Comments by dfk

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  • It seems like when I have ever talked about how I felt, I got what are distractions, either pills or suggestions. I am fairly old and what I have finally concluded is that I am missing an essential human need, which is to feel connection, to feel known. I have always felt I am in a very large emptiness. I have plenty of family and good surroundings, but deep down I feel like there is nothing there.

  • Parents need a cook book, about the proper ingredients to make lives, what to stir in and when. Could we enlist Betty Crocker to write it? Psychiatrists could prescribe that sort of thing instead of what they do. It could be in stock at Walgreens, two dollars thirty five cents. Just needs one generation to pass along the proper example.

  • We have this basic need for others to keep us in mind, to know about us. It’s basic to survival for others to know us, so we can help each other if needed. In today’s world, there is not so much need for others to save us from things, but that doesn’t cancel out our basic need that is still there. Things like this go from one generation to the next by example, but we have lost a lot of this. What we inherit is an aversion to this, which is why imo there are so many “mental health” problems.

  • I was waiting for how you got out of such a horrible system and recovered. To me, it seems that our needs, as children, when not met, is what comes back to bite us later in life. When we don’t have the attention paid to our thoughts and feelings, we’re missing the social glue that keeps us part of things, gives us enough courage to handle life, and is always there to be what we stand on so we don’t fall forever. We need from each other what we need, there is no way around it, regardless of what some people believe. The ones who believe we can do without have not had to do without. We don’t need as much courage, as we need each other, to be interested, to want to know, to give a place in our minds and hearts for each other’s thoughts and feelings, and treasure such things.

  • I think a large part of what gets passed along to the next generation is, “follow the rules, feelings are a luxury you don’t need, and you’ll be ok.” Our basic human need to be in other minds and hearts is considered old fashioned and a waste of effort in our world of competition. Somehow, we have gone past the human condition, since we are so adaptable. But we fooled ourselves, we’re really just the same, except uncomfortable, sick, violent, and other bad things.

  • It seems like the whole topic of mental health skips the basic human needs to feel included, such as feeling known, cared about, and belonging. People think those things are available to everyone so the therapists help you know how to get them and give you a little bit of them while you have therapy, and they then send you back out into your world, where you fail again. Drugs are something to keep you from feeling or thinking too much. Considering the state of the culture, that’s probably about all the can be done. Where are the good people? Do they vanish a little bit more from each generation to the next?

  • I know this is far-fetched but it’s an idea. Why we like music, why it seems to help us mentally and emotionally, has to do with our association of music with the turning of attention to where it’s coming from and the steady focus of attention on it. This is a very necessary thing for people to focus attention on each one of us so we feel known and safe. When we see people all focusing on music, the association is a moment of safety has taken place, and we were there. If we could make the music, they would focus on us. The more we hear and take in, the more we feel we have the same chance to get people to focus on us and make us safe. The more minds we are in, the more security we have.

  • I wonder why the discussion doesn’t talk about human needs, like the need to feel known and belong. Maybe that’s too simple and the words aren’t long enough. There’s nothing mysterious with feeling depressed or anxious when the parts of our minds are up against a society, the people of which, don’t really care about some of us. Our minds tell us we’re in deep trouble when we don’t feel accepted of valued, and they do it by feelings that are considered an illness.

  • They seem to always be talking about unitary minds, so what happens is mystical and spiritual. But we are a mass of parts all working in parallel to cope with life, we couldn’t do it otherwise. It’s the separation of the parts that creates the mystery, they come and go and combine and blend. It’s a noisy, confusing, boiling pot of stuff. But it’s effective. We have taken over the planet and just about ruined it. We should be a little more understanding and kind to each other and respect the complexity of people’s minds.

  • Psychiatry will continue to exist like it is because there is no replacement. Some aren’t considered worthy to have basic needs of feeling known, and acceptable. You can criticize and find every fault with what they do and the drugs, but it’s what they have. By the common rules of culture, only some can exist in other minds sufficiently to feel secure. Psychiatry is a symptom of the sick society.

  • It seems to me like I spend most of my time trying to find ways to feel a member of some group of people, like family, or maybe a church group, even a neighborhood. It seems like that’s the most urgent need I have as a social being. I can’t be secure without the signs and signals of membership. I could be labelled as depressed or anxious since those would be mental strategies to survive without my membership need being fulfilled. The signal of being accepted is feeling known. Others want to know my thoughts and feelings, and remember them. I wonder if it’s all really that simple.

  • Work can be satisfying is you know others appreciate what you do. I appreciate the people who stock the shelves at Walmart, even though I don’t feel like I can just tell them that. Early in my working life I worked on development of an artificial arm, and I sensed there were people who liked what I did. I think companies do try to meet the needs of the customer, like in phones, they know that new features will emerge, and people will want a new phone every so often as a result, so they don’t build them to last forever and cost more.

  • It seems like the meaning of life is finding how we can fit in with others. It’s more than just cooperating, it’s being a part of each other’s lives, it’s knowing about each other, making the little niches in our minds where we keep our knowledge of each other. Our meaning is in the dependability of the niches we occupy in other people’s minds. Just a thought.

  • Well the thing to do for people is to undo the effects of having been denied their needs as they grew up. The basic needs are to be known, to be cared about, and to belong. It must be ok for others to know what we think and feel, and if they want to keep up with that for some time, we feel cared about, and if that goes on long enough, we know we belong. If you don’t get this early in life, then the mind’s reaction results in feelings and behavior that they call mental illness. So, you have to first help them with getting their needs at present, and then go back and try to talk to those parts which are hurting still, and show them there is a new system now, and they don’t need to make those pains and feelings they thought they did. The big problem is people are not so generous to give us our needs now, so we can work out this solution. They will do anything else, but not that. I don’t know why, it must be written in some manual or law.

  • There should be another term instead of mental illness, something like mental reaction. Just a product of minds put into a state that provokes a warning to us that we are not secure. Maybe mental warning would be something. I got a mental warning yesterday that I was not safe. I have a constant mental reaction to the environment where I am not accepted. Things like that.

  • How people live their lives is from the examples of the previous generations. When healthy living is lost, it will stay lost until people wake up and see what they are doing. Unhealthy beliefs make unhealthy society makes unhealthy people. For example, kids need to be known, which means what happens to them is considered highly valued information. If they feel known long enough, they will feel cared about, and if they feel cared about long enough, they will know they belong. That’s an important foundation for life. Deny humans their needs, and they have reactions. Call the reactions mental illness if you want, but the remedy is to restore human needs.

  • Emotional pain is a signal that we’re missing something, connection or support, something vital our mind believes we need. We need for the pain to be acknowledged and understood so we feel known, cared about, and belong. Then the purpose for the pain is fulfilled.

  • Sports would work if you were good enough at it to be on the team, but it could work against your needs if you weren’t as good a player as they wanted. It doesn’t have to be sports, it could anything where you were found equally acceptable as the others. It’s hard to find such things in our competitive society. We make everything about who is better. Sports, writing, being an astronaut, commenting, it doesn’t matter about your feelings, it’s where you are in the ratings of how well you did.

  • Mental illness. The normal human reaction to life in the world at the time, where some people were without the necessary basic human needs, such as, feeling known, cared about, and belonging. Happened to humans, but other humans pretended it was puzzling to them that any of their species would have such reactions. The affected people were assigned various labels to help determine what was done with them, such as, giving them chemicals to interfere with the functioning of their minds, or placing in the care of other specially trained people, who sometimes kept them in buildings designed to isolate them from others. One of the most incomprehensible periods in human history.

  • Well isn’t it really that it’s a software problem, and since they don’t know how to fix that, all they can do is attack the hardware? And the software can’t be changed just by a new environment, you have to find ways to really reach in and talk to it, since it’s intelligent and has a purpose, even though it’s wrecking people’s lives.

  • Mental distress is just our unavoidable reaction to being made insecure, drugs only interfere with the functioning of the mind. We are born needing substance or money security, relational security, and also security with God, so we don’t fear death. We can’t do without any of those and feel secure. It’s ignorance of our nature that leads us to neglect the needs of others, since we get what we need from each other.

  • The pain behind suicide takes a long time to help, so the immediate things they do have to be ineffective at resolving their problems. They can threaten them or distract them, but it doesn’t take it away, it may even just make them more determined and better at it. There is no answer except to stop building people lives with pain in them. Or be able to remove it more skillfully. The greatest threat to society is parents who trust their instincts. They should put a lot of thought, study, prayer, and careful consideration together with their instincts for what they do for the next generation. We have to make better lives.

  • Aren’t we socially needy such that we want to know about each other through exchanging thoughts and feelings? Isn’t that just our nature, the way we are? So, you would expect we would feel pain if we were excluded, since pain motivates us to change. Getting messages from others that we are not acceptable would create pain, enough that the mind would try to find a way out of the pain, and suggest suicide. It would be a natural reaction. The thing to find out, is why people feel like rejecting one of their own, why we look at the social part of life as competitive. Are there just too many of us? Not enough stuff to go around? Or are we missing something that should be transferred from one generation to the next, and we have forgotten what it is?

  • It seems like one very basic human need is to share thinking/feelings with those around us. Parents encourage their kids to share, and the need is met and the example is shown. Kids go to school and share with other kids. Sometimes even teachers can be open to sharing. It’s instinctive, for cooperation and survival. When the example of filling the need doesn’t get passed down the generations, we end up where we are today. I think there has been a mass forgetting of what humans normally do.

  • I think in the IFS concept of the mind, some or most, maybe all of us have among our many parts of the mind a suicide part, which looks at how much pain we are getting and makes suicidal feelings to help us escape from what it considers unbearable. So if I was talking to someone I think I would start with that idea and then ask them about the pain, because then it’s not like a one subject discussion. We could talk about maybe asking the suicide part why it thinks this pain could be unbearable. Then you don’t have this kind of all or nothing thing you have with a unitary mind.

  • Born into a hostile environment, our mental parts assume roles of labeling, guarding, and controlling. They must do that, or it would betray us to hostile world. If we were in a friendly environment long enough, the parts might consider changing. Then and only then can we make that request and hope they will. Then they might stop the anxiety, depression, or volatile feelings, those instruments they needed to use when it wasn’t safe.

  • You can’t drive a car up the side of a building, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the car. It wasn’t designed for that. People were designed to be in groups of families or tribes, with close cooperation, knowing each other, and making their living by division of labor. When that’s missing, the mind detects a hostile environment, and puts up defenses designed to make us survive. Fear makes us sensitive to threats, depression keeps us out of view and therefore safe. Volatile feelings change our strategy to meet the perceived dangers. We only can find dangers by comparison to our experience, so we may make mistakes, but it’s the best we can do. Here we are surviving, and they say there is something wrong with us because we couldn’t do without our needs, the ones “they” have but we don’t.

  • Wouldn’t we feel helpless and unworthy if we never connected with our parents? If we never felt known or understood by them it presents an almost impossible situation to the mind, since we come with the need to feel present in some other minds. Madness could be the way the mind tries to find a way to manage our life when what we need for survival is absent. And maybe we underestimate the level of connection we need.

  • We spend our lives trying to get in to those little spaces in the minds of others around us, to put there what we want them to know if they have enough tolerance and compassion. We hope if we do the same, they will keep us and let us be there and always want to know the latest. It’s how we are together, we can’t avoid wanting to just be human.

  • I just read a little about Internal Family Systems, and in it, Richard Schwartz, the person behind it, has an interesting point of view, that we are multiple personalities, divided into two types, exiles, and protectors. The exiles bear the burdens, or pains, from life, such as abuse and neglect, and threaten to overwhelm the conscious. The protectors try to keep them at bay. One of the protector class is a suicide part, which is the last ditch effort to keep us from feeling more pain than we could bear, or so the parts think. I also sometimes wonder if most people don’t believe they have worth except from their achievements, so it becomes a life long quest to keep finding any way at all to feel worth. They keep looking and trying things, only to have failure, and face starting over again. I wonder if this compares to your example of pushing the stone up the hill and it rolling down again, as maybe continually trying to work things out in your inner system to find worth that keeps the pain away, only to have it fail again, and have to start the process over.

  • The mindset is toward “getting” the social and emotional things needed in life, if you have a problem, you should learn how to “get” what you need. It makes for a competitive, unhealthy society. When some get, some naturally give. If you wanted a healthy society, the mindset would be toward giving. Where there is lots of giving, there is lots of receiving, out of the abundance. Why is this so hard to figure out if there are so many smart people in the world?

  • Bad things happened and the message you gave to your subconscious was, I don’t like this and I don’t want it to happen again. Your obedient mind then formed parts which were dedicated to protecting you in the future, and the feelings they produce are interfering with life, so the feelings get labeled as the problem. If you came up with a way to look at the whole picture, really describe reality, then you could have a diagnosis. It wouldn’t be just a simple label thing, it would be longer. They just need to stop side stepping reality, and it would work a lot better, so they could have some way to classify problems because that is the need for officialdom and bureaucracy.

  • I read the words, heard, respected, and understood. It seems like that’s really the most basic types of things every human being should get all along. Is it just ignorance on the part of parents or whoever is there for them, or is it the culture which says we should be ashamed of being needy. Needy is a strength not a weakness. We took over the planet with it because it makes us cooperate. If we keep deciding it’s really a weakness, we will begin to lose it.

  • I think it’s not just the present hardships, but past history, that causes suicidal impulses. In the first 5 years of life, you get whatever emotional foundation you will get, based on whether your feelings were important to someone. That was the big message you needed: your feelings welcome here, your feelings matter, that forms the foundation for resilience. It’s like putting in earthquake protection, when the jolts and shaking comes, the building doesn’t crumble. We also then must have material means and social supports, no question. You have to look at all the supports to see the full picture.

  • It seems here almost like the idea that the mind is running a bunch of processes in parallel, each one almost like a separate entity, with a central awareness or self. Like the IFS idea. Probably, if we didn’t run many parallel detections and interpretations of our environment, we wouldn’t ever have been able to survive, because we would have taken too much time to figure out threats or opportunities. The formation of our minds is when we assign various tasks for the parts. That would be heavily influenced by our experience with abuse or neglect, or care and attention. The brain doesn’t come subdivided, it’s mode of operation is to make separate parallel functions as needed, so we have various numbers of parts. The extreme parts are making the distressful feelings, so if you get to them like with your multi lens idea, that would be good. Of course, this is all just my conjecture.

  • The mind having many parts, each one like a member of a committee, when we work on ourselves, we’re having group therapy. You try to get all the parts to assume more cooperative roles. People working in groups would have so much complexity, no one could tell what was going on, unless they were all aware of their parts, and what each part was doing relative to others’ parts.

  • In the IFS model of the mind, I don’t think there is any such things as psychosis, just parts of the mind which have taken on extreme roles. They try to work with those parts, to persuade them to assume more beneficial roles. Makes a lot more sense to me than just using the concept of the whole mind being in some state or other. My mother had her trials with this sort of thing. There are quite a few IFS trained therapists now, I think, they have something called the Center for Self Leadership. Worth a look.

  • Childhood with angry disinterested parent(s) would have a lot to do with depression. Happened to my mother, and me also, except mine were emotionally dead as well as disinterested. I think the mind makes a lot of parts, each one almost a person in itself (IFS model), and they are all doing their thing, which explains the chaotic nature of feelings in life. The mind is complicated. If you knew all the parts and what each one was up to, it would make sense.

  • It might be a talent best learned in childhood, how to bring what’s on the inside to the outside so that it improves things instead of making them worse. I never learned it, my parents, I think, thought they should teach me how to behave so I would be successful in life, at the cost of keeping it all in, which hasn’t worked out very well.

  • I think it all shows just how much human beings need to have what’s on the inside, be able to show up on the outside. Seems like this is a survival thing, built into us, so we can, together, meet the environment successfully. For children, if the adults know all about them, keeping track of them, they are more likely to survive. We are, by nature, kind of mismatched to our organized society.

  • We live in a culture in which normal is considered healthy, but in general, normal is too disconnected to meet our needs. The treatments and drugs mostly serve the purpose of distracting and inhibiting our minds from the pain of disconnection. People use the rules of culture to compete for something that should not require competition. Why?

  • I think what secular and maybe some religious authorities want the most is to stay in power, so they will go with whatever is the most popular thing. If most people believed psychiatry was useless and harmful, I think the authorities would be saying that. It seems like down through history, some wars had religious aspects to them, so I’m not sure I would call all religions civilizing. I wouldn’t compare religions to psychiatry, I would compare psychiatry more to culture. I define culture as the way people do things, for no reason other than that’s the way they are doing them.

  • The right “mothering” and/or “fathering” is really the only answer to all these disheartening statistics, which represent lots of suffering. The instincts to provide for the rising generations have been lost, or at least a lot of them. They will be passed on to the next generations, if they exist, otherwise nothing or something inferior. Parental managers who don’t know their kids in depth don’t believe anything is wrong, and the kids don’t know it either, until much later in life when they “come down” with some “mental disorder.” And then they don’t want to admit how bad their childhood was, and the parents need to be spared from any more grief, so the truth never comes out, and we’re in dark, and believe we can’t stand the light. Somebody should write something to the effect, turn on the light, let’s see where we are, really.

  • Children learn about two kinds of worth, one is a given, an unconditional gift, and the other comes from achievement. The first kind is the one we are born to need, and the second kind is how we try to fill in the hole left by not getting the first kind. The trouble is, it’s not easy to get the second kind, and it doesn’t last.