Archive
Bi-Polar
You were asking me on the phone about bi-polar disorder. I am going to run down some general thoughts on the disorder and some thoughts on dealing with it. Identifying your symptoms and coming up with a plan for each is a good start. As a rule that’s how you beat this “disease”. If you treat it as a thing in and of itself like cancer then the words a psychiatrist said to me are basically true: “You have a serious mental disorder and it is never going to get better”. The best you can hope for is a good psychiatrist and more agreeable than disabling medications for symptom control. A bleak picture and one I would not accept. When that psychiatrist said that to me I already had a Masters Degree in Sociology and was steeped in the idea of labeling theory the idea that mental illness is a socially created stigma far more than anything to do with brain chemistry or mood disregulation. So I refused to accept that guys label but I still had a bushel full of negative symptomology to deal with. So I broke it down, and enacted some cognitive behavioral interventions I knew from my mental health days as well as managing my environment I got better.
A diagnosis does not have to be a determinant of who we are as people. It also doesn’t let us off the hook for managing our lives. We are the ones who will benefit if we change and we are the only ones who can enact positive change in our lives so it makes since to accept the hand we are dealt, ferret out the part we have control over, and apply the force of our will only on that part. Fortunately science, metaphysics, and personal experience have taught me that our thoughts, behaviors, indirectly our emotions, sometimes our environment, and to a much larger than most suspect, our very physiology can be put under our conscious control.
All change comes through what I call the 4 “A”s: Awareness, Assessment, Action, and Accountability. Recovery from bi-polar disorder comes from becoming aware of the nature of our symptomology, assessing its impact on our overall well being and intervention strategies, implementing those strategies with constant measurement of success and reassessment of strategies along a coherent plan, and maintaining our plan through a systematic format of accountability (literally to count) with ourselves and sometimes others.
Fundamentally our personalities our sense of being our consciousness arises out of constructs; memes, scripts, patterns of operations, we had no hand in creating and accepting without question because to a certain extent we are made of these things. But at some point we reach a point of accountability. We are compelled to know who we are and perhaps more importantly to know who we want to be and make ourselves in that direction. The world of thought is malleable, adjustable, compliant to the will, evolutionary. Applying the 4 “A”s could look like this: Awareness – Becoming aware of our patterns of thoughts, the things we believe, the things we give meaning too, how we interact with others, how our self-observer treats our self, competing thoughts, adaptive and maladaptive thoughts, etc. Assessment – Identifying and prioritizing areas of out thought-life, identifying problematic or maladaptive thoughts, scripts, voices, habitual responses, behavioral choices (I will call all these things constructs as a reminder they are created things etc. and also identifying core thoughts, scripts, voices, habituated responses, behavioral choices (constructs) to build upon or unleash upon our maladaptive constructs. Assessment is a good time to write things down, awareness as well, but I know you are already journaling. Action is the time you enact your assessment. A lot of people stop at self-analysis and never identify and institute changes, which is the greatest gift of self-awareness. Accountability is measuring that action. Staying the course. Keeping track of your successes. It is a promise to yourself and others of the changes you are making. It creates someone (even if it is only yourself) to say, “Hey did you do that thing?” It allows us to know what we have done.
Most of life is obfuscation, a means of obscurement of truths we would rather not face. I propose we should boldly face who we are and why we are where we are so that we can enact who we want to be and where we want to be at. The means are myriad and widespread. Any self-change system can be effective if applied with diligence over time. Some you already know the basics of. Devise a plan, implement it, measure your results, and make changes as necessary based upon your outcome data. If it is so easy why isn’t everyone successful. Some of it is ignorance. People don’t know who they are or why they do things. Some of it is feeling comfortable, nesting in who we have been because who we might be is too frightening. Its worth some thought to ask yourself why you put yourself where you are right now, this is worth asking wherever you have chosen to put yourself. What do I believe about myself is incompatible with success? What am I really trying to do by failing all the time, and what is the easiest, or the quickest, or the surest way to change it?
In future posts i will add emotional, behavioral, environmental, and physiological management strategies as well as provide more details as folks raise questions or make comments. As a treat for reading this far here is a new poem i am working on:
Am I any less real when I am asleep
The world it keeps on turning
The sun still shines when its dark outside
But we don’t see its burning.
And if i die today
Will my soul pass away
Or is it gonna keep on living
If will if it just resides
In this meat-machine
But souls are made for giving.
an idea poem
Its been a productive time writing wise, since i started this blog, thanks again Ben. I have two pieces in the works and i was hoping to get at least one of them into publishable shape but i’m not feeling it. One expands more on multiconstruct thinking and how i came to think this way and the other is some general thoughts on bi-polar disorder. Keep watching i’ll get them up here one of these days (hopefully by mid-week since this post is going to be relatively lame). The only thing i have to post is an idea poem i wrote this week. I read it for a poet buddy on Saturday (after we carved pumpkins which was fun) and all he had to say is “what are you a neo-Platonist, have you read any Proust?
The idea of things are more real than the things themselves. Things decay, go away, become other things. I am more a consciousness than a body. I am a personality, a constructed device of organized information. I know and and am known. Every cup from which i have drunk is no more, or will be no more, or perhaps never was. Nevertheless, the idea of cup is wherever hand lifts drink to lips. Good ideas bring themselves into being out of necessity. What are ideas made of? From what land do they come? Unbound by time or space, ideas just are, everywhere and everywhen, a foreverland, a memic universe, heaven, the big book of life. I am an idea, information, a character in a story, observed and remembered even by myself. Point to that observer on an X-ray, MRI, bloodtest. You can’t do it. I am distributed. I am a multitude. And what of the idea of me? Where is that located? What is it made of? Does it dwell in foreverland, the memic universe, heaven, the big book of life? I am such a good idea if i did not exist i would create myself. I’m no cup, mind you, but i am bigger, more complex, a personality aspiring to archetype. For “Behold i am a new creation” and wise old Solomon knows “there’s nothing new under the sun”, sure and steady, but dieing nonetheless.
Multi-Construct Thinking
Every way of organizing thought is a created system. Our perception of the world is shaped by the cultural norms of our belief system. Our religions, our philosophies, our professions, our role in our family, community, society, all channelize our conceptions of reality to a specific end which is not necessarily correlated with reality. How we define our terms and engage in language(s) shapes what we can and cannot experience or even perceive, invest with meaning. Each of these ‘organizations of ideas’ can be thought of as an artificial construction that can be dangerous to confuse with the real world.
Our constructs guide our vision to what reinforces our belief in the construct. Constructs both illuminate the true nature of the universe and obscure a true picture of the universe, mostly because the universe is just so damn big. We can access literally an infinite amount of information. A true picture is too large to comprehend so we cut it up into pieces. We make maps and guidebooks because there is a lot of room between being able to know something about something, which we obviously and easily are capable of, and knowing everything about everything. A true map of the universe would be as big as the universe, which is preposterous. So we create constructs, formalized systems to organize information to make the infinite universe appear to be knowable. Nothing is wrong with that until we mistake our construct of the universe for the universe. Every construct breaks down at the edges and becomes false and meaningless. That’s why every construct has a critic. To not stray from the truth ask not if a construct is true but how is this construct true? In what ways is this construct false? In what ways is this construct meaningless?
Constructs are a systematic framework of patterns of concepts and sub-organizations of concepts, memes if you will. Memes are words or ideas, but seen as existing independently in an information universe. Memes have many of the qualities of life in that they can be created (born if you will), they reproduce, they grow and evolve, and they disappear (die if you will). Constructs are simply large and complex memes.
Constructs provide power by directing or harnessing information in a directed fashion. A shared language allows cooperation and all it entails; it allows cultures to arise preserving memes in the cultural members and in their artifacts, increasing the memes chance for survival.
Constructs create meaning and are created with a purpose. Purposeless and meaningless constructs lack survival value from competition from constructs with purpose and meaning. Malicious constructs, or patterns of behavior or belief that have deleterious effect can continue to exist when chained to a larger construct with survival value.
Perhaps you have heard this example; an anthropologist, a physicist, and a mathematician journeyed to Scotland and saw a brown cow. The anthropologist said the cows are brown in Scotland. The physicist corrected her by saying there are cows in Scotland and some of them are brown. The mathematician corrected her with there is at least one cow in Scotland, one of which’s side is brown. This illustrates how our understanding of the world filters the meaning that we attach to our perceptions. Most of us already juggle multiple constructs. Lets say the anthropologist is also a mother, a Buddhist, and a libertarian. All of these constructs will inform the way she perceives Scotland. Multiple constructs may overlap or not. If our mathematician is a father and a vegetarian as well those systems have little overlap. They provide their respective meanings to the individual who is a mathematician largely in their separate spheres of understanding. Having disparate constructs to create meaning in a variety of circumstances enriches the individual.
When multiple constructs overlap they can be in agreement or disagreement. Our Buddhist anthropologist easily sees the connection between the threat of ethnocentrism, judging owns own culture as better or more right than others and the Buddhist idea of seeing the Buddha nature in all people. In fact the anthropologist is informed and enriched by her practice of Buddhism. Both the shared language of the two systems and the extent that each reaches places the other might not have gone makes our anthropologists personal uber-construct of anthrobuddhistmotherism a more robust system in which to place her sense of self.
Hello world!
How does a technologically unsophisticated basically shy person get a blog? About a week before the blog began i shared an anecdote and someone asked my why i didn’t have a blog. I said i was waiting for someone to come to my house and set it up for me. Then when i was helping Terry and Kristin move (see next post) i ran into Ben Jones who i hadn’t seen in 10 years. We got caught up swimming at the quarry and i invited him back to my house for coffee. He also asked me why i didn’t have a blog and offerred to set one up for me which he did from my back porch. When he was thinking about domain names he asked me what my philosophy was and i told him “i was multiconstruct”. I believe that every way of looking at the world is not really the way the world is but its an artificial construct built to make sense of the world, a construct. I also believe that every construct both illuminates some truth and shades other truths or renders them meaningless. The best way to understand this wonderful and infinite universe of ours is to draw the best most useful ideas from all of the constructs folks have made to understand. Robert Anton Wilson taught me that everything is true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense. Aleister Crowley shows in the introduction to The Book of Lies that all language falls short of actuality and there is no way to tell the complete truth with words. To make the most accurate picture of the world i draw from all systems of belief to paint as accurate picture of the Truth as i can. Instead of asking “is this true?” i ask “in what way is this true” “how is this false”. This allows me to defy contradiction and hold to science, religion, philosophy and draw what understanding i can.
Multiconstruct 
Recent Comments