#i do not want to pathologize this one highly specific aspect of myself

[spoonyruncible]

I'm not gatekeeping, I just have some gates and I've sort of vaguely known they're there, I haven't kept them and the hinges are so rusty i doubt they'd close if I tried. But, like, for ages all that came through those gates were stray geese and a dog I think belongs to a neighbor but might just belong to himself and of course there's the hunching afflicted wrathbeast. That's just having a garden. Things grow there and random folks stumble in sometimes, mispronounce the names of my favorite varietals, say stunningly inaccurate things about them, and wander bemusedly back out.

As a surprise to probably no one I was a deeply lonely child. No one really got me or what my deal was, so when I found something I loved it was mine and mine alone to treasure. As I got older I found other people who liked 'my' things. Some of those people were horrible! But there was a kinship and it was okay to be a bit horrible so long as we could be odd together. Gardens are resilient things, they tolerate mistakes and abuse. It's absolutely wonderful to share, to dance to the same music, that imperfection becomes part of the joy of it, becomes a unique thing unto itself.

So imagine my shock when there is a garden party that rapidly becomes a festival. No one has ever really been here before, it's been me and the geese and that one dog and a few other weirdos. Suddenly my things, things people beat me for loving, are things everyone loves. All at once the landscape is unrecognizable and if I acknowledge that then I'm being a hipster. I don't mind the festival, it's nice, now it's much easier to get things I need without having to put on my trekking gear and hike out to the one obscure location that has The Supplies. It's not bad, it's just weird. It feels like there is something wrong with me instead of something wrong about liking what I like.

I'm not really talking about one specific thing here, there have been a lot of these moments where what used to be unusual or even shameful is now the big thing. And it's good, it's can be great sometimes even with the unforeseen bizarre bad parts. But there is this selfish little part of me that wants to cling to my unloved love, to put a raggedy LP on a barely working record player and lay on the wooden floor of my childhood home staring at a painting of a ship in a storm that is right beside a picture of a young man in a cap and a too large jacket and listen to sea shanties belted out by people not very good at singing while I drift and drift and drift away on the sound and the whitecaps to a place where there is only this. I love the new versions like a drowning man loves air, I am happy that people have found this beautiful thing and can enjoy it, but there is a tinge to it I don't like. A prick of pain every time I see this joy over my joy, over my joy that I was punished for, humiliated for, shamed for. I'm glad people can love these things without suffering but it makes my suffering seem so fucking stupid.

There is a certain temptation, a bitter agony, that makes me want to hiss like an abused cat and cling jealous to my silly little toys. It's not that I want them all for myself, it's that I can't let go of that little kid with a bruisy eye sulking because no one wants to play with him. It's the whisper of, "We can be friends but only in secret. I don't want people to know I'm like you." It's the enthusiasm that rapidly becomes muted because the whole world is demanding to know why you can't just be normal for once. But that same temptation to lash out is the one that makes me reach out my hand instead, especially to people who are like, "Wow! I've never been to a garden before. I'm gonna screw this up. How do I not screw it up?" because now they're that bruisy eyed kid no one wants to play with. I can't protect the person I used to be by becoming the exact thing that hurt me. Gotta keep the gate open, gotta get used to new things even if it takes noise cancelling headphones and an entirely rational amount of backsliding, gotta wake up every day and keep trying even though the world keeps throwing curveballs that no sane person could anticipate. It's all okay. We're in this together and we're all gonna be okay,

[loserchildhotpants]

My mother is looking for me.

I silently went no-contact a few months ago.

Years ago, when I first went no-contact, I announced that that was what I was doing, and it does occur to me that I didn't owe her an explanation then, just as I don't now. There is an aspect to me that has changed since the last time I went no-contact, though. I'll get to that.

My mother and I were extremely enmeshed for most of my life. Several counselors have referred to the relationship as covertly incestuous, and that stands to reason, actually. I hate it, I hate that terminology, it feels gross, but in retrospect, so does my relationship with her, it's just hard to see it as gross, or the source of such enduring discomfort when it's all you've ever known. So, I definitely didn't see it for a long time, it's hard to see the picture from inside the frame. When I look back, though, her behavior is deplorable.

She was less like a mom and more like a friend, and the thing was, she was a shitty friend.

In summation, she was wildly inconsistent; at times, she rose to the occasion and was what I needed, when I needed it, but those times were rare, and minimal in the face of all the rest of the time when she *commanded* me to be and do things like, rub her feet while she cried about my father's limp dick, or she'd start whining nasally while smacking me with her naked feet, talking about how mean I am to her.

She was always so angry in the face of a boundary. I was maybe 9 or 10 when I had to ask her to stop kissing me on the mouth when I was going to bed, and she got so upset with me. She asked sexually or medically invasive questions, and would often bully me and make fun of whatever the answer wound up being.

She openly bullied my sister, and favored me, and it was really evident that if I held fast to boundaries like my sister did, she would retract her love, just as she had with my sister.

She pit us against each other our entire childhoods, she's been manipulative, vindictive, and careless. She has facilitated some of the worst events of trauma and abuse I've suffered in my life, because her having fun or being perceived some specific way by other adults meant so much more to her than her kids being safe.

So, she's not motherly, she's not a nice friend to have, she is mostly a highly reactive child that needs constant gentle-parenting, and will not be held to account for anything she feels makes her 'look bad.'

All this to say, she can't function in any capacity for me that is worth the risk of the injury I incur when I'm around her. She is the elephant's foot of mental illness to me; the closer I get, the longer I stay, the sicker I become.

She's poisoned her entire side of the family against me, she'll tell basically anyone that will listen that I'm a pathological liar who inexplicably hates her for no valid reason, that I'm mentally unstable, and that she's clearly failed as a parent since I turned out so horribly.

On top of all this, we are morally antithetical to one another. At a fundamental level, what I think it means to be a good person has nothing to do with what it means to her, and there's no compromising that.

I used to feel great anxiety at the prospect of never speaking to her again, I used to wrack my brain for a way that this could be a failing on my part, because if it's my fault, I'm just a bad daughter, maybe I can fix that.

I've made myself so small for her, I trimmed so much down, and masked the rest to look how she wanted it to, and she was *still* unhappy with me. There's nothing I can do to secure her love, it's too conditional, and frankly, I don't want to perform like that anymore.

So, when separating by any degree, no-contact or low-contact, over the years, I'd feel anxiety, self-reproach, guilt, shame, but I don't feel that this time - or - that may be a lie. I *do* feel those things, just not in the quantities I have before.

Mostly, though, I feel badly for her.

Things weren't awful all the time, she wasn't *always* terrible, and in fact, with my father living and breathing under the same roof, she was still my only remotely functional parent. It's not as though I don't have love for her - I was born with love for her. It comes naturally, inherently.

I keep thinking to myself that she didn't think life would turn out the way it did, and she must spend a lot of time very sad about that.

When she calls my sister, sobbing about how she can't seem to contact me, she's not crying because she misses me, she's crying because this wasn't how the story was meant to go.

As enmeshed as we were, and as masked as I was to her, she was unmasked to me, and I think I know her pretty well.

I think she lived under this impression that the high's of life were all that mattered, and if she just avoided thinking about things that caused her discomfort, they wouldn't happen; she'd be young and hot forever, she'd always be the most popular girl at school, the most likable boss bitch at work, she'd have this air of Dignified Woman about her, she'd be super lucky just the way she was born, cultured, well-traveled, charming, upper-middle class, and life would *look* a certain way.

But she didn't invest in the future, didn't save anything, spent wildly, and we lost our home in 2008. Soon after, she divorced the man she'd spent 30 years with, the both of them hating each other the entire time. Then her eldest went no-contact, then the ex-husband needed to do the same, and then her golden mini-me, her youngest 'abandons,' her just the same.

So, she doesn't live a lavish lifestyle with cosmopolitan friends on the Upper East Side, she works 3 jobs in Florida that she'll be working til she's in her 70's, her ex-husband won't risk being near her because he has minimal contact with their kids and feels that consorting with her will pass whatever contagion she has onto him and he'll lose what crumbs he considers a successful relationship with his daughters. (The guy also thinks he's a Good Father for not having beaten us regularly, so his metrics about what is quality is pretty questionable)

In her head, she had this idea - she'd marry this really handsome guy, and her love could Fix him, y'know? He was so angry, so sad, so 'damaged,' and they had such great physical chemistry while they were young, she'd make it work, so they'd *look* great together. He'd work a particular kind of job she got him (and he did, for 15 years), she'd work a high paying job too, and still do all the housework, keep everything trim and pretty, including herself and her kids. We'd be a perfect family unit, beautiful to look at, unburdened by profound societal despair or existential thinking, we'd all be socially acceptable, and lovely, and she'd retire at 60 with comfort, if not a friend in her husband than a partner at least, she'd certainly never feel alone, and that's not what happened.

Her family unit fell apart, because nothing meaningful was holding it together. She might argue that love was holding it together, but if the love is conditional, that foundation will invariably, eventually fail.

I think that's why it's not enough for her that she has all of her blood relatives rallying around her, validating her perpetual victimhood, telling her how much of a martyr she is, and how wronged she's been. The sympathy is fine, but it's not lasting, and that pitying attention may sustain her for a while, but then she's alone again, sitting in the ruins of the future she built for herself, not wanting to look inward at all, because to her, accountability is tantamount to personal attack. She won't look inward the same way she would never self-harm.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. I get it. I get that, at 66, it has to be fucking heart-rending to look back on one's life thus far, and take stock, and think 'no, no, no, it wasn't supposed to be like this at all!'

It doesn't really matter that her expectations weren't rooted in reality. She maintained them, and so she's disappointed.

It's a sad affair, the entire thing. I feel badly for her. She thought she'd be young and hot forever, she thought the family unit she built and birthed would owe her complete, unwavering fealty, she thought she'd be so much more comfortable than she is, and here she is, full enough of self-pity to drown in it, unable or unwilling to recognize that she is the only one that can save herself.

It's not like she's at the end of her life or anything, if she wanted to change herself, and her life, and what it looks and feels like, she could do that. It would take focus, discipline, and frankly a lot of therapy, but it could be done. It's not like the wrap up music is playing.

Still, it won't be the life she dreamt of for herself, and when I think of her, I see this injured child, red-faced crying over dashed hopes. It's sad.

I need to stay away, because if I get near the crying child, she begs me to comfort her, and then scratches, punches, and claws at me, screams at me that her misery is all my fault, that I'm the one that abandoned this child and she'll never forgive that, she'll never forgive how heartless and cold I am, and all of that hurts very much, because she's *not* a child, she's my mother, and so when she says these things, yells, cries, transfers all that onto me, it wounds me.

My mother is looking for me, and I can't let her find me. At least, not right now. I don't have the emotional bandwidth for that sort of interaction right now.

There's no point to this really. I just had to put my thoughts down somewhere.

[hanna-symphony]

Today I want to talk with you all about a part of my identity that affects every aspect of my life and work and relationships.

I am a PDA-er.

“Pathological Demand Avoidance” is a medical descriptor for a specific type of autistic profile. (It may also be an ADHD and C-PTSD profile, as this neurotype is under-researched.)

In the neurodiversity paradigm, we prefer these words for the acronym -

Pervasive Drive for Autonomy

Prime Directive: Autonomy

This identity term describes a phenomena where any stimulus perceived as a demand signals danger to the unconscious mind, triggering a stress response.

Commands and imperatives are the most obvious sorts of demands. No one likes being told what to do, but this goes far beyond that.

🧡 For a PDA-er the statement “no one likes being told what to do” can feel dismissive of our disabling struggles. This is not about “not liking” something.

The demands I struggle with the most are things which my conscious mind actually wants and desires but some part of my brain still perceives as demands.

🧐 All of the following can be perceived by the unconscious as demands: direct instructions, schedules, school assignments, to do lists, constructive criticism, personal goals, aspirations, mantras, ambitions, deep desires, the “proper” way to do things, social hangouts, dates, getting to work on time, making and eating food, needing to go to the toilet, needing to go to sleep for the night, and the list could go on and on.

For PDAers, the moment that our unconscious perceives our conscious will as an imperative or a “should,” the fight/flight/freeze response activates.

Almost anything can be perceived by the unconscious as a demand. Whatever we PDA-ers perceive as a demand will unavoidably trigger our fight/flight/freeze stress response. This can manifest as aggression, mania, literally running away, depression, brain fog, nausea, pain, or executive dysfunction.

If you don’t struggle with this or other disabilities, you may find it hard to imagine living with a body that seems to rebel against your conscious will at every turn.

If I say “I need to eat now,” my body says No.

If I say “It’s time to take my medicine,” my body says No.

If I say “I really want to meet my friend for coffee,” my body says No.

If I say, “Yes I will do as you have asked,” my body says No.

If I say, “I should really drink more water,” my body says No.

This operating system requires me to approach the world in a different way to most people. My work and self-care and relationships have greatly suffered from lack of understanding of how my body system operates.

Learning about PDA helped me stop judging and shaming myself.

(Here are my top two favorite articles about PDA if you want to learn more!

Highly Sensitive Neuroception May Be At The Heart of PDA *The original link for this website no longer exists* A documented copy of the article is here - http://www.buildsomethingpositive.com/wenn/PDA%20Neuroception.docx [❌ original link - https://pathologicaldemandavoidanceaprofileofautism.com/2019/06/25/pda-neuroception-the-five-fs/]

Pathological Demand Avoidance or Needing to Be Free http://www.sallycatpda.co.uk/2019/12/pathological-demand-avoidance-or.html)

Now that I understand why I am so frequently triggered by even my own mind,

I am working on shifting my internal dialogue to respect the unconscious process of my bodymind. The more I shift my language, the more I feel able to navigate the world without being triggered by the demands of my own making.

This shift requires a creative use of language to avoid making demands on myself. This is extra difficult as autistic person who relies on learned scripts for many processes. The scripts my parents and teachers and culture taught me are full of demands. The idea is to reframe everything as an option instead of an imperative so that my body doesn’t freak out and say No.

🎈Here’s what is working for me currently...

Menus instead of to-do lists

- I write down all the things I might want to or need to do. They are optional. I do not shame myself for not doing things that are written. I celebrate the things I do accomplish. If I finish a task that wasn’t on the menu, I often add it to the menu with a big check mark ✅ so I can see what I’ve accomplished.

Encouraging open ended self-talk instead of positive commands

- “I have to” or “I need to” is immediately a demand. I’ve been having success with phrasing things as “I will ____” or “How can I ____?”

Self-EMDR to shift how I perceive alarms and scheduled meetings

- Things that were once demands may not always be perceived as demands. There was a time I could not use any alarm. I can now use musical alarms because I did a self-EMDR process around my fear response to auditory alarms. Meetings are still hit or miss for me. Some days my body says No to my schedule, other days my schedule feels comforting, and I’m still working on figuring out the difference.

Heaps of understanding and kindness and gentleness for myself.

- It can be so easy to fall into shame spirals because of PDA. The self-talk of “why can’t I just do the thing, I’m such a failure” is a very old record that my mind likes to play over and over again for old times sake. Learning how to escape those spirals and be gentler with myself is an evolving process.

🤷🏻‍♀️ Somehow I’ve managed to create these infographics for you all: linktr.ee/TraumaGeek

🙈 Talking with people about trauma, polyvagal theory, and/or neurodiversity gives me a “special interest overrride” where my excitement about the topic somehow prevents a stress response for a thing that would usually be perceived as a demand, so if you want to schedule with me, you can click here: www.calendly.com/TraumaGeek

🙏🏻🥰❤️ I am eternally grateful to the patron supporters who helped me believe I could build my own vocation and avoid the disabling demands of traditional employment. www.patreon.com/TraumaGeek

#actuallyautistic #neurodivergent #PDA

[c-ptsdrecovery]

1. They behave unethically.

According to clinical psychologist Ryan Howes, Ph.D, “Any signs that therapy is moving from a professional and empathic relationship to a romantic one should be considered a bright red flag.” (He recommended reading this page for more information.)

But unethical behavior isn’t just sexual advances. It also includes “violations of confidentiality or financial wrongdoings” and offensive comments, said Joyce Marter, LCPC, a therapist and owner of the counseling practice Urban Balance. For instance, a friend of Marter’s had an already-pricey therapist who charged his clients while he was on vacation. In graduate school, Marter had an initial consult with a therapist who made a racist remark. She never went back.

2. They ignore confidentiality and emergency protocol.

Therapists should have you complete an intake form to provide information in case of an emergency, said Jeffrey Sumber, M.A., a psychotherapist, author and teacher. Similarly, every therapist should discuss your rights with you, including the times when they are required by law to break confidentiality, Sumber said. (You’ll also need to sign the confidentiality agreement.)

3. They don’t specialize in your issue.

Hibbert, an expert in postpartum mental health, regularly sees the devastating results from lack of expertise. For instance, she’s seen new moms hospitalized for a month because their clinicians believed they were psychotic. In actuality, they had postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is nonthreatening and treatable with therapy and medication, she said.

Find clinicians who are trained in what you’re struggling with, she said. Some therapists may simply have exposure in a particular disorder, instead of expertise, said Deborah Serani, Psy.D, a clinical psychologist and author of the book Living with Depression.

She suggested asking specific questions about certificates, diplomas and experience. For instance, when you ask “How many clients have you treated with depression?” you don’t want to hear ‘a handful,’ you want to hear ‘dozens or hundreds,’” she said.

Because she doesn’t have training in substance abuse or eating disorders, Serani refers individuals with these issues to colleagues who do. “Good therapists always know the limits of their expertise,” Serani said. Even if you are seeing an expert in the field, don’t be afraid to seek a second opinion, Hibbert added.

4. Their recommendations go against your beliefs.

Hibbert works with members of her church and has heard of clinicians making suggestions that conflict with their beliefs and values. “A good therapist should work within your own value system,” she said.

5. They dodge your questions.

“Therapists don’t answer every question,” said Howes, who also authors the blog “In Therapy.” That’s because the focus is on you. However, they should answer reasonable questions clearly and directly, he said. These questions can be “general get-to-know-you questions to anything pertaining to treatment.”

Howes gave these examples: “Where are you from? What interested you [to] this line of work? Did you have a nice vacation? How long have you been in practice? Do you have experience with my issue? What do you recommend we do to treat this problem? How do you think therapy is going? How do you feel about our relationship?”

6. They over-share.

On the other hand, Howes said, “some therapists share too much about their own life, drawing attention to themselves and potentially pulling you in to take care of them.” He noted that every disclosure a clinician makes should benefit you in some way. (“You’re always welcome to ask how their story helps you,” he added.)

“A good therapist knows boundaries, keeps personal issues tucked away and always strives to make the session treatment productive for their client,” Serani said.

7. You feel worse after your session – regularly.

“This might happen on occasion, even with a therapist that you love, but if it’s happening all the time, then something is not right,” Hibbert said.

8. You feel judged, shamed or emotionally unsafe.

According to Marter, this includes anything a therapist might say or do, such as rolling their eyes. Marter stopped seeing a therapist because of a similar experience.

I saw a therapist for a few months who came highly recommended but seemed to hold a magnifying glass to all of my issues. I felt worse. I talked with her about it and felt even more pathologized. I was confused about whether she was just helping me see my “stuff” and I was being defensive, but made the choice to tell her I needed to end our work together. It turns out, this was the beginning of me setting healthy boundaries for myself and also led to my finding a therapist with whom I feel completely safe and positively regarded, even when we are processing my less than desirable aspects of self.

9. They’re a lousy listener.

While a therapist might not remember minute details, they should remember key facts about you and your concerns. According to Howes:

Not every therapist will remember your dog’s name, where you went to high school, and your favorite breakfast cereal every week. But they should recall your name and what brought you to therapy in the first place. If you feel like you’re constantly replaying your first session to help them help you better, you may want to take your business elsewhere.

10. They disrupt the session.

This includes answering phone calls — unless there’s an emergency — texting or even falling asleep. As Serani said, “A good therapist makes you the only focus.”

11. You just don’t feel “right.”

Howes and Hibbert stressed the importance of trusting your gut. “Sometimes there is no obvious reason — you just don’t feel it’s right,” Hibbert said. According to Howes:

If you feel like something isn’t right in your first phone call or initial session, this may be a bad sign. Some discomfort is a normal part of therapy, just as seeing a personal trainer isn’t always comfortable, but if you feel uncomfortable to the point of dreading or avoiding sessions, you may want to keep looking.

As Duffy said, “you should also feel comfortable in the atmosphere, physically, spiritually and emotionally, that your therapist provides.”

Of course, therapists may make mistakes. They’re only human. Marter shared a story about a friend’s beloved therapist forgetting their appointment. The therapist walked into the waiting room — in her home office — wearing a robe and slippers 15 minutes after their session was supposed to start. The therapist was surprised to see her client, but she was extremely apologetic. “Such human mistakes should be processed directly and can be opportunities for growth,” Marter said.

Finding a good therapist with the expertise you need isn’t easy. But paying attention to these red flags can give you some guidance on when to walk away, and continue looking for a therapist who is right for you.

[secret-blacklight-domain777]

Drew McDowall speaks to Chloé Lula about new solo album Agalma and the reissue of Coil’s 1999 opus Musick To Play In The Dark

21 years after its initial release, Coil’s Musick To Play In The Dark is being remastered and reissued by US label Dais. The release coincides with ex-member Drew McDowall’s fourth solo album Agalma – which he describes as an extension of the ritualistic practices that were “woven into Coil’s DNA”. Like the industrial group’s later work Agalma drips with spectral textures, angelic backing vocals and glitchy cinematic sweeps formed from warped field recordings and modular processing. Here, he reflects on finding inspiration in solitude, the insidiousness of the patriarchy and the power of synchronicity in music and in life.

Chloé Lula: Musick To Play In The Dark has been hailed as the point at which Coil pivoted from “sun music” to “moon music”. According to Jhonn Balance, it was motivated by a desire to “let in things you had shut out before: the feminine. The tidal. The cyclical”.

Drew McDowall: Musick To Play In The Dark kind of put the stamp on a process that was happening for a couple of years with Coil. Balance and Sleazy’s music was considered kind of solar as it related to an album like Scatology with a queer, male energy. During the period that I was involved as an official member, from about ‘94 or ‘95, we began investigating lunar energies, like with Moon’s Milk or Under An Unquiet Skull, one of the Solstice/Equinox 7"s, I think the driver behind this shift was our distaste and distrust of the patriarchy, both from a cultural point of view and from an occult point of view. Musick was a conscious effort to tap into lunar, traditionally feminine energies. And in an occult sense, to move away from the ostensibly solar, patriarchal, hierarchical Crowleyian aspect of the occult into the more fluid, chaotic, unconscious practices of Austin Osman Spare.

Not a lot of people know this, but Balance and Sleazy would always say grace before a meal, and they would always give thanks to the Goddess. They did that almost as long as I knew them. I kind of liked that. So it was about those energies that only really come out in the dark, that are less blatant and present and in your face. It was a process, it wasn’t a sharp delineation. But Musick was when that crystallised, and in that sense it was an album that was completely moon music.

What were your specific contributions to the album?

It was really fragmented. I’d moved to New York after living in London for 15 years, and was dealing with a lot of chemical issues, drug issues, whatever. I went back to work on Musick, but my imbalance had gotten so extreme that I could only be awake during the nighttime hours and was asleep during the daytime. Their studio was in Weston-super-Mare, this decrepit seaside town. They’d gotten sick of London, and they wanted to get Balance away from all of the temptations that he was prey to. It was kind of an attempt to save his life, really. They had this huge Victorian mansion on a hillside overlooking this wonderful bay, the River Severn.

Balance, Sleazy, and Thighpaulsandra worked in the studio on the bones and the structure and the stratum of these tracks during the day, and I would stagger out of whatever comatose stupor I was in in the evening and just take what they’d done and process it and rework it. It was a way I wasn't used to working with Coil, but I think it added something – some kind of psychosis or strange pathology to the recordings. Back then – this was ‘99 – granular synthesis wasn’t really readily available. We’d gotten a hold of some prototype stuff that was really not very easy to use. They didn’t have the nice interface that you have now. But that was part of the fun. I was also taking things and running the material through different filters and synths that we had in the studio. I would leave the files on one of the computer desktops and go to bed. We’d cross each other’s paths in the morning, have breakfast and chat for a bit, and then I’d go to sleep while they worked for the rest of the day.

I’ve read that what you generated through granular synthesis was intended to sound like a fire. What was the idea behind that?

It was almost a kind of ritual aspect, like being around a ritual fire, or a primitive fire, and tapping into what we were and where we came from. If memory serves me right, those were some of the conversations that we had, fire being this idea of being in a glade or an opening in the forest around a fire, and having that sound, the smell and the sight of it. We could only really capture the sound of it, but hopefully we managed to create the effect of the whole experience.

You’ve mentioned to me that you like to go to upstate New York when you want to work on your solo material now. How do isolated settings, like the Catskills or Weston-super-Mare, impact your ability to tap into highly creative states?

We [Coil] loved to get out of the city and go to places like Avebury. We would take day trips or trips for a couple of days and visit stone circles. Back then, in the mid- to late-90s, they weren’t quite the Instagrammable tourist hellholes that they are now. So you could really get to these places that you weren’t allowed to be in, and you’d either cut through a fence or just walk into these places that weren’t even fenced off, for the most part. Getting out like that was a lot of our inspiration prior to doing any recording. Especially when we all lived in London, it was so vital to get out and get into the forests and connect with Pan. That was part of Coil’s methodology, and I kind of carried it over into the way that I work now. If I’m not recording upstate, I’m doing a lot of the pre-recording meditation there and getting myself ready, either psychedelically or mentally or physically or whatever. Or even doing some of the recording if not the whole album. The album that Nicky [Hiro Kone] and I did [The Ghost of George Bataille] was recorded entirely upstate in the Catskills.

You helped remaster both volumes of Musick. Is there anything notably different about these reissues?

We remade Musick into a double album and added a really beautiful etching on one side. All of the Dais reissues sound even better than the originals, thanks to Josh Bonati who remastered them. Corners were cut a little bit in some of the original packaging, and the print quality wasn't as good back then. So not only does Musick sound better, but it looks absolutely gorgeous because we got all of the original files for the artwork and gave them the kind of high-resolution, beautifully packaged reissue that it deserves.

What was it like to revisit the material? Are the guiding principles behind it still relevant 20 years later?

I think they might be even more relevant today, if anything. There’s this massive pushback into this really regressive patriarchal state worldwide. Obviously we see it here in the USA, but in Poland, Hungary – all of those places. It feels like patriarchy’s last death spasm. Unfortunately, as we all know with male rage and white rage, the death spasm can take everything down with it. And while it’s unquestionably a good thing that it feels like its death spasm, we should be aware that it will try to destroy the planet in its desire to not give up power. I think that’s in the nature of patriarchy. It would rather burn the planet to cinders than cede its position. Patriarchy and white supremacy both being intermeshed in the same thing. Things felt apocalyptic back then too, do you know what I mean? But now there is no hiding from as it really feels like everything’s spiraling and whiplashing into oblivion.

I really hadn’t listened to Musick very much, because the process of making it was often very traumatic. And dramatic. I didn’t hear it until about two years after it was released. So when we were listening to what we had during the process of having it remastered, it was kind of mind-blowing. There are moments of darkness, but there are moments of really delicate sweetness, like “Broccoli”, where Sleazy is singing in his soft and sort of adorable voice about vegetables.

I hear similarities between songs like “Are You Shivering?” on Musick and “Agalma II” on your new album. There’s so much going on in their sense of depth, space, and evolution, and their allusions to familiar instruments combined with granular glitch.

That wasn’t deliberate, but it’s kind of inevitable. I added to Coil’s DNA, but Coil added to my DNA as well. There’s something we tapped into that I want to keep exploring. That never changes – this feeling that the work is never done, the mission is never complete. You can always go deeper or explore more, or take it in different directions.

In past interviews, you’ve talked about how your music as part of Coil and as a solo artist has aimed to trace various dissociative states.

I disassociate very easily. And rather than fighting it, I try to use it as a wellspring – as fertile ground for the work that I do. That’s always been a process, and always been part of the work or part of the inspiration for the work. I took my inspiration from those states that we all experience, that we can’t really put a name to. There are moments that fall short of language, and when we try and pin these moments down, it feels like we’re trying to hold water in our hands and it’s slipping out, and we feel adrift. So the idea with Agalma was to try and capture those moments. I guess the closest that I could come to putting a word on it was trying to capture the feeling of the sublime. Not just beauty, but joy, terror, dread. It was partly that. And the working title of the album was Ritual Music. That’s another thing that’s kind of been woven into my DNA from being with Coil. All of the music that we did was ritual music, and everything I’ve done since then has been a form of ritual music.

Agalma feels improvisational in its sense of chaos, but controlled enough to indicate planning, arrangement, and methodology. How did you put it together?

I’m not a very rigorous conceptualist. For me, it’s really trial and error and serendipity. Some of the inspirations or methodology might be that I’ll take the particular architecture of a dream and translate that sonically. Or it might just be a process of iteration, which is really my main workflow: manipulating what I’m doing to the point that something else is revealed in it, something that was trying to get out – that I was consciously cajoling or persuading to speak to me – or else something that just pops up unexpectedly, and I’m like, “This is where this piece is trying to take me”. I might take something through the modular and put it through different processes on the computer, then send it back into the modular. A lot of what I find really rewarding is field recordings. There are a lot of field recordings in my work that don’t even sound like field recordings. I kind of like that, where it’s not immediately apparent what something is.

What were some of the field recordings you used on this album?

I was in Naples a couple of years ago staying in this incredible apartment building that was carved into the side of a hill. I spent hours just recording in the marbled hallways. I got a ton of really good field recordings that I then shaped using the modular. You can’t really listen to it and say, “Oh, that sounds like a voice”. It just sounds like traces and resonances of something. But it’s really hard to pinpoint what it is you’re listening to.

Eight out of nine tracks on Agalma feature contributions from other artists. How did you choose who to work with?

This album started to take shape in my head last year, before I started recording. I really wanted to work with people that inspired me. I wanted to work with people I had that sense of trust with. I didn’t give anyone any guidelines, but everything just gelled in a way that felt really magical and weird.

We’ve talked quite a bit about subverting the patriarchy and being an outsider. Are your collaborations motivated by a desire to mine that feeling of operating from the margins?

That’s interesting. All the collaborators on the record are friends. That was one of the important things. My personal connections with people are always predicated on the idea of this affinity of outsiderness. Alterity. When I meet someone I like, I get the sense that they’re also kind of an outsider. Even if it’s not, like, explicit, there’s always a strand. For this record, it just felt that those were the voices who I really felt a presence with.

One of the feelings that I was also trying to explore and skirt around the edges of, or have in some way in my brain, was the sense of the sacred, and to really reconnect with that idea. And not in any religious terms. That’s something that was very, very much part of Coil. Even though their focus changed for me, I still see it as going back to the albums that preceded my involvement. Coil always had a strong sense of the sacred, and it wasn’t in any Sky God sense. It was in the sense of a sacred materiality. Like “sacred” in the Bataille sense of the word. That’s always been part of my work, but with this I wanted to make it more up-front.

It’s powerful when the act of following a kind of altered, oneiric logic leads to moments of synchronicity.

Those moments have to be valued and not just dismissed as coincidence or something mundane. There are moments of just huge resonance that we’re often not aware of at the time – like the moment feels loaded in a way that we can’t immediately put our finger on. But sometimes months or even years later, we see them as points where our life changed and we started on a different path. We do ourselves a huge disservice to just write them off to chance or happenstance or accidents. What they are I don’t know, but I think they’re much more meaningful than just randomness.

Agalma is available via Dais now. Musick To Play In The Dark is released on 27 November

By Chloé Lula

[unillustratedadventures]

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) under the Alternative Model

The following is based on the DSM-5’s alternative model for personality disorders in general and Cluster B personality disorders in particular, which I have discussed in previous posts. 

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NPD is the Cluster B personality disorder that is exclusively antagonistic (and thus independent of both Disinhibition and Negative Emotionality), in which personality dysfunction is centred around unrealistic or volatile self-esteem, addiction to external means of regulating or protecting self-esteem (i.e. to perceived approval from others), the obstruction of empathy by this addiction, and a sense of entitlement to approval (and to the absence of disapproval) that leads to exploitativeness and superficiality in relationships.

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It is important to note that while NPD is associated with high values of the trait Narcissism, it is not implied by high trait Narcissism. Indeed, every Cluster B personality disorder is associated with high values of Narcissism.

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Although the essential pathological traits of NPD are exclusively antagonistic, the antagonistic traits Manipulativeness, Deceitfulness, and Hostility—which are all centrally involved in Antisocial Personality Disorder—are not strictly required by NPD. Nevertheless, such traits frequently co-occur with NPD. When they do co-occur with NPD, the relevant instances of manipulativeness, deceitfulness, and hostility tend to constitute desperate attempts to acquire perceived approval, or avoid or mitigate the effects of perceived disapproval, in order to protect one’s self-esteem (by abusing the perceived source of approval or disapproval). A notable subtype of NPD—often called ‘Malignant Narcissism’—consists in the co-occurrence of NPD with Manipulativeness, Deceitfulness, and Hostility. Even when instances of manipulativeness, deceitfulness, and hostility are insufficiently regular to imply the corresponding pathological traits, the nature of NPD is such that manipulation, deceit, and hostility are bound to occur whenever there is sufficient stress relating to self-esteem, and they seem to be the most effective means of protecting or regulating self-esteem.

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Other notable subtypes of NPD include what is sometimes called ‘Covert Narcissism’, which consists in the co-occurrence of NPD with high trait Introversion (or, equivalently, low trait Extraversion), Overt Narcissism, which consists in the co-occurrence of NPD with high trait Extraversion, and Fragile Narcissism, which consists in the co-occurrence of NPD with the negative emotional traits Anxiousness and Depressivity.

—

1| The Parts of NPD

Both of the following are present at least by early adulthood: 

1. Moderate or greater personality dysfunction, manifested by at least two of the following: 

Externalised Self-esteem  (Identity) 

Approval Fixation  (Self-direction) 

Exclusive Self-concern (Empathy)

Selfish Non-mutuality (Intimacy)

2. Pathological Traits that include both of the following aspects of Antagonism:

Grandiosity/Entitlement (Antagonism)

Attention-seeking (Antagonism)

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2| Personality Dysfunction in NPD

Every instance of a personality disorder involves characteristic difficulties in at least two domains from among Identity, Self-direction, Empathy, and Intimacy. In this section, I shall briefly explain each of the specific difficulties that are characteristic of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. To this end, NPD specifically requires at least two of the following characteristic difficulties:

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(Identity) Externalised Self-esteem: Excessive reference to the perceived approval or disapproval of others for self-definition and the regulation of self-esteem; self-appraisal that is overly inflated or overly deflated, or vascillates between these two extremes; emotions mirror self-esteem and fluctuations thereof.

“On my own, I can’t get a clear idea of who I am. My only sense of who I am comes from how others react to me, and how valuable or worthwhile I feel is highly sensitive to my perceptions of what others think or feel about me. In the absence of these external signs, either I feel completely worthless, I feel flawless and exceptional, or I’m constantly shifting between feeling completely worthless and feeling flawless and exceptional.”

(Self-direction) Approval Fixation: Goal-setting is based on gaining perceived approval from others and avoiding perceived disapproval from others, relative to personal standards that are either unreasonably high (in order to view one’s self as exceptional) or too low (due to a sense of entitlement and unreasonable expectations of approval); frequent lack of awareness that one has these motivations.

“On some level (sometimes without my being fully aware of it), I’m constantly stalked by the threat of feeling utterly worthless, or of losing any sense of who I am. And I want to avoid this more than anything—so, no matter what the cost, I’m always trying to get confirmation of my worth and identity from others, and always trying to prevent experiences or mitigate the effects of experiences that make me feel less valuable, or weaken my idea of who I am.”

(Empathy) Exclusive Self-concern: Impaired ability to take the perspectives of others, and to recognise or identify with the feelings of others; excessive attunement to reactions that are perceived as being relevant to one’s self, to the exclusion of all other interpersonal stimuli; tendency to either over-estimate or under-estimate one’s effects on others.

“Others are nothing more that indicators of who I am, and objects that are either approving or disapproving of me. It is difficult for me to imagine that others have thoughts, feelings, interests, or intentions that do not concern me in some way, or do not express approval or disapproval of me. If I do something good or admirable, then I expect that everyone will notice it and be improved by it. But I also assume that my actions could never thwart, harm, or disadvantage others in any way that is significant or that otherwise demands accountability from me, no matter what I might do.”

(Intimacy) Selfish Non-mutuality: Even apparently close relationships are largely superficial, ultimately disposable, and are acquired for the purpose of regulating self-esteem; mutuality in relationships is heavily constrained by one’s having little genuine interest in others’ experiences, and by the predominance of one’s need for personal gain, the acquisition of perceived approval, and the avoidance of perceived disapproval. 

“In effect, my closest connections to others are just reliable means of feeling good about myself and supporting a favourable idea of myself. The tasks of maintaining my self-esteem and maintaining a favourable self-image leave me with little room for genuinely caring about the people who are closest to me. My significant others are significant only in the sense that I am presently keeping them around me, because I can presently rely on them to make me feel good about myself and support a favourable idea of myself, with minimal effort and input from me. I treat my significant others in whatever way makes me feel better about myself, or stops me from feeling worse about myself, irrespective of what they might want or need. Regardless of the apparent closeness or significance of a person in relation to me, and regardless of the feelings and wellbeing of such a person, I have no choice but to sever all ties with her as soon as I start perceiving her as a threat to how I feel about myself, or to my favourable image of myself. Nothing is more important to me than feeling good about myself (or not feeling bad about myself). And this means that every one is ultimately disposable, and that no one’s interests or wellbeing can ever be more important than my own.”

—

It is well worth comparing these characteristic difficulties to the ways in which Identity, Self-direction, Empathy, and Intimacy operate in healthy personalities. For this purpose, I have sketched out a healthy personality profile here.

—

3| Pathological Traits in NPD

Every instance of a Cluster B personality disorder involves a sufficient combination of pathological traits, all of which are aspects of either Disinhibition, Antagonism, or Negative Emotionality. In this section, I shall briefly explain each of the pathological traits that might be involved in instances of NPD. To this end, NPD specifically requires both of the following two aspects of Antagonism:

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Grandiosity/Entitlement (Antagonism): Either overt feelings of unjustified entitlement, or actions that imply such a sense of entitlement; self-centredness; acting as though one firmly holds to the belief that one is special, exceptional, or importantly different from others, possibly associated with condescension towards others. 

Attention-seeking (Antagonism): Excessive attempts to attract and be the focus of the attention of others; acting in ways that prioritise being noticed and remembered; admiration-seeking.

[pinteressay]

Sickly Skinny:  A mosaic memoir by Cristina Casas

“Have you lost weight?” was my grandmother’s way of saying “I love you”. The women of my extended family who developed type II diabetes from being overweight would constantly and relentlessly fat-shame other women as a way to hide their own insecurities about their weight. Both of my parents wanted to lose weight but couldn’t stick to a diet and exercise plan. But I was the one to develop an eating disorder at 14. The kid who had never cared what others thought, who put about five minutes of time into her appearance every day, who when she wasn’t in a school uniform was in her self-appointed uniform of solid colored t-shirts and dark washed skinny jeans. That was the kid that went from 135 lbs to 100 lbs in two months.

The Worst Things I Heard When I Lost 35 Lbs in Two Months at 15

1.   “Have you lost weight?!?!?!”

2.   “You look absolutely amazing!”

3.   “What diet are you on? And how can I do it too?”

4.   “I won’t eat unless you will too” - my best friend (soon to be boyfriend) who thought he was helping

5.   “What’s your secret?”

6.   “Let’s go shopping so you can donate all your old clothes that are too big!”

7.   “You’re so lucky to be a double zero!”

8.   “I’m so jealous of your size!”

9.   “You look so much sexier now.” - my 40 year old godmother

10. “Whatever you’re doing to look like this, keep it up!”

He’s never explicitly said it but, my dad had an eating disorder as a teenager. His situation was different than mine, his immediate family was extremely fat phobic, and he was a chubby child. As a teenager, he had a job working for Coca-Cola as a delivery person. He was part of a two-person delivery team, his partner would drive the truck, and my dad would unload the boxes of soda. When he talks about this experience, he focuses on that part of it; offhandedly adding that every single day he did that job, for lunch, he would have a snickers bar and a diet coke. When talking about this period of his life, he drops the fact in casually, but it is always included. He can’t talk about high school without mentioning the lunches of 0 calorie soda and a candy bar. I’ve seen the photos of my dad’s transformation - it wasn’t typical puberty baby fat shedding; he went from being an overweight kid to an underweight teenager. It’s sad. He played football but got injured so he had to quit and that’s when this started. My guess: he felt like if he was big but didn’t play football, he’d lose his popularity so he “became attractive”. I don’t think he knew he had an eating disorder; he may not even realize it now. There’s this stereotype that eating disorders are only for, well, people who look like me: skinny, relatively attractive, white girls with long hair. They’re not for boys, particularly not for Hispanic boys. 

Eating disorders can be genetically linked, so it’s not much of a stretch to realize he had an eating disorder as a teenager, despite us never explicitly talking about it. Eating disorders are much less sociocultural than people seem to think as they are neurological disorders, though they do have deep psychological links and triggers though. Both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are linked to certain genes, this research is still very new, but neurologists and geneticists are exploring. A study done on twins showed that pathological attitudes such as body dissatisfaction, eating and weight concerns, and weight preoccupation, show heritabilities of roughly 32 to 72 percent. While this isn’t the same as a parent-child relationship, it does show that eating disorders can be shared between family members. As with many mental disorders, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how/why these disorders manifest in certain people as opposed to others but studies have shown that “greater than 50 percent of the variance in liability to eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors can be accounted for by additive genetic effects” (Berrettini).

Things I Wanted To Hear When I Lost 35 Lbs in Two Months at 15

1.   “We can see your ribs; are you okay?”

2.   “You aren’t broken.”

3.   “We accept you no matter what.”

4.   “We want to help you.”

5.   “We love you always.”

6.   “I understand what you’re going through.”

The DSM V categorizes five main eating disorders but when I was first diagnosed four years ago, there were four major eating disorders in the DSM IV: anorexia nervosa (binge/purge and restricting), bulimia nervosa (purge and non-purge), and eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS) with binge eating disorder as a specific subcategory of EDNOS. I have EDNOS. People with EDNOS either have atypical anorexia or bulimia, mixed features of both disorders, or behaviors that are not categorized in either bulimia or anorexia (Psychology Today). Basically, if you have disordered eating to the point where it could be considered an eating disorder, but you don’t have one of the other three, you have EDNOS. My eating disorder manifests as a mix of both anorexia (restricting) and bulimia (non-purge). My own personal way of looking at it is that I am an atypical anorexic with the mentality of a bulimic person. Unlike typical anorexics, I am completely aware of my condition and even at my very worst never let myself go more than 72 hours without eating. Additionally, atypical anorexics, never drop into a weight range that would be considered underweight. I fully understand the health detriments, but it’s not something you logically choose - it's a neurological and psychological disease that you have to fight. Typical bulimics binge eat and then fast, but I tend to fast and then mildly binge, which at this point means eating a slightly larger than “normal” meal and allow myself to eat more sweets than I should.

EDNOS is the most prominent eating disorder, affecting 75% of people with eating disorders (Machado). It affects nearly 10% of the total population of the United States: 4.78% of adolescents and 4.64% of adults. The disorder is difficult to study because, like all other mental disorders, it is so highly individualistic; EDNOS doesn’t affect any two people in the same way. Since there is a range of subcategories of EDNOS, which are each highly volatile,  little can be said about the category as a whole. What can be stated is that like with other eating disorders EDNOS is widely under-treated and often undiagnosed, it also can lead to severe long-term health detriments such as potentially permanent kidney damage, heart damage, and brain damage if left untreated (Le Grange).

Things My Eating Disorder Made Me Do:

1.   Obsess over calories - something I had never even considered before

2.   Skip meals

3.   Completely stop eating breakfast

4.   Obsessively drink water

5.   Avoid kitchens and cafeterias like the plague

6.   Fight with my boyfriend about eating and anything having to do with food

7.   Become nauseated at the smell of most food

8.   Ignore the worsening of my chronic migraines - one of my migraine triggers is low blood sugar

9.   Rationalize binging after not eating

10. Fight all logic when it came to food and eating

11. Eat fewer than 500 calories a day

As children, people who later develop eating disorders are often characterized as “anxious, obsessive, perfectionistic and achievement-oriented,” I fit that description pretty perfectly, both as a child and now as a college freshman (Weir). These character traits certainly aren’t the reason I developed ENDOS, but once I had it they exacerbated it: I’m anxious about my weight and people noticing my odd eating habits. I’m obsessive about calories. I’m a perfectionist in so many aspects of my life that it causes me extreme emotional stress that I cannot gain enough control over my brain to be able to fend off this disorder. I am always oriented towards both finally freeing myself from ENDOS and giving in to achieve my “goal weight”.

I remember the day my boyfriend asked me if I was anorexic and I had a complete meltdown; denying vehemently to save face. I knew I had an eating disorder before we started dating, I had accepted that struggle as part of my life. That sounds passive, but like any other mental disorder, ENDOS won’t go away because you pretend you don’t have it, it’ll just get worse. I have never in my life thought I was overweight, but for some reason at 14 going on 15, my brain decided that the extra tummy pudge I had was no longer acceptable. I already had depression and anxiety at that point; and because they were unrelated, my eating disorder perversely helped me get over my depression. As I lost weight, I became less depressed, not necessarily because I was happy I lost the weight, that certainly factored in, but almost because my brain could only handle so many things so my eating disorder sort of absorbed the depression. If I was feeling emotionally shitty, my brain suggested I had eaten too much the day before and was feeling bad about that. Logically, I knew that not eating was probably contributing to the shitty feeling but like with most mental disorders, there is no room for logical though - my own or that of others. 

My boyfriend would try to convince me to eat with logical arguments such as “the human body needs more than 1000 calories a day Cristina, you’re actually killing yourself” and “Cristina, you know that when you fast you retain water so you gain water weight and you actually lose weight more slowly” and I knew all of these things in my brain, but the eating disorder always found a way to render them void. My responses to these very logical arguments were usually along the lines of “I’m fine” and “Look, I’m getting better really, I’m just not hungry right now”. Like my father, for a period of time, I would eat a candy bar for lunch; these “lunches” would be eaten around 2 PM, after my third class of the day when I would begin to feel a migraine coming on and would only eat so that I could make it through the rest of the day because raising my blood sugar often helps me fend off a migraine. I passed out three times from lack of food but I always blamed it on my migraines, which are equally serious, but wouldn’t warrant a call to the school psychologist. 

I developed a habit of lying about eating; I would tell my theater castmates that I was going to eat dinner once I got home from rehearsal and my parents that I had eaten dinner at rehearsal; I never told my mom about the skipped meals - to her knowledge I was getting three meals plus snacks every day. 

Battling an eating disorder has become a huge part of my identity because it’s hard for a mental disorder not to become a big part of who you are - there's a constant battle in my head between the disorder and my self; eating disorders shift your whole perception of yourself whether you want them to or not, no matter how hard you fight them. It plays a huge role in my confidence and general self-image, not just my physical appearance either. A large part of me is so outraged that I “allowed” the eating disorder to do this to me, I have spent the past four years so ashamed of it. 

Things My Eating Disorder Didn’t Make Me Do:

1.   Eat less shit/healthier

2.   Exercise

3.   Feel the need to purge

4.   Obsess over my body image to a degree of dysphoria

5.   Think that I needed to see my ribs to be beautiful - I was disgusted when I got to my thinnest and could see my skin suctioning around my ribs like cling wrap, but I couldn’t stop

6.   Deny having an eating disorder

The first step of recovery is acknowledgement, something I had from the get-go. Step two is actually wanting to recover, which was the hardest part. Unlike most other disorders, people are amazed and impressed with the physical results of an eating disorder. The amount of compliments I received after losing the weight, did not at all make me want to regain a healthier weight. So for two years, I stayed at 100-105 lbs. My senior year of high school, I snapped; I didn’t care what anyone thought of me anymore, about anything. I decided once and for all that I needed to actively change the way I thought about food and my eating disorder. I had gained a bit of weight over the summer and was up to 110 lbs, and I decided that instead of panicking like I did when I first saw the number on the scale, I would make this my new “acceptable” weight, I could live with being a zero instead of a double zero. It seems so dumb that I let the arbitrary numbers put on clothing define how I live my life, but to me, it matters, and I have made that my safe zone. I decided to start practicing yoga and eating in a less disordered fashion. The exercise certainly helped me become okay with gaining a little weight. Coming to college I have gained a little more weight but increased the level of exercise without trying due to the pedestrian lifestyle, so my clothing all still fits which helps put my eating disorder at ease. I am still in the recovery process, but I recently I have become increasingly happy with my body, and I can feel the disorder retreating, it’s not gone but the mental wounds opened by my EDNOS are starting to scar over.

Bibliography

Andersen, Arnold E., et al. “A Slimming Program For Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 271–280.

Berrettini, Wade. “The Genetics of Eating Disorders.” Psychiatry (Edgmont) 1.3 (2004): 18–25. Print.

Bischoff-Grethe, Amanda et al. “Altered Brain Response to Reward and Punishment in Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa.” Psychiatry research 214.3 (2013): 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2013.07.004. PMC. Web. 22 Nov. 2017.

“Eating Disorders.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 3 June 2017, www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/eating-disorders.Eddy, Kamryn T, et al. 

“Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified in Adolescents.”American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 47, no. 2, Feb. 2008, pp. 156–164.

Elices, Matilde, et al. “Direct Experience While Eating: Laboratory Outcomes among Individuals with Eating Disorders versus Healthy Controls.” Eating Behaviors, vol. 27, 2017, pp. 23–26.

Foerde, Karin et al. “Neural Mechanisms Supporting Maladaptive Food Choices in Anorexia Nervosa.” Nature neuroscience 18.11 (2015): 1571–1573. PMC. Web. 22 Nov. 2017.

Kerr, Kara L et al. “Altered Insula Activity during Visceral Interoception in Weight-Restored Patients with Anorexia Nervosa.” Neuropsychopharmacology 41.2 (2016): 521–528. PMC. Web. 22 Nov. 2017.

Le Grange, Daniel et al. “Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified Presentation in the US Population.” The International journal of eating disorders 45.5 (2012): 711–718. PMC. Web. 22 Nov. 2017.

Machado, Paulo P.P., et al. “The Prevalence of Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified.”International Journal of Eating Disorders, vol. 40, no. 3, 2007, pp. 212–217.

Weir, Kirsten. “New Insights on Eating Disorders.” Monitor on Psychology, vol. 47, no. 4, Apr. 2016, p. 36., www.apa.org/monitor/2016/04/eating-disorders.aspx.

[topmixtrends]

COMEDIAN, ACTOR, AUTHOR, and activist Russell Brand, who needs no introduction, has struggled with addiction throughout his life. Recently we discussed his new book, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, in which he shares the hard lessons he has learned over the years.

¤

BRAD EVANS: We all know any book is the outcome of months and sometimes years of procrastination. What really compelled you to write this book at this moment in your life?

RUSSELL BRAND: I felt that anybody who is in recovery has an experience where the initial attempt to tackle addiction — in my case crack and heroin — ends up being utilized in every aspect of your life. Working through and following the same principles can alter all behaviors and all forms of destructive attachments. So what I felt was I’d reached a point in my life where I have gone through so many layers of disillusionment, with sex, fame, Hollywood, and the rest, and the recovery lens through which I live my life offered something.

Don’t get me wrong — disillusionment is a good thing. After all, who wants to be bloody illusioned! Now I by no means do it perfectly. Far from it! But I have seen the techniques that I followed change lives. So I wanted to expound these to offer a counter-weight to the prevailing addictive ideologies of our times, which is a determined and yet unconscious self-centeredness.

When reading the manuscript, I was trying to figure out what type of book it actually was. Ironic, I know, for a so-called post-modernist! I think, in an affirmative way, it’s like an “Anti-Self-Help-Book.” And what I mean is the central message I see jumping off the pages is that it’s precisely the traits of the self-centered, individualistic, fuck-the-world-and-its-loving-sentiments attitudes that get you precisely into the fix in the first place. Hence it’s not about self-help; rather it’s all about a sober and truthful cry for human connection.

I think our culture and our biochemistry can collude to become our worst allies. They can create a kind of chronic individualism. And I feel the natural conclusion of a secular rejection of the mystical leads us to the point that we are just individuals. We are only here for ourselves, surviving alone, and learning how to dominate certain situations so we can fulfill our own impulses and desires.

When I try to find personal fulfillment in my life I still often find myself in a sort of peculiar despair. I start to feel lonely and disconnected. Then I remind myself. Hence why I feel qualified to write about addiction is my life is like a map of addicted lines from money, crack, fame, sex, relationships, and seeking out other people’s approval. And so I see this phenomena appearing again and again in my own life. Maybe the label “addiction” itself is too confining and what we are actually dealing with is the human condition in motion. We live in a culture that uses as its fuel this will to acquire and possess. But the tragedy is such a desire to possess things ends up possessing us.

But this is a constant battle. Every day I wake and I am bewitched and hypnotized by the seductive lure of materialism. And yet I know that when I go and help other people, sometimes in blatant sub–Princess Diana ways or even on a more basic human level by just listening to other people’s problems, that’s when I feel genuinely fulfilled and my life has meaning and significance. There is an indescribable energy there when you begin to help somebody else. It’s a kind of elevated sense of human connection. And you also start to see the real beauty of a person when they help somebody less fortunate. A life of unselfish purpose, empathy, compassion, all those words that are excluded from the political and social ideologies of our times suddenly become accessible through the most basic of human actions and behaviors.

So why do you think then that we often act and behave against our better judgments? I am thinking here of our attraction to relationships and people we know to be detrimental and indeed toxic to our physical and emotional well-being.

Possibly a misplaced sense of romanticism. What I mean by this is the individualistic notion that you can find fulfillment by being with some aspirational figure that comes from the desire to be with some deity or earthly goddess. I’ll find salvation if I find the true one, like your own personal Jesus. This idea I think is highly prevalent. And yet even more toxic I think is the commodification and objectification of all relationships. To view somebody like an object that can serve you, make you feel better, and improve your social status. Now I have to admit that in my case this happened all too easily. I have to work to not approach relationships in this indulgent way. But these are just tendencies. And that’s what a recovery program means to me. It is to learn to acknowledge and deal with these tendencies on a daily basis.

It’s also important to recognize it’s not the difference between having a program and no program. We are socially and culturally programmed to behave in certain ways, not least the program of vapid consumerism. And so if you don’t undo that program, decode yourself from the “I’ll never be good enough unless I get my hand on that object” like somebody who is leaving an all too consuming cult, then that’s the program which will come to shape your existence.

We have to learn to untangle the strands that bind us to materialism. We know the material world is an illusion that is transmitted into our consciousness through the senses. This is why personal crisis is important here. It gives us the opportunity to reevaluate our lives and ask difficult questions.

There is invariably a deep philosophical underpinning to this project. And that is the attempt to connect with something, which in the most inexplicable but no less real ways gives meaning to this all too fleeting life. Am I right in saying this is truly a search for the substantive over the superficial? Or to put it another way, maybe it’s an embrace of something irreducibly spiritual, which only comes from certain courage to tell the truth about your existence?

What is substantial about the spiritual to me is its efficacy. I know it works. When I do these things I feel better in ways I can’t explain but know are real. It doesn’t require any science to tell me this. When I am kind, loving, and when I surrender I know that I am becoming a better me. These things can’t be measured. Nor can they be mechanized or monetized. They are in fact affective. They have a truth, which is different and difficult to legislate or iterate. This again is the deception of secular materialism. It teaches you to become suspicious of those feelings you know to be true. And then it sells us solutions to our problems that come from living under the false ideals of consumerism. This is how addictions take hold. They don’t appear as problems but solutions in our attempts at seeking some form of human connection. And this is why I think we are all somewhere on the addictive scale.

I know that I could lapse at any moment. I don’t know what’s around the corner. What unforeseen event might push me back into the depths of loneliness and despair? This is why I haven’t written this book from a position of authority. It’s written from a position of an experience I am still living. And it’s when I actually think that I’ll take full control of this situation that the ego starts to reappear, armed with its desire, pleasure, and fear to send me down the wrong path. So the reason why the spiritual is important is that it is the only thing that can transcend the material and passive consumerism.

You talk in the book of the need to confide in others about your troubles. I would like to read out this particular segment, not only because it brought tears to my eyes, but also because I think it really addresses what’s at stake here:

Suddenly my fraught and freighted childhood became reasonable
 and soothed. “My mum was doing her best, so was my dad.” Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do and I am under
no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present. Yes, it is wrong that I was abused as a child but there is no reason for me to relive it, consciously or unconsciously, in the way I conduct my adult relationships. My perceptions of reality, even my own memories, are not objective or absolute, they are a biased account and they can be altered.

The moves here from the deeply personal and tragic to the transformative are powerful. And it no doubt takes a great deal of courage to put this onto paper. How do you hope these words can help in the healing of others who carry such difficult memories?

As Jarvis Cocker once put it, “without people we are nothing.” Recovery and spirituality are collective and communal activities. They cannot be achieved by being stuck into a pod and shot into outer space. Primarily it is about how you relate to yourself and how you relate to others as people. Just to clarify, the abuse you referred to in the passage happened outside of my family and the issue, I feel, is that it’s possible to alter our perception of the past, and in doing so we also alter our perception of the present. But you can’t just say this to yourself stuck in some room. It has to be related.

Lets now connect this more specifically to your earlier work on the War on Drugs. Historically, the drugs issue has often been neatly separated into war/law versus development/health paradigms. Now while the critique of the former is most welcome, too often the latter can reduce this to questions of individual pathology or deviance. It is simply the individual who screws up! How might we learn to better connect the social to the individual in this context?

The criminalization of drugs is a useful social tool in the management of populations. And I agree with your critique of the health model as a determinate means for reducing what is a social issue to some individual pathology. Addiction can affect anybody, but it is certainly exacerbated by economic deprivation. But there are different forms of deprivation too, like emotional deprivation, so it’s not like the poor simply have full ownership of this. Though it would be nice for them to have exclusive control of something! What I mean is that its effects are felt more there in terms of the experience, the treatments, whether you are criminalized or not, and often whether it takes your life.

A while back I went on a police raid in west London. This was a very revelatory experience for me. They battered the door in of this “crack house” — which in itself is an interesting description for a deprived home — and what dwelled within was not monsters. It was like booting down the door of a leukemia ward. It was full of thin, emaciated, and broken people who were slumped and pale in chairs, denied sunlight of every variety — literal and spiritual.

These were people who were just holding their lives together. And what I realized here was that it’s precisely those programs, which take you from the individual narcissism and nihilism to forms of social care and compassion that are most needed here. If we have an inclusive, empathetic society then by definition you don’t abandon people to the fate of forces beyond their control. We need to help people so that they are not defined by problems, which are often social problems. If we have systems that emphasize the corollary and connection between us then we will build a better society that is more inclusive.

I want to push you a bit on this term “recovery,” which is used for the title. The way you seem to use and deploy the term here is different from more simplistic understandings, which might refer to the rediscovering of some essential self that’s been somehow trapped or frozen in time and just needs to be re-discovered. And yet this book seems to also be a critique of such perfectible lifestyles. Or that to recover means to also accept that sometimes it’s actually okay not to be okay in life, and that all of us struggle with our identities.

This again is something I have only found in spiritual conversations. You accept fallibility as part of the human condition. And you don’t punish yourself because of it. Humanity needs to relinquish the idea of perfectibility. Now a natural biochemical entity like the human does have a code. It will grow a certain way, if in our case unimpeded by social, political, cultural forces. But we know those forces exist. So when I use the term recovery I am talking more about an intended path, which doesn’t condemn us to live addicted lives and to succumb to the logics of passivity and its false material prophets. We must be reborn from a world that sees us only as a statistic.

To conclude, I’d like to end on the issue you begin with at the very start of the book — namely the big impending “D” or death question. As you point out in the introduction, we don’t like to talk about the reality of death individually, and it certainly is not something we like to talk about publicly. And yet since Plato onward, it has been thought that to philosophize is to learn how to die. 

I don’t think however this goes far enough, or at least it needs to be taken a stage further. As they say, “Religion is for people who fear hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.” With this in mind, your book leaves me asking: How can we examine our life, to learn to appreciate its finitude and the impending death we all face by actually crossing over and looking at life from the perspective of death? Or, as you say, to ask serious questions about our life, our present, and our hopes from the future, while already knee-deep in the mud of our tragic and yet still wondrous condition?

This requires actually some rather simplistic shifts in acceptance and gratitude. To begin, on an all too human level, I relinquish the idea that I am not homeless, lying in a gutter and smacked up on crack because I am now somehow a superior being literally looking down. It’s more because of some random set of coordinates and unforeseen events, which have deposited me into a comfortable life, and I’m really lucky and gracious. So I don’t have a punitive attitude toward those people who by chance find themselves in desperate states.

I always find it a real honor that when I am among addicts they will often just take me for who I am. They know my past and my fallibilities. And it’s in these moments that I also realize we are all ultimately connected. We are all experiencing this thing called life together as part of a shared consciousness, for better and worse. And when I realize this I know I am not on my own anymore. I am no longer afraid. I don’t have these obligations to prop up some avatar of myself, some deification that people might love or give me approval in order for me to ameliorate some inner sense of worthlessness and isolation.

When the self feels like it’s worthless or nothing I feel we are searching for a deeper truth. How can we not be disconnected or divided, separate from everything? Clearly the retreat into individualism is more than self-defeating here. Because if we separate we are condemning ourselves to nothingness! This is not about the annihilation of the self as in the subjugation in a violent or destructive way. But the recognition that there is no need for fear because we are already one, and these things are not just philosophical tropes or empty mantras, they are things you can live by recognizing that your own suffering is an opportunity and call to break out from the imposed paradigm that reduces worthiness simply to what objects you accumulate. And this is what it means I think to find out the truth about ourselves.

¤

Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director of the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base covering 143 countries.

¤

Artwork: Chantal Meza, Get Away II, Oil on Canvas 55×78 (2014).

The post Recovering from an Addicted Life: A Conversation with Russell Brand appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[unillustratedadventures]

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) under the Alternative Model

The following is based on the DSM-5’s alternative model for personality disorders in general and Cluster B personality disorders in particular, which I have discussed in previous posts. 

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BPD is the Cluster B personality disorder that is largely distinguished by Negative Emotionality, while also involving either Disinhibition or Antagonism, in which personality dysfunction—along with the destructive patterns that characterise Cluster B more generally—are centred around impoverished self-image and goal-setting, intolerance of stress, emotional volatility, preoccupation with negative evaluation and rejection, and interpersonal interactions that are intense, inconsistent, and toxic.

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Although the antagonistic traits Manipulativeness and Deceitfulness are not diagnostic with respect to BPD, they do frequently co-occur with it. When such traits co-occur with BPD, the relevant instances of manipulation and deceit tend to constitute desperate attempts to avoid or prevent perceived negative evaluation, rejection, or abandonment (by abusing the person who is expected to impose such a thing). Even when instances of manipulativeness and deceitfulness are insufficiently regular to imply the corresponding pathological traits, the nature of BPD is such that manipulation and deceit are highly likely to occur whenever there is sufficient stress relating to negative evaluation, rejection, or abandonment, and they seem to be the most effective means of prevention.

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Moreover, while proneness to delusional thinking is not strictly required by BPD, it also frequently co-occurs with it (indeed, the name for the disorder originally comes from the idea that it sits on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis). Accordingly, there is a noteworthy subtype of BPD—Borderline Personality Disorder with Psychotic Features—which amounts to the co-occurrence of BPD with a specific proneness to delusion (in which the psychosis is typically both paranoid and stress-induced), as reflected by either of the following Psychotic traits:

Unusual Beliefs and Experiences (Psychoticism)

Cognitive/Perceptual Dysregulation (Psychoticism)

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1| The Parts of BPD

Both of the following are present at least by early adulthood: 

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1. Moderate or greater personality dysfunction, manifested by at least two of the following: 

Impoverished Identity (Identity) 

Goal Instability (Self-direction) 

Devaluative Hypersensitivity (Empathy)

Push-Pull Conflictiveness (Intimacy)

2. From among the following seven pathological traits—which are aspects of Negative Emotionality, Disinhibition, and Antagonism—one aspect of either Disinhibition or Antagonism* together with at least three other traits (summing to a total of at least four traits:

Emotional Lability (Negative Emotionality)

Anxiousness (Negative Emotionality)

Separation Insecurity (Negative Emotionality)

Depressivity (Negative Emotionality)

Impulsivity (Disinhibition)*

Risk-taking (Disinhibition)*

Hostility (Antagonism)*

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2| Personality Dysfunction in BPD

Every instance of a personality disorder involves characteristic difficulties in at least two domains from among Identity, Self-direction, Empathy, and Intimacy. In this section, I shall briefly explain each of the specific difficulties that are characteristic of Borderline Personality Disorder. To this end, BPD specifically requires at least two of the following characteristic difficulties:

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(Identity) Impoverished Identity: Markedly impoverished, poorly developed, or unstable self-image, often associated with excessive self-criticism; chronic feelings of emptiness; dissociative states under stress.

“I don’t have a good grasp of who I am, either because it’s never clear to me or because it’s constantly changing. It gets a lot worse when I feel overwhelmed or stressed out. At those times, I can lose sight of what I’m like, what I want, and what I believe—or these core aspects of myself can suddenly seem to change in drastic ways. I’m convinced that I’m worthless. I always feel as though something’s missing inside me.”

(Self-direction) Goal Instability: Inconsistency or paucity in goals, aspirations, values, or career plans.

“I often have no idea about what I’m doing or where I’m going. I never know what I want in life; or else I’m momentarily convinced about what I want in life, only to suddenly find myself wanting the complete opposite. So I’m either stuck in one place, going nowhere and doing nothing of consequence, or I’m erratically jumping from one incomplete task to the next.”

(Empathy) Devaluative Hypersensitivity: Impaired sensitivity to the feelings and needs of others, associated with interpersonal hypersensitivity (i.e. proneness to feeling slighted or insulted) and perceptions of others that are selectively biased towards vulnerabilities, weaknesses, or negative attributes.

“Others are either perfectly good or irredeemably bad. Usually the latter. There is no grey area, where the qualities, thoughts, or feelings of others might be located. And no-one likes me. I can’t do anything right. People are always attacking me. People are always thinking bad things about me. When others reach out to me, they usually have ulterior motives or are trying to undermine me in some way. Even when I do think that people are good, they usually turn out to be horrible after all, or end up hating me and rejecting me. All of this stuff is stressful, and leaves me very little room for thinking about what's good for others, or doing things for others.”

(Intimacy) Push-Pull Conflictiveness: Perhaps some capacity for genuine intimacy, but an impaired capacity for intimate relationships that are stable and fully mutualistic. Tendency to bring about close relationships that are intense, unstable, and conflicted, largely because of one’s tendencies of mistrust, neediness, abruptly alternating between overinvolvement and withdrawal, alternately viewing close relationships in extremes of idealisation and devaluation, and anxious preoccupation with criticism, rejection, or abandonment (whether real or imagined). [Representing things in extremes of idealisation and devaluation is called ‘splitting’, as is abruptly shifting between such representations of something.]

“My closest connections to others are confusing and often terrifying. Such relationships can be really important to me. Too important. So important, in fact, that they can get too painful to bear and must be invalidated or destroyed. I often crave closeness and affection, but then when I end up getting close to people, they usually force me to cut them loose and get rid of them. They either turn out to be massive disappointments, or they just make me anxious all the time because they're bound to hurt me and abandon me. So I have no choice but to hurt them and abandon them. Sometimes I want to be as close to other people as possible, but then suddenly I will want absolutely nothing to do with them. My significant others are perfect and can do no wrong. My significant others are evil monsters who just want to hurt me. My significant others have no significance whatsoever and I couldn’t care less about them.”

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It is well worth comparing these characteristic difficulties to the ways in which Identity, Self-direction, Empathy, and Intimacy operate in healthy personalities. For this purpose, I have sketched out a healthy personality profile here.

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3| Pathological Traits in BPD

Every instance of a Cluster B personality disorder involves a sufficient combination of pathological traits, all of which are aspects of either Disinhibition, Antagonism, or Negative Emotionality. In this section, I shall briefly explain each of the pathological traits that might be involved in instances of BPD. To this end, BPD specifically requires at least four of the following seven aspects of Negative Emotionality, Disinhibition, and Antagonism, at least one of which must be either an aspect of Disinhibition or the trait Hostility (which is an aspect of Antagonism):

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Emotional Lability (Negative Emotionality): Unstable emotional experiences and frequent mood changes; emotions that are easily aroused, intense, and/or out of proportion to events and circumstances.

Anxiousness (Negative Emotionality): Intense feelings of nervousness, tenseness, or panic, often in reaction to interpersonal stresses; worry about the negative effects of past unpleasant experiences and future negative possibilities; feeling fearful, apprehensive, or threatened by uncertainty; fear of falling apart or losing control.

Separation Insecurity (Negative Emotionality): Fears of negative evaluation by, rejection by, and/or separation from significant others—which is associated, somewhat paradoxically, with fears of being excessively dependent on significant others, or complete loss of one’s autonomy. 

Depressivity (Negative Emotionality): (Often-but-not-necessarily associated with suicidal behaviour or thoughts of suicide) frequent feelings of being down, miserable, and/or hopeless; difficulty recovering from such moods; pervasive pessimism about the future; pervasive feelings of shame; and/or pervasive feelings of inferior self-worth.

Impulsivity (Disinhibition): Acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli, acting on a momentary basis without a plan or consideration of outcomes, and/or difficulty establishing and following plans. Particular to BPD: an experienced sense of urgency during emotional stress, which might result in self-harming behaviour.

Risk-taking (Disinhibition): Engagement in dangerous, risky, and potentially self-damaging activities unnecessarily and without regard for consequences; proneness to boredom together with thoughless initiation of activities to counter boredom; and/or lack of concern for one’s limitations, or denial of the reality of personal danger.

Hostility (Antagonism): Persistent or frequent angry feelings; anger or irritability in response to minor slights, minor insults, or possibilities thereof; and/or mean, nasty, or vengeful behaviour.

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(Next: Narcissistic Personality Disorder under the Alternative Model.)