Mstar

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    Milos L
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  1. I wanted to take some time to really let the responses here sink in, and also to do some personal thinking on this topic for myself before writing out a reply. First off I'd like to thank all of you who took the time to reply to this post. I was expecting to get maybe one or two responses but a lot of people here took the time to share which I greatly appreciate. @whyNOT: I'm glad I could help you bring more light to your own past. I think you're absolutely right NB is amazing and I think even just from his work I have learned more than I ever would about myself having not found it. @generalsemanticist: Wow, thanks for that insight about taking things personal as a child. I can already see from other examples in my life how key that is to understanding some of the irrational fears and anxieties I sometimes feel below the surface of my experience. It rings particularly true in terms of my social interactions. Where as a child I was usually left alone for long periods of time and couldn't plan effectively with friends to avoid spending weekends alone I took it to mean that I was wrong and would be rejected. That is a response I've worked very hard to overcome in one of my goals of creating an amazing peer group for myself. Thanks! @Rich Engle: You're absolutely right about Martial Arts being a thinking mans game. A glaring example of this comes to mind. Last months UFC between Anderson Silva and some other young competitor was a brilliant display of a guy who absolutely destroyed, and dominated his opponent -'s mind. It was a picture perfect example of the champion shocking the competitors mind, and rendering him ineffective for 5 rounds of nauseating boredom - from my perspective, watching it on a Saturday night. You've also made me realize that perhaps I need to bring more conscious awareness to achieving higher integration while sparring and doing martial arts. I'm certain if I bring the purpose of becoming more well adjusted and comfortable in violent scenarios to the practice I could use it as a safe place to practice facing up to some of my fears. Finally This struck a huge chord with me. You're absolutely right. I learn about taking responsibility for myself, setting goals, and then in the midst of an incoming panic attack forget all of that and start looking for the magic pill again. I think I'm on the right track, growing as a person, working on my self-esteem and confronting the issues as they come up. Thank you for your comment. @Peter Taylor: Thanks for your advice, I think you're absolutely right about the breathing exercises and helping to bring a conscious distinction between the aggressive behavior of a bully in the play ground or night club and the fear of a near-death situation. I'd just like to point out for anyone reading this however, and for your own consideration, that NB actually recommends the opposite for dealing with anxiety. From reading his books, and doing my own introspective work on myself I've found a correlation between the anxiety I feel and the alienation I feel from some parts of myself. His book The Disowned Self is all about how disassociating from our feelings, values, thoughts and memories is one of the major impediments to our psychological growth to adulthood. Also in terms of the nature of anxiety attacks I think that psychotherapists who preach disassociation are hurting their patients more than they know. NB write in one ( or two ) of his books of one client who perfectly illustrates the cycle of how an anxiety attack comes on. The client had stage fright, and the more he thought about performing the more tense he became. The more tense he became the more his heart rate and breathing became spastic and the more his stage fright seemed terrifying, perpetuating a cycle till panic took hold. This corroborates with my own experiences. The more I tried to tense up my body, the worse the feeling became, the more I tried to run from it by any means, the more I had to tense up against it. I've found that as scary as it is, letting it wash over you is the best way to sooth it. @Brant Gaede: Yup, I have a friend who does hypnotherapy so I'll see if he can help out some. If not I'll be saving up about 2k to buy some sessions with NB himself. It's pretty expensive but I wouldn't hesitate if after doing a consultation with him he thinks he can help. I would rather invest this money in myself and my future than spend it on a vehicle, I think that can wait. @ David McK: Thank you for answering one of my questions. At the time when I wrote the orignal post I was hoping for the opposite answer but shortly after posting it I knew in my gut, as well, that the problem was purely internal. Thanks for the kind sentiments, I can feel how personal this must be to you from your post and I appreciate your sharing. I think my ability to write about my past in detail may be a sign of my ability to dissociate from things to protect myself from them, which I guess is both my blessing and my curse right now. I see a future where it will prove to have been a wise decision and the launching pad for a life lived in the pursuit of happiness instead of on a mad dash away from fear. @Stephen Boydstun: Hahaha, if it isn't religion, it's communism. My folks were primarily nonreligious, however they had a firm belief in the state and the beliefs espoused by the society of our currently torn to shreds homeland (Former Yugoslavia - Serbia). And just like in your story, there is an unspoken commandment "do not question authority." I appreciate your comment, especially the part about reconciling with your father. Me and my pops don't speak much, but we keep up a relationship based on our mutual admiration of sports. I could see how in the future I could get along better with him, but I think first I would need to find myself more. Know who I am at a deeper and more stable level, and get rid of any past fears of him that may be trapped in my psyche. Then I think I could look at him when he's being brilliant and when he's being idiotic without having a reaction beyond that which is appropriate to the scenario at hand. As for the panic attacks, could you elaborate on the part about physical conditions? I talked to my family MD and he didn't even let me finish speaking before he started talking about putting me on a steady dosage of pills. This discouraged me, and another MD who I consulted told me the exact opposite, that I was fine and that my problem was internal. Philosophically speaking though one was a strict materialist and the other a devout Jew. I think from my own reading of the issue and my situation every sign points away from a physical cause. My pathology is inconsistent, I believe with a physical condition because when they first occurred they were horrible, with one night me staying up 7 hours waiting for sun rise having rolling attacks, and then shortly after being able to live completely free of them until I hit a success barrier. @Philip Coates: Yeah, I'm seeking help from NB himself soon to hopefully help me fast track with him what might take me years to unravel reading his work and doing my own introspective work. I wouldn't trust most free clinics for psychology because psychology, although a field beloved to me, is rampant with irrational premises that remain unquestioned. I believe in the power of my own mind to tell me when something is wrong, and theories like social determinism, behaviorism and other psychological theories influenced by the preceding make me very reticent to trust the therapy offered by free sources. I definitely appreciate your warning though, and I take it to heart that you mean well so thank you for that. And finally. What I decided to do about this situation: 1) I've e-mailed NB and will get into contact with him when he returns to the country. I'm still waiting to hear about financing options, and if none are available I'll have to wait probably till September before I can begin to work with him. I am excited I decided to take this step. 2) Until I do work with NB, I'll be doing sentence completions focused mostly on self-acceptance and self-responsibility the 2 areas I feel my self-esteem needs the most nurturing in. As well as listening to self-hypnosis and doing further research into some forms of healing meditation (I'm not a mystic, however, the validity of meditation in healing is much like hypnosis where it is a series of suggestions given in the form metaphors to the 'energy systems' of the body. Which could also be viewed as tension spots) and NLP. 3) I realized the other day that in the last few months since I began to be more introspective and read NB I've cried more than I have in any part of my life. It's come to my attention that although I don't think this is intrinsically a positive thing I also find it isn't intrinsically a negative thing. I think that a lot of my childhood was spent putting on a show and NOT crying at the injustices my parents put me through for many reasons. I realized that even today if I need to cry in my own house I have to mute it and make sure no one sees the after math. I think this response to crying says a lot about my past with emotions. I recall that same patient NB talks about in one of his books who has the panic attacks out of stage fright. NB helps him through it by telling the patient to feel the anxiety and then try to express it as best as he can, the client screams at the top of his lungs and has other reactions that would be deemed 'abnormal' but afterward feels better. He frees the emotion by expressing it to himself. I want to be ready for my next (assuming I have another one) panic attack. I want to find a safe space where I can make as much noise as I need to and not be disturbed and see what happens when instead of trying to suppress the anxiety and the fear I go into it - and express it in whatever way feels right. Thank you so much to everyone who replied. And to anyone who has read this entire post, I am aware that I wrote a behemoth, but it felt really good to write!
  2. Hi OL, I am a long time lurker here first time posting. I'd like to post up what I've come to understand about myself and my father and hopefully get some feedback on areas where I can live more consciously or take some form of responsible action to alleviate some of the negative effects my past with my father is having on me. I grew up with immigrant parents and beatings were a common thing. Getting smacked upside the head at the table, or being spanked in public places was not outside the boundaries of what either of my parents would do, however as a young kid I'm pretty certain I understood their reasoning and, although violent, my parents were or less just. While I was young I probably got some beats I didn't deserve but I was too young to realize, the problem began when I began to develop a sense of right from wrong. Having come from a communist country my parents no doubt had a very ingrained philosophy of subservience and when I showed the gall to go against their views in action and in philosophy that's when I began to see a side of my dad that I think still haunts me to this day. When I would try to stand up for myself and what I thought should be rights of my own - like doing my homework during the week instead of all on Monday when it was due friday - my dad would enter a rage I hadn't seen before basically going mental. Although he showed a lot of restraint during these episodes (i.e. hitting softer than usual) he also showed a lot more ferocity and would sometimes shake the crap out of me as a means of stopping himself from hitting me. The fact that I could see how much anger he was trying to keep inside and not let out made those soft hits and shakes that much more terrifying. Im turning 20 soon and all the beatings have stopped for a long time. The rage fits still occur but he's enfeebled now so I try to sooth them by agreeing with him more for his sake than my own, however I feel like the past has had some lingering effects. I noticed about a month ago that my phobic fear of violence may be connected to my dad. I use to be bullied in school, however the bullying began AFTER we moved out of a community housing area and into a nice suburban home, right around when I started talking back and asserting my views. I noticed from being confronted with a number of violent situations coincidentally in the same week, that every time I am faced with this kind of situation regardless of the size of the aggressor it's always the same feeling of helplessness that I felt in the presence of my dad or a bully. ( I should mention, I do martial arts, and often wrestle and spar with my friends and get injured in the process, adding more irrationality to the fear of smaller aggressors - also fear is a bad word for it, it feels more like a total shut down, all thinking stops in my mind, and in my body I feel completely weak. ) And finally, the real reason for writing this post. I got panic attacks for the first time in my life 6 months ago. After finding out about NB and Rand from a friend I managed to take some actions to increase my self-esteem and enjoyed the benefits of increased consciousness and a complete subsiding of the panic attacks. Since then I've had the feeling come close to coming over me twice, the first time was when I felt love for a person for the first time, and the second happened tonight on my way home. I tried to find something unique to tonight's situation and the only thing that comes to mind is that my mom has left the country today. I think on some sub-conscious level I still fear my father. I know logically today that if he tried to use violence against me it couldn't hurt me but I think that part of me isn't aware of that yet. With my mom gone for a while I'm thinking of sitting my dad down one of these days and talking this stuff through with him. He's incredibly close-minded and fear-driven however I think just talking at him in some of these situations may help me. I'm not afraid to hurt his feelings because I feel like whatever he did to me as a kid was just a manifestation of what his dad did to him. I feel like in some part of himself he feels the pain of not being able to have a benevolent relationship with his son. Has anyone here gone through something similar? Have any of you dealt with the irrational fear of parents? Do you think that me telling him that I no longer fear him, and telling him his violence can't hurt me anymore will have the desired effect on my internal world or do you think this is something I have to deal with internally some how? I apologize if it sounds like I'm coming here looking for therapy, but I couldn't help but post this here. There are many brilliant people on this forum and a large concentration of people who will understand this from the conceptual psychological framework that has helped me so much in the past half a year.