigh, she stopped and asked, what happened here? After thinking a minute, I remembered a ligament tear I got in that spot one summer when I was thirteen. My appointments with her began to evoke all kinds of memories which we’d discuss as she worked out my knots.

One day, I was talking with her about how surprised I was to be delving into so many things that had happened long ago. She made one particular statement that I’ve always thought about over the years – the body remembers its pain. I believe that and more. I’m not sure what magical powers Bjorg possessed. I always thought she might be some kind of shaman or witch doctor. But she resonated with me and said things about the human body and ultimately who we people are in our entirety that make a lot of sense to me. The body remembers its pain. We can all look at scars that we’ve acquired over the years. I dropped a glass jar when I was a kid, trying to use it to save newborn guppies from their cannibalistic parents who gobbled them up right after their births. While scrambling to save the babies, I gashed my leg, creating part of my body’s story. The vestiges of that day are visible on my right knee.

When I broke my nose when I was eight, it healed with a deviated septum. In cold weather, both my cut leg and my nose ache, the way you feel when you eat something that gives you brain freeze. I’ve taken some bad spills in my time, a few memorable ones from horseback. The images of my spine show the signs of those falls from my teen years through my early 30’s. As I age, they will exact a price from me as have the other physical choices I’ve made throughout my life. The body remembers its pain.

But what about our minds, housed in our brains, the memory areas stimulating the study of the hippocampus, the amygdala and other regions which are responsible for everything from motor skills to memory? The brain remembers its pain?

I suspect this is correct. But the accumulation of experiences over time make those memories difficult to access. Is this papering over of memories accomplished by personal cognitive necessity, by time or by a combination of both? Is preverbal learning and experience difficult to remember because the language tool is necessary for unearthing them? I don’t know the answer to these questions but my instincts tell me that even the smallest babies are recording and processing experiences that, barring physical injury to the brain, remain parts of them for the rest of their lives. The emotional and psychological wounds that affect us are as durable as any physical injury but are harder to see. The same is probably true for the good things that happen to us. What gets complicated is when we have reactions to situations that seem inappropriate to what’s actually happening and can’t feel or find the reason for those responses. I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic. My husband was raised by parents who should probably never had children. After they left him, very sick with pneumonia, alone in a hospital at age 2, he’d gotten up and wandered out of his room. He was then restrained to his bed. That was his first cognitive memory. When I met him, he was twenty-two. At the first sign of what he perceived as an emotional threat, he withdrew into what I called his rabbit hole, a safe alone place where he could protect himself. He’d clearly developed that place as a defense mechanism for when he felt isolated and threatened.  Happily, I was just the person for diving into rabbit holes, trying to discover why they existed. I, who was well loved by my parents, was encouraged to be outgoing and rewarded for that behavior. We made a perfect pair with our very different origins. His psychological wounds were always operating in the background. And of course, in time, the ones I collected were lurking around as well. I think that’s probably how it is for most of us. Some people have no idea how they came to be who they are and are utterly uninterested in figuring it out. They choose to be shut off from those painful times. Others, like me, go poking around all the time, looking for reasons for everything. From my personal vantage point, I find that looking for and through those painful times ultimately disarms them from their power to resurge and take over my behavior. They are from the long ago. I guess we all have to find what works for us. I still can’t help wishing I could convince everyone to try things my way. Michael wished I would intermittently “take a hike,” and stop tromping around in his scar-filled interior landscape. Oh well….

Some time ago, I was walking down a sidewalk and a woman was walking toward me, pushing her baby in a stroller. The baby made eye contact with me which held as we got closer and closer to each other. I made a concerted effort to smile brightly and warmly at this child although I knew it was unlikely we’d ever see each other again. The way I see it is this – I’d rather make a positive, happy, even if unremembered, memory than scowl and put a durable wound into a little head. Maybe that’s simplistic but I’m well-intentioned.

Durable Wounds The year 1990 was more than the beginning of a new decade for me. I had just survived three years of traumatic losses, hits to my primal weakness, abandonment.

[djgblogger-blog]

Living with neighborhood violence may shape teens' brains

http://bit.ly/2t2Ujps

Community violence has effects on teen behavior. New research looks into their brains. AP Photo/Ben Margot

Flinching as a gunshot whizzes past your window. Covering your ears when a police car races down your street, sirens blaring. Walking past a drug deal on your block or a beating at your school.

For kids living in picket-fence suburbia, these experiences might be rare. But for their peers in urban poverty, they are all too commonplace. More than half of children and adolescents living in cities have experienced some form of community violence – acts of disturbance or crime, such as drug use, beatings, shootings, stabbings and break-ins, within their neighborhoods or schools.

Researchers know from decades of work that exposure to community violence can lead to emotional, social and cognitive problems. Kids might have difficulty regulating emotions, paying attention or concentrating at school. Over time, kids living with the stress of community violence may become less engaged in school, withdraw from friends or show symptoms of post-traumatic stress, like irritability and intrusive thoughts. In short, living in an unsafe community can have a corrosive effect on child development.

Few studies, though, have specifically looked at the toll community violence may take on the growing brain. Recently, I studied this question in collaboration with a team of researchers here at the University of Southern California. Our goal: to see whether individuals exposed to more community violence in their early teen years would show differences in the structure and function of their brains in late adolescence.

Witnessing crime has lots of downstream effects. ATOMIC Hot Links, CC BY-NC-ND

Connecting community violence to the brain

My colleague Gayla Margolin, an expert on youth exposure to violence, has been following a sample of Los Angeles-area youth for over a decade. When these teens were about 13 years old, she asked them to fill out a checklist of community violence experiences: hearing gun shots, witnessing a beating, seeing someone do drugs, watching someone get arrested or chased by the police, seeing someone get chased by a gang, or seeing someone get threatened with a beating or stabbing. For our current study, we added these items together to get an overall sense of how much violence each teen had witnessed in his or her neighborhood.

About four years after they took the community violence survey, when the youth were around 17 years old, we asked 22 of them to lie down in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine while we scanned their brains. When we examined the images we’d collected, we zeroed in on two small but critically important structures near the base of the brain: the hippocampus and the amygdala.

The hippocampus and amygdala are beneath the cortex of the brain. Blamb/Shutterstock.com

The hippocampus, a curved structure shaped like the seahorse it is named after, plays a role in learning and memory. Stress hormones seem to shrink this structure, and adverse childhood experiences like abuse and neglect have been linked with smaller hippocampal volumes later in life. One recent review of research on child maltreatment found that early abuse and neglect predicted smaller hippocampal size in 30 out of 37 studies that looked at the connection.

In our current study, we also measured the size of the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure located close to the hippocampus that is known for its involvement in emotion and threat-related processing. Childhood adversity has also been tied to the size of the amygdala, although this research has been mixed: Some studies have found that people exposed to early stress show smaller amygdala volumes, some show larger amygdalae and some show no relationship at all.

In addition to looking at the size of the hippocampus and amygdala, we also looked at patterns of interconnection between these structures and other regions of the brain. Which parts of the brain “talked” more to each other, as reflected by more tightly correlated levels of activation?

A neural signature of community violence?

In our data, we found that witnessing violence in early adolescence predicted smaller volumes of both the hippocampus and amygdala in this group of teens.

We didn’t measure the absolute size of these structures – instead we tested the relationship between community violence and brain volume. In other words, if our participants told us at around age 13 that their neighborhoods were higher in crime and violence, the size of these critical brain structures looked smaller about four years later, compared to teens who reported less community violence. Interestingly, this link held up even after we controlled for the youth’s socioeconomic status (family income and education) and their present-day exposure to community violence.

These brain regions showed stronger connectivity with the hippocampus among youth exposed to greater community violence. Darby Saxbe, CC BY-ND

We also found that, among youth exposed to more community violence, the right hippocampus showed stronger connections with other brain regions linked to emotion processing and stress, perhaps suggesting that these youth were more vigilant to potential threat. If you’re used to encountering dangerous situations, maybe you and your brain learn to stay alert to avoid the next potential threat that lurks around the corner.

Our study dovetails with other research on early stress and the brain but is the first to specifically look at the link between community violence and the size and connectivity of the hippocampus and amygdala. Our sample was quite small and limited by the fact that we scanned the youth only once, in late adolescence. Therefore, although our measure of community violence was collected about four years before the scan, we have no way of knowing for sure whether community violence actually led to changes in the hippocampus and amygdala. It’s possible these brain differences preceded the youths’ exposure to community violence. For these reasons, this study should be considered preliminary and needs to be corroborated by much more research.

Despite its limitations, this work takes a first step in showing that community violence is linked with detectable differences in the teen brain in ways that are consistent with other forms of early adversity like abuse and neglect. These effects might be due to stress hormones that flood the developing brain and affect the growth of neural structures like the hippocampus and amygdala.

Youth with smaller hippocampal volumes may show learning and cognitive difficulties, whereas smaller amygdala volumes have been linked with depression risk and behavior problems. In other words, if, as we suspect, community violence has a toxic effect on the brain, downstream effects may emerge both at school and at home. And those effects converge with the deficits in attention, cognition and emotion regulation that other researchers have already noted in youth exposed to community violence. They may even endure into adulthood and contribute to a cascade of risk for further problems in employment and education.

Although community violence may be widespread, that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. Developing kids and teens deserve to feel safe at home, in their schools and in their neighborhoods. As our results and those of many other studies show, growing up in a violent or chaotic environment seems to leave traces on the brain, and may put youth at risk for other problems down the line. Although we don’t usually think of street lights, after-school programs and revitalized park spaces as brain-building improvements, public investment in urban neighborhood safety and quality may have wide-ranging benefits for teens at risk.

Darby Saxbe receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

[blcrawford-blog]

How to get rid of PORN addiction

In 1997 my aunt, her boyfriend Clint and I went to Blockbuster to rent the movie Space Jam on vhs.  I popped that bad boy in, watched it, enjoyed it and eventually went to bed.  The next morning Clint woke me up and said, “Kiddo, your aunt and I are going for a quick run, the apple jacks and milk is on the table.”  Moments later I got up, locked the door after him, rewind Space Jam to watch it again.  When I hit play and turn the volume to up to fifty, what I saw literally changed the outcome of my life.  IT WAS PORN!  Full fledge, raw and uncut SEX.  I was astounded, flabbergasted, in amazement –all that stuff.  OMG!  And the language: cunt this, cock that, blow me and I’m cumming (soprano voice).

After regaining consciousness I rechecked the door locked again, turned the volume down to forty-seven and just stared, blinkless.  I sat there for about thirty minutes completely observing every nuance of about two scenes.  My body, to say the least, was awakened.  That night, well, that week I spent sleepless nights thinking about this GOLD MIND I discovered.  Clint nor my aunt never said anything, it’s like they never knew.  I never fast forwarded or rewinded it back, because I had no idea where they stopped it at.

Guys!  I spent nearly a century watching porn religiously.  By the time I reached junior high, I had a dvd collection of pornography.  When I reached high school, porn was my life.  No lie! Since my house was practically across the street from my school, during lunch I would drive home, watch a scene, grab a honey bun and get back to class.

In my early twenties, my view of women was atrocious.  One Sunday morning during church service (I can't believe I'm typing this) I got the urge, went in the bathroom stall, inserted my headphones and engulfed myself until service was over.   This is when I knew I had a problem, but I was to ashamed to tell my pastor.  I couldn't stand him knowing my dark secret.  I was an addict!

Shortly after I married my beautiful wife, had children and STILL –it only got worse.  I eventually confessed to my wife and together we started therapy. 

Here are the actionable steps I took to end this addiction.  I take that back, I don't think an addiction can be cured, rather immobilized.  Hope it helps!

Confess to someone

Most porn addicts keep their dark habit quiet, and they are extremely careful of keeping it hidden away from the world.  This is an immediate ice breaker. Admitting you have an addiction is the first step to recovery. Explain that you feel powerless and too weak to conquer this addiction.  This first step will allow you to free your dark spirit and began a new chapter.

Create a Mantra

A mantra is a phrase or statement that you read to yourself for daily encouragement.  A quote, scripture or written prayer that will keep you steadfast during this process.  This mantra will teach you a new way of thinking.  If read daily, it'll give you the ability to push past resistance or away from urge, while focusing intensely on your end goal.

After several months of this step alone, I noticed major changes.

This stimulates the human psyche to think positive.

You will begin to develop an inner conviction to keep yourself determined.

This daily practice instills memorization into your hippocampus to compose that belief.

How many times should I read my mantra a day?  As much as you'd like.

No less than three times a day.

Four to five times a day is recommended for starters.

If you work a normal eight to ten hour work shift like I did, four times will do.  I read first thing in the mornings, during both fifteen minute breaks and in traffic driving home.

During free time or before bed pull out your journal and write about how you conquered your day.  By brain dumping your thoughts on paper you are facing this addiction heads on.  And plus you're achieving small wins everyday, which ultimately build confidence.

Don't think five times is over board, remember you're an obsessive porn viewing freak!

Fight the URGE!

Urges last approximately twelve minutes at a time.  When the urge surfaces, caution yourself and quickly move on to the next moment.  If you are near the time slot you normally indulge that's when you are vulnerable, therefore the only thing you can do is stand up to temptation and overcome each moment.  

After continual involvement a person slowly looses willpower to control their actions when the craving arises.  The addiction process is an enslavement process to the brain.  If you have been involved with pornography for years, please understand this is not a ten day cure plan.  Addiction provides a shortcut to the brain's reward system by flooding the nucleus accumbens with dopamine. The hippocampus lays down memories of this rapid sense of satisfaction, and the amygdala creates a conditioned response to certain stimuli. 

This is why the mantra is so important, the addiction is currently second-nature in your brain, therefore reading your mantra multiple times daily helps reverse your addictive thinking patterns.  

Habit Replacement

Improve your learning patterns by creating a new relationship with new positive habits.  For example, if your addiction is usually performed first thing in the morning, replace that negative habits with morning exercise. Have your gym clothes, water bottle and headphones laid out in the morning prepared for great workout.  Over time this new positive habit behavior becomes repetitive and automatic.  Habit replacements that we repeat with regularity are literally ingrained into our neural pathways.

Thanks for reading!  Please Like or Share 

https://millennialhabits.blog/

 photo: SaulHerrera

[robbiefarlow-sidequestfitne-blog]

New Post has been published on Side Quest Fitness

New Post has been published on http://sidequestfitness.com/greek-gods-secrets/

The Secret the Greek Gods Didn't Want You to Know

Why You’re Zeus, Athena, and Poseidon All Wrapped into One

In the Summer of 2000, the third single off Vertical Horizon’s hit album, Everything You Want, was released on the radio.

After their second single spent 26 weeks cruising to #1 on the Billboard Charts, the band hoped their third release would send them further up the ladder of stardom. Sadly, the third track petered out at #23. And after that, they all but disappeared from the music scene.

But their third single, “You’re a God,” is the only Vertical Horizon song that eeks out of the ether and plants itself in my mind every so often. The only theory I have for why this happens is due to my fascination with godliness.

A Man of the Cloth

Here’s something you may not know about me: Years before I wanted to be the next Kevin Spacey, and decades before I changed my life via fitness and became a coach, I thought I was going to be a minister.

The notion of “being a god,” or at least, “being more godly,” has always intrigued me. It possibly explains why I love superheroes as much as I do, and why I’ve always wanted to live on top of a mountain where I could watch the world carry on below me as if I were an Olympian perched atop Mount Olympus.

But I was raised to believe in Judeo-Christian ideals. And the stories of Ancient Greece were just that: stories. Still, there was something visceral about The Olympians. The daily life of the Greek gods read more like a script of The Real World than the stories that involved Jesus preaching or roaming through the desert.

Plus, instead of one god in three forms, the Greeks believed in dozens of gods, each dedicated to their own sphere of expertise. Ares was the god of war; Artemis the goddess of the hunt; Athena the goddess of reason, intelligence, and battle strategy; Dionysus the god of wine and ecstasy (not the drug, but I’m sure he’d love Molly). Presiding over them all, of course, was the king of the gods himself—who in most stories spent his time thrusting his thunderbolt into attractive Greek women—Zeus.

Now: unless you had your head stuck up your ass for all of grade school, I’m going to assume you know who Zeus is. If you don’t, I hate you, and don’t want dumb people reading my site.

But here’s the thing about Zeus: (most of) history has been looking at Zeus in the wrong way. And I only realized there was another, far more interesting way to view Zeus while listening to Dr. Jordan Peterson’s lecture series on The Bible.

Toys for the Gods

In the mind of the Ancient Greeks, human beings were the playthings of the gods. Humanity, to the Hellenes, was beholden to the whims of the spirits that sat atop Mount Olympus. They were wild, unpredictable, and when left to their own devices, caused great suffering.

We know more today about how our world works than our Greek ancestors. But there’s still so much we don’t know of our own world. But what if there is another layer to Greek Mythology? What if you viewed The Olympians through the realm of psychology?

How do these gods change if you view them as an anthropomorphized version of our most basic human emotions?

Dramatized stories have been used since the dawn of time to teach all of humanity important lessons about how to live a good life. Greek Mythology was no different. And if you examine The Olympians as representations of our most basic human emotions, you’ll begin to see that Vertical Horizon was right: you are a god.

As Above, So Below

What’s it like when you lose control of how you feel? Does it feel like you’ve been swept away into a part of you that you can’t control? Do you feel like you’ve “possessed” by a spirit?

Or put another way, how many times have you:

Been so angry but had no idea why and blacked out, then said or did something you regret?

Have you ever loved so intensely that it leads you to do really stupid things?

Or have you ever felt so drunk on an emotion or passion that you lost yourself in pure ecstasy for a moment?

Individually, our emotions (or gods) can cause us to slip back into our most basic animal instincts. At their core, these emotions are savage. And raw emotion is untamed; wild, and unhinged. If left to their own devices, these god-emotions will do the only thing they’re designed to do.

But consciousness forces us to recognize our choices and actions. It demands that we take responsibility. It requires us to look at these god-emotions, determine what the hell they’re freaking out about, and keep them in line so that we can make good decisions about our circumstances.

Our conscious mind operates as the king of the gods; making Zeus, the king of the sky (read: mind) and the keeper of law and order, the representation of our conscious self.

Ride the Lightning

Have you ever been struck by an idea out of nowhere? Like it felt as if a light had gone off in your head? The Ancient Greeks had a word for this: enelysion. It meant, “struck by lightning.” (The word later evolved to “Elysium,” a part of the Underworld—The Elysian Fields—where the souls of the heroic and virtuous spent eternity.)

When you become consciously aware of your thoughts, actions, feelings about a situation, or your emotional state: it’s as if you’ve been blessed by Zeus and struck by lightning with (t)his revelation.

  Unconscious behavior, the kind you blame on “unruly spirits,” is you being ruled by your god-emotions. Conscious behavior, on the other hand, is you using your Zeus-mind to maintain law and order over your god-emotions.

Once you become conscious of a problem, and bring it to light with Zeus’s lightning bolt, only then do you have the capacity to make your situation better.

But when we let the gods run amuck, we become their playthings. And when one god gets rambunctious in our lives, we (can) bring about discord and disorder:

Too much spirit, and you become drunk on that which brings you ecstasy. (Dionysus)

Too much love and lust can leave you blind to the actions of those around you. (Aphrodite)

Do you find that you’re quick to anger and easily turn into a hot-headed douchebag? (Ares)

In a Glass Cage of Emotion

Myths of the ancient world may have been considered fact by those in that time, but their true intention was to help humanity understand it’s place in the world. Our ancestors created these stories so that they could explain the seasons, the rising of the sun, fertility/infertility, earthquakes, floods, violence, etc.

Now, thanks to science, we know how/why earthquakes occur, we know why the sun rises and seasons change, and science has shown us how our brains work in terms of emotions.

But how can you increase consciousness? How can you take more control over your god-emotions and live a better life?

5 Ways to Become More Conscious

Take Care of Your Body

Exercise increases your cognitive function, increases the size of your hippocampus (the area responsible for memory), and has been shown to have dramatic epigenetic effects on how your genes express themselves.

Increase Your Inner Knowledge of Yourself (Journal or write in some capacity)

“You can’t solve a problem unless you know what it is.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson. Journaling has been proving to help those with mental health issues better cope with their disease because it helps you become conscious of your problems, fears, and worries. Writing helps you shape your mind. It can show you how you perceive the world, and show you how you respond to your emotions, and how you can better deal with them.

Appreciation (Gratitude)

One of the things I love about The 5 Minute Journal that I bought my wife is that it asks her what she’s grateful for every night. We’ve now carried that over our own relationship by telling each other 3 things we appreciate about one another from that day.

Desire (Set Goals)

Humans are goal driven creatures. Having a lofty goal to aspire to gives our lives meaning. And when you’re conscious of where you want to go, and working towards that goal, your life feels more meaningful.

Attention (Meditation or Nature)

Put the phone down, pick your ass up off the couch, and pause the video games for a few minutes each day. Take a walk in nature and observe the world around you. Or meditate. But find a way to quiet your mind so that you can connect to your mind.

We’re Animals at Heart

Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to theorize that our emotions evolved over time in the same way as our inherited genetic traits. Our ancestors needed these emotions to survive in the wild. And no matter how much we try and fight it: we’re still animals at our core. There’s still a “lizard brain” that operates and controls much of our day to day life. Our emotions are still as savage as ever.

We’ve civilized as a species. We’ve built cities, honed fine metals, discovered the building blocks of the universe, set foot on the moon, and flown to the heavens. Our ancestors would consider us gods if they could see what we’ve accomplished.

But we still carry around the same god-emotions they did. (So we’re not complete deities.)

Civilized Savagery: Balancing Your Inner Greek gods

Freud believed that we needed to civilize those emotions—or spirits—so that we could live together in harmony with others. Our emotions can possess our minds, and our conscious being becomes beholden to their whims. To resist, we need to be conscious of what they want, and what actions these gods are demanding transpire.

And then, like Zeus, our conscious minds—the rational and thoughtful and just part of our brain—must take control. But the only way to keep your gods in line is to make sure that you’re Zeus-mind is constantly conscious of what’s happening. To live a right and just life, you must civilize your most savage emotions and become the god of your mind. Or something my friend Nick Sorrell referred to as “civilized savagery.”

Our god-emotions are part of us, they’ve helped us survive as a species and avoid dangerous situations. But left unbridled, they can cause great harm; they’re necessary, yes, but our conscious mind must also civilize these basic instincts so that we can live a good life.

Like a god who can see from the highest heights of Olympus, you need to examine, ask yourself questions, and better understand what your god-emotions are doing. Why are they trying to wreck havoc right now? What has spurred them to take over and come forth?

By doing that, you bring consciousness to your thoughts and feelings. Because as Vertical Horizon so clearly stated: you are a god, and you just don’t know it.

[shunvrutha]

A Travel To The Future- A Hypothesis!

Time leap is, in the present era, an unaccomplished achievement. But what if we are the results of time leaps ourselves? Don't understand? Let me put forth my theory. Imagine a time machine exists probably YEARS ahead of 2016 (as shown in the movies) . Everytime a person time leaps using it and goes back to a past time point to change a particular action, the entire future actions from then on will change. It will even affect the decisions of the others involved. Imagine our lifetime to be made of various threads , a change in one thread causes a divergence from it, ie. a single thread splits into two different events...and each split string will lead to a different future. Having said that let me explain my theory. They say 7 worlds similar to ours exists. And 7 people in the world look alike. These two statements are mere hypotheses...or as this generation would call it, superstition. What if I say it's not? What if I say your future self time leaped several times and lead to the existence of 7 similar people resembling you. But everytime your future self time leaped, their lives took a different path leading to the 7 similar portrayals of yourself leading a different life not even similar to yours. But some events may overlap. And each of the 7 people on reaching the point of life where they decide to time leap as the original, also travel back. And the results of their time leap also do so. And the process continues. There will be a very wide divergence from the original life line probably leading to the formation of a completely new world. And so 7 worlds may eventually emerge. Every time leap is going to steal away memory, though not completely. On visiting a particular place that your future self holds dear.... the memories may flood in. Also, a particular insignificant action that was done by your future self might come to your memory and it shall be called DEJA VU. Another incidence where you can recall memories from a different divergence line, ie.incidents from a life your 6 other comrades are leading (or from other 7 worlds) , is through DREAMS. Yes, your dreams might suggest that your future self time leaped to create a divergent life for you and the memories from the original life line is flooding in from your hippocampus. And if you have bad dreams don't forget to thank your future self for the time leap as he saved you from that tragedy! Evolution of humans , I believe, is also a doing of time travel into the past. The presence of an highly evolved being in a world of poorly evolved can actually be the reason for evolution itself. A good example is our present era where there are zoological centres that train apes and monkeys. Similarly, the people from the future may have travelled to the early ages, carrying with them the knowledge of the highly evolved and taught (or more correctly, trained) the low IQ beings their habits. And this lead to evolution. Who knows, probably in the 30th century Apes might be the CEOs of Facebook! Probably the very first person who discovered the time machine and time leapt to cause divergence, to cause evolution, is that one person we now called GOD (Generator of Divergence). And as the saying goes.... there is one God. Following him, many others might have time leapt leading to formation of various religious groups claiming the existence of different Gods. (This content means no offence). As the human body can travel to the past, so can the soul. When that happens, the presence of your soul might just creep out the living. And them we call GHOSTS. Ghosts DO have a purpose like the movies impose. Ghosts kill...for revenge, Ghosts look after you...if you're their loved one. Why? They know what's coming. They know if you have wronged. The dead don't have memory.... souls from the future do. Yes I put forward the theory that memories might be temporarily forgotten due to time leap and it very much supports the theory about Ghosts. The souls don't come out of the body after death... they were always there from the beginning. You get to watch how you live your life from the beginning, all over again....slowly gaining memories from the original life line...and when finally the point where death comes, you know what your last wish was. The kindled memory of the last wish sets you to take revenge or to accomplish what you have left undone or to prevent a bad happening. And we assume it is the deceased while it is actually your soul from the future. Not only the human himself, but also a specific message can be sent back in time. Just the message. Now...shall we call this.... HUNCH? A hunch is a strong feeling telling you what the possible solution is. Like... for example, detective Sherlock had a hunch that the killer is Mr.Pete. He carries out an investigation on Mr.Pete and finds clues that suggests Mr.Pete indeed is the killer, while in Sherlock's original life line he was probably stabbed by Pete after a smirky smile from the killer and Sherlock failed to solve the case and at the same time lost his life. So he used his last few minutes sending his past self a TELEPATHY which was delivered as a HUNCH. Some happenings can never be changed though. If you have to die halfway, you die. No matter how many divergence lines are produced, you die in each one of them. The accomplishment you would do within that time span might however be altered. This is where DESTINY takes its birth. We all have a fixed beginning and a fixed ending... time travel can only change the inbetween. So 90% of what Astrologers say about what you are destined to become is true. Every idea portrayed in the movies or every idea the scientists dream of bringing into life has been achieved. Every single one. From computers to mobiles to flying trains! ....except time travel. But it will soon be achieved in the near or far future because it does take time for the scientist who travelled from the future to recollect his memories! Even though we might not live to see the time machine...we know we played an important role in changing someone's destiny from worse to best. Live today, now, this second carefree because the path in front of us is set and you know where you are going already! The future will speak for itself!

[psychotherapyconsultants]

4 Ways to Ease Back-to-School and Autumn Anxiety

Middle schoolers aren’t the only ones who feel the jitters as school reopens every year.

Most people I know have trouble as summer draws to a close and autumn begins. All of the stress and transition required to accommodate new schedules, activities, and schools can throw off the limbic system (your emotional center) of even the most grounded creatures.

In fact, Ginny Scully, a therapist in Wales, said in an interview so many clients with feelings of anticipation and nervousness during the last week of August through the first weeks of September that she coined the term “autumn anxiety,” which I’ve written about before.

Here are some strategies to use if your autumn anxiety spikes as you’re sending your son or daughter off to a new school, or as your nervous system panics a little as it feels the change in temperature and sunlight.

1. Differentiate Between Signals and Noise

In his book Stopping the Noise In Your Head, Reid Wilson, PhD, director of the Anxiety Disorders Treatment Center in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina, explains the difference between a signal and noise.

A signal is a legitimate worry that is prompting you to take action. It’s “useful” anxiety: an alarm that says, “Hey, something isn’t right — fix it!”

Dr. Wilson gives this example as a signal: “I have a final paper due before dinner on two texts I haven’t read! And I haven’t started!”

Noise, on the other hand, is not productive or useful. It’s merely static or interference. Noise would be if you had written the paper to the best of your ability and were lying awake all night obsessing about its not being good enough. Wilson writes:

Worry is supposed to be only a trigger for problem solving. It is not supposed to last a long time. But anxiety’s goal is to get you confused as to what is a valid concern and what is noise, and then to get you to dwell on the worry instead of solving the problem. As long as you’re actively engaged in that worry, you’ll never be able to decipher whether it’s a signal or noise.

So when a worried thought pops up, take a step back, disengage from your upset about the specifics. Examine the worry, and then decide if it’s a signal or if it’s noise. If you conclude that it’s a signal, that’s wonderful! You can do something about a signal. Signals come with solutions. Signals we can handle. On the other hand, if that worry pops up and sounds like noise, you can’t solve it. No solution exists … Your easy-listening station is picking up static, and you’re turning up the volume, trying to decipher the lyrics to the song you can barely make out beneath all the noise. It’s time to change the station.

2. Access Your Neocortex

In order to distinguish between signals and noise, it’s helpful to understand the evolution of the brain.

Physician and neuroscientist Paul MacLean, MD, theorized that the human brain was in reality three brains in one: the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex — each of which developed at different times.

The reptilian brain is the oldest, most primitive of the three and includes the main structures found in a reptile’s brain: the brain stem and the cerebellum. It’s rigid and compulsive.

The limbic brain appeared in the first mammals and is responsible for emotions in human beings. It contains the hippocampus, the amygdala (sometimes referred to as our fear center), and the hypothalamus. The limbic brain governs many of our judgments, often unconsciously, recording memories as agreeable and disagreeable, and exerting a strong influence on our behavior.

The neocortex is the most evolved and sophisticated part of the brain. It contains the two cerebral hemispheres that are responsible for the development of consciousness, nuanced judgments, abstract thought, language, imagination, and advanced learning.

When we panic or have to adjust to something in the fall that we don’t want to, we’re thinking with the first two parts of our brain. Disagreeable memories from the past flood our amygdala, issuing SOS signals throughout our entire nervous system. What we need to do is access our neocortex: our inner philosophy professor that’s capable of assessing the situation with much wisdom and insight and possibly offering a practical suggestion or two, all the while calming us down.

3. Eat Good Fall Foods

If you’re feeling edgy going into fall, stay away from sugar, processed foods (refined grains), alcohol, and caffeine. They will only increase your anxiety.

Fortunately, Mother Nature has provided us many foods and spices during this season that can combat anxiety. Some good ones to splurge on are:

Pumpkin seeds They’re chock-full of zinc (containing 23 percent of our daily recommended value in just one ounce), which Emily Deans, MD, calls an “essential mineral for resiliency” in a blog post for Psychology Today, “Zinc: An Antidepressant.” The mineral also increases our ability to fight off inflammation, which has been linked to depression and anxiety.

Squash Just 1 cup of butternut squash contains 15 percent of the daily recommended value of magnesium, 17 percent of potassium, and 18 percent of manganese — all critical minerals to keep you sane.

Cinnamon The spice is especially good for anxiety and depression because it helps regulate blood sugar. And 1 teaspoon provides 22 percent of the daily recommended value of manganese, a critical trace mineral that helps with nerve function and connective tissues, aiding the central nervous system in general.

Apples As I mentioned in my post “10 Foods I Eat Every Day to Beat Depression,” apples are high in antioxidants, which can help prevent and repair oxidative damage and inflammation on the cellular level. They’re also full of soluble fiber, which balances blood sugar swings.

4. Find Ways to Laugh

It’s hard to laugh and panic at the same time, and laughing is much more fun. Finding humor in a situation is one way of quieting the noise that I discussed in my first point, and a way to access your neocortex — the philosophy professor inside your brain.

Even a slight cackle can provide the essential space between the situation and your reaction, allowing you to see it from a truer perspective. With stressful events, there are always opportunities for humor and taking everything a little less seriously — especially if you become an observer not only of the voices inside your head, but of the situation and the awkwardness in general. Laughing also has many health benefits, like decreasing pain, boosting immunity, reducing stress, and burning calories.

Originally posted on Sanity Break at Everyday Health.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/08/11/4-ways-to-ease-back-to-school-and-autumn-anxiety/

[sozneb-blog]

benzos

“First of all, a TRUTH to accept is that WE HEAL.  I have seen people emerge from comas who cannot remember who they are - HEAL.

Most of us, me included, didn't expect the temporary "brain injury" we got when jumping off benzos. But I [...] starting to realize through my own experience and my educational background, that there is a PURPOSE in every symptom we have.  I have had months and months to analyze what is likely going on in the brain at a gross level - and I want to attempt to explain certain symptoms in a way that we can visualize - so that they are less "scary" and more "telling" of the healing that is happening.

First off - let's start with GABA and Glutamate. Most of you may know how this works by this point. But for those that don't, we have a huge nervous system of millions of nerves (neurons).  They don't "touch" each other. They are separated by a tiny space in between. However, they communicate via chemicals. The 2 MAIN chemicals in the entire nervous system are the BIG GUNS.  They are GABA and Glutamate. They are BOTH at work at ALL times in the CNS.  It isn't like one is working and then the other is working. They are BOTH ALWAYS working in tandem to control every aspect of movement, sensation  - everything. They take the incoming information and appropriately pass it along - they "trim up" the information appropriately so that we can process it.  

GABA is inihibitory.  If a nerve releases GABA - it is to Inhibit function - this could be to "slow it down" or it could be to "limit the sensory input" so that we can process it.  In the same way, GABA might be released to help "steady" your hand while doing something like painting a very detailed painting.  GABA "shores up" movements to make them more fluid.   That's just in a nutshell. Of COURSE it does a lot more than this, but the idea is that GABA is present in the ENTIRE CNS and ALWAYS working to balance every sensation, movement, etc.

Likewise, Glutamate is the balance to GABA. It is the "excitatory" transmitter. It fires to speed things up - to initiate action - to make things "go".  There's a lot more to it, but Glutamate is kinda the opposite of GABA.  

BOTH are required to work at all times.  Neurons are ALL ALWAYS firing off GABA and Glutamate on a endless cycle all throughout the nervous system. It's quite amazing really.

What does a benzo do?  If a person is anxious - they may be so stressed that they cannot overcome a very traumatic event or anxious situation.  If a doctor prescribes a benzo - the benzo comes in and sorta "holds the door open" for ALL the GABA in the system to FLOOD into the nerves - even when that is not what the nerves would actually want to occur. The immediate effect is that EVERYTHING ni the body SLOWS DOWN and is inhibited. This might be helpful during surgery, for anesthesia, for a seizure disorder.  Yes - the benzo - by definition - will act on GABA and "slow everything down".  And yes - the net effect of this is that a person may feel drowsy, calm, less anxious... everything is being inhibited.    And in general, taking a benzo for "one day"  is okay. When the benzo is gone, the body just reverts back to regular operation. HOWEVER, if a person takes a benzo day after day,  while indeed the person feels less anxious, the body begins to realize that it cannot DO the things it needs to do in this very slowed-down neuron state. It cannot make hormones. It cannot create enzymes. It cannot digest correctly. It cannot keep a heart going efficiently. It cannot get enough oxygen- and on and on. The body NEEDS to run at "normal" speed - not this "inhibited speed" all slowed down.   But what can the body do? It cannot "remove the benzo" from the system. The only choice the body has to maintain a regular speed is to do two things ..  It can TURN OFF it's own GABA receptors - thereby rendering those benzos unable to affect the GABA in the system. And it can grow MORE excitatory Glutamate receptors to counteract the slow-down.  And that's kinda exactly what happens....

Only - this isn't true balance either.  The body does the best it can - but over time, things begin to suffer.  The body cannot make enough serotonin in this state. Or dopamine. Some things get made in excess - and other things do not get made enough!  During this time, a person may not be aware this is all going on. He may not be able to perceive any difference. But ONE day - the person may wake up sad - or not sleeping well - or unable to remember things fully - or his vision doesn't look right....and it becomes apparent the person has "hit tolerance".  The body is taking the same amount of drug -but try as it might, it just cannot overcome what has occured. It can take weeks, months or years to hit tolerance. Some people do and some don't before [...] to get off benzos.  (I did. - it took me 9 months to hit tolerance.  But it was fast.  Once I hit it, I could notsleep more than 6 hours on all that klonopin AND Ambien! I couldn't remember things last week. I was crying all the time... something was wrong.)

The process to reverse this takes a while.  GABA receptors have to UPregulate and effectively "reopen" or "grow back".  Glutamate receptors must DOWNregulate, or effectively "turn off" or "prune back".  And IN this mix, all the smaller monoamines (neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine) must somehow find a way to synthesize in the mix.  Through weeks and months the body is rebuildling millions of neurons, and changing pathways, rebuilding GABA, downregulating Glutamate, rebuilding serotonin, rebuilding dopamine, rebuilding norepinephrine.  And ALL the enzymes and hormones that need to be made are attempting to be made while this is going on.  

That brings me to my[...] point... WHY do all of us in benzo recovery have generally the same symptoms? Well - it may make you feel calmer to realize that our brain structures are NOT broken. They are doing EXACTLY what they are supposed to do under the circumstances.  And all of our perceptions of what we are seeing, feeling, hearing- are normal because the parts of our brains that are firing off are doing so because a) They [...] DO work. b) They work just as they were intended to. c) They are actually healing as all this firing is going on.  

Why the depression and anxiety? It's so complicated, but this WHOLE system is interdependent. At that SAME time as ALL this stuff is going on, the entire body is [...] to heal in every place GABA and Glutamate naturally act (uh - and that would be - EVERYWHERE). The intestines, stomach, eye balls, skin, toenails - seriously - where do we NOT have nerves?  Anything we didn't have as a pre-existing condition is fair game for being affected by the recovery that takes place.  This includes the body's own ability to make serotonin that is required to feel "balanced" and "happy". And you guessed it. This is not being made very efficiently in a building that is under major construction. So - you may get a day or so of feeling good - and then - boom - that's gone until you can make enough serotonin. Oh - and by the way - serotonin HELPS TELL THE NERVES WHEN TO RELEASE GABA AND GLUTAMATE! Ha! So on top of needing GABA to make serotonin, you need serotonin to regulate the release of GABA into the system!  How much more interconnected can you get?  God - it's a wonder it knows how to heal at all!  But it does!  Amazing to me, really.

This is just some limited information to give [...] idea of what is going on in neurophysiology.  Obviously this is very cursory and not super detailed. But there is a bigger point here than "what parts of the brain are affected".  The point REALLY is - IF  YOU KNOW that symptoms are tied to parts of a NORMAL brain under reconstruction, then you can begin to rest a little more easy in your mind that under the circumstances, the symptoms themselves are a GOOD sign. Without intrusive memories - as awful as they are - especially when mixed with fear - but without them, your memory itself would not heal.  It IS healing - and when you are having intrusives, try to think of it that way.  Tap your finger to your temple and say to yourself, "I know what this is. This is my hippocampus healing! Ha!" Because it IS.  And if it were NOT healing, you would not be having those symptoms.  ANY part of the brain or body that needs to heal is going to "experience" something in the form of symptoms - and you are going to notice that. But it is part of  process that is inevitably returning to the balance that it could not achieve while we were [...] putting those pills in our mouths.  (And if you're tapering, this is [...] happening - just likely with less trauma than with what happened to me when I cold-turkeyed.)

So - when you have symptoms - know that symptoms themselves are a way for you to know that healing is taking place.

And finally - realize that the DRUG is GONE.  This is withdrawal - yes - okay -we call it withdrawal -  but it's really "recovery". The benzos are gone. The "evil drug" is no longer there.  The symptoms that are left are not the "enemy". That's our brains doing the EXACT right thing. What's happening to our brain at this point is not the "benzo beast"

It's OUR BRAIN recovering. Not to degrade anyone who calls it the benzo beast

- I get that. But just so you know - you're not really fighting a beast. You don't even need to fight it.  Just wait it out.

And the people can come and go and work like a well-oiled machine.   Don't feel you need to fight the recontruction. It's just healing. And all that is happening to us is a sign of that.

Hope this helps somebody a little - or maybe a family member.  

And if you ARE a family member, please realize that those of us in recovery are no more in control of how we feel or what we experience than people who have undergone brain trauma in a car accident. Please be patient with us, because our brains are healing and we are in the process of reconstruction - and our function is temporarily enabled, then disabled, then enabled, then disabled again.  And that is totally normal and expected.  We can no more help that than a person can "want" to wake up out of a coma. It happens when the brain is able - and not out of sheer will.  But it does happen. So please stand by us and say loving things and reassure us every day. Notice our improvements and tell us what they are.  Encourage us when we feel good.  And when we don't, just hold us and hug us and tell us it will be okay.  Anything you would say or do for a family member that had had a car accident and a brain injury - please do that for us.  And be patient... we are getting there.

Likewise, throughout recovery, I've had and continue to have cooling, burning, prickling and occasional stabbing sensations. I've had it feel like my skin was "wet" when there was no water on it.  Again, though. This is all normal - and like the quote says above.."Just understanding that this is expected to occur, and is "good pain'; or pain for a good reason, is enough to help many people adjust to its presence."  It doesn't make the pain FEEL any better in the moment, but it does help us not to become anxious about it. It's normal.  And it's a sign of healing.

The broad idea here is that 1) Healing is happening. 2) The sensations that feel like injury are NOT injury. They are the CORRECTION of nerve injury.  They just "fire off" as they heal. 3) We can use some things to cope. 4) It's going away in time.

I know this is not a "fix" to the feelings.  There is nothing anyone could say to me while I was IN pain that made the PAIN better.  All I could do was cope and cry and try to get through it.  But knowing it's normal and that I'm not getting worse; I'm [...] - is always something I benefit from knowing.”