On models of personality typing

On models of personality typing

In a self-organizing system with just a few rules, natural clusters will form and cohere. These convergences move only within their own borders, though one needs to be outside the border to recognize that. These sets can be enneagram types, astrological signs, DSM diagnoses, … . There will be many likenesses and unique differences and the likenesses will enable people to fit themselves into a comfortable pattern. Most people will place in the background the parts of themselves which don't quite fit. And then the model becomes,if not Truth, a generally accepted option for understanding each other.

For the idea to hold, it isn't necessary to have any god or supernatural belief, beyond accepting self-organizing ... seeing the likeness creates the patterns and then adopting the pattern finds more likeness, reinforcing over and over, enlarging and pruning, until a typology is built and naming rights are claimed for the construct, and the typology is taught and made complex.

See, for instance, Game of Life Cellular Automata, Andrew Adamatzky, 2010 for discussions of cellular automata, boundaries, convergence, and a lot of the convergences (glider, cross, … ) and applications.

Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is changing. From the left-most US city, we are moving towards bigness, dealing with a smaller economy by setting hungry policies for the dollars of others and withdrawing support for the values of innovation, creativity, smallness, and volunteering. By implementing the plans of the Community Programs Committee, we will be concentrating power in large professionalized service delivery agencies.

We are not learning lessons from the national failures.

I'm discouraged by the short-sighted survival mode that the funding guidelines committee has approved especially here where there is so much involvement in spirituality and holism and ecology.

When pragmatism trumps the values of community and connection to create a professionalized safety net, the quality of life here will degrade.

An example of the kind of exclusion is in the city's new health focus area where the old-fashioned physical and mental health silos prejudices against people who experience moods swings, fear, voices and visions by segregating mental health from physical health. A result of this segregation has been, on average, 15 years of potential life lost.

By assuming emotional well being is somehow separate from diet and exercise and cancer, separating things we can touch prejudices against feelings and fears. Just consider all the effort to get people to go for help which they are ashamed of wanting, ashamed because of the selfishness behind the carve out, carved out to get separate funding by separating out the people who would be helped. 

Can you feel stigma?

Sometimes people don't ask for help because of prejudice, because of concerns about discrimination, because of shame. Mostly it's because of shame. I think using real words that connect with real feelings would set an example for someone feeling as if life had lost all value. I don't think many people *feel* stigma. Stigma is a concept from sociology that carries no emotional burden, makes it easier to distance ourselves from shame. The mental health field uses it all the time, for distancing. I think changing the language of campaigns would ground them in real experience and further the willingness for people to reach out.

Hope

My understanding is that the human body is optimized for environmental conditions of about five thousand years ago, that we haven’t quite caught up with ourselves. Animals have a fear and survival response that they seem to immediately be able to turn off once the perceived danger is no longer present. Humans seem not yet able to turn off that switch, and for some humans the stress response continues to reverberate and amplify.

I wonder if meditation practices, prayer, and other forms of self-talk are trying to wire the brain so that we can turn off the fear response when we don’t any longer need it, install a balance to the auto-response to fear with an off switch.

I also wonder whether there is a distinction between adaptation, acceptance and awareness. Because cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, if there seem to be no options, we accept, justify to ourselves, rationalize. But if there seem to be options, we maintain dissonance, stress, ... so it seems to me that the whole self-help/improvement industry sustains unhappiness and dissatisfaction (suffering) by emphasizing hope, change, grasping for tomorrow, averse to today.

I think there can be a two-fold (at least) track towards a unified theory of understanding everything - the deterministic/logic/science/rational/law method we tend to value most; and a merger/oneness/butterfly/self-organizing/awe/mystery track which is woven throughout the former, might even be the mesh on which the former is built and on which it depends. Not as mutually dependent as warp and woof, rather a framework which once the thinking structure is built fades away, is not necessary for the structure but is necessary for a new or different structure and is necessary to rebuild if the existing structure is destroyed.

What might be the impact of fewer degrees of separation?

Webmind values the reunification program because individual reunifications increase global net happiness.*. I think the idea is that individual joy leverages into global joy.

More broadly, it seems there would be fewer degrees of separation between individuals, between communities, between countries, a stepped up version of social networking. And thus more peace, because species don't fight as much with their own kind.

But what about rage within families, honor killings, Boznia, Rwanda, … ?

Is this what consciousness brings when it overrides earlier adaptations?

Now I'm wonder about the impact of fewer degrees of separation.

* Sawyer, WWW:WATCH, p 300

1989 Mood Matters purpose statement

The specific purposes of the association are to

• establish a resource network
• define a system of early warnings when the high times begin to move quickly
• keep up with the most current in medications
• talk about changes in life expectations
• share our own art and writings
• perhaps move towards community actions, and, ...
• provide a haven

http://peoplewho.org/moodmatters/

Optisolv – towards a good release

Optisolv – towards a good release

To increase social acceptance of the actions of people with subjectively life-limiting expectations who want to die at their own convenience.

My experience, while perhaps much different from yours, ought nonetheless to be given credence and stand on its own merit. Do not impose your fears or your faiths on me. What I decide is what I want.

Fearful righteous people insist on rationality and competence and elapsed time before acting because the alternative is unimaginable, literally impossible to even contemplate, too chaotic, a full threat to social structure. If humans could kill impulsively without contemplation, if they'd kill themselves, they'd also kill me. That permission would destroy our sound structure, so therefore we forbid non-violent means of choosing to die. We allow shooting, jumping, hanging, crashing, but not swallowing and sleeping.

Depression is a straw man. If depression is a medical illness it should not be isolated as the only illness for which one is expected to keep treating and suffering. At a minimum, we must Include depression as an accepted reason for ending life. There must be lots of choice about undergoing technology-driven life extensions. Premature death makes an assumption about statistically average life expectancy; choice is about an individual decision about sufficiency; choice is a satisfactory fulfillment of a desire to stop.

Rewiring?

Are Buddhist practice and other forms of meditation rewiring for the next evolutionary step?

Does meditation begin to reprogram the hard-wired fear auto-response.

Are all the lowering-stress practices merely indoctrination, a denial of a harsh society. Is death denying is part of today's unreality?

Hope thus becomes a stressor, a perpetuation of illusion, a rejection of the real.

Do practices like Buddhist meditation dim the amplitude of the switch between stress and resisting acting on the stress, creating consonance?

I wonder.

Reality is a fractal ...

Reality is a fractal in motion, self-similar, iterative, with fractional dimension, ... for recursive I-making.

Composting my discontents

Pride in compost from a satisfied green gardener made me wish I had such a close-by way to not waste. Somehow that idea of converting decomposition into renewal remained in my thoughts, waiting for an implementation. How, I wondered can I develop composting for what I no longer need. I began to think of breaking down and recycling discontents and distresses that I'm not using, releasing them as their components, and taking back in ways to fertilize myself with an intention to synchronize with flow. I found the way to do this very close-by, on my meditation cushion, breathing out in, disassembled, what I didn't need, and breathing in alignment.

A yellow lobster has been caught

Yellow lobsters, black swans

Next will be a purple fawn.

Indefinite ...

Dawn, lawn, pawn, con, gone.

Evidence resistance and cognitive dissonance

Kathryn Schultz urges, in Being Wrong, “Recall Leon festinger, who found that failed prophecies often lead to an upsurge in faith.” (p 204)

So also with the prophecies of risk and danger which incite the advocates of coercion-masked-as-treatment - - - the more force fails, the more they organize to increase the amount and scope of commitment.

Coaching, counseling and listening

I’ve been reading discussions about psychiatric coercion- services which are contingent on accepting a diagnosis, taking meds; providers using leverage for compliance. On a peer provider list, there was a post about motivation counseling, that because it was subtly suggestive, motivating towards a suggested goal (maybe med compliance), that it’s coercion was insidious. The conclusion was that reflective listening is non-coercive, allowing persons to find their own truth, thus was what peers should provide to each other.

I agree that many people who cope with mood swings, fear, voices and visions need to find our own voice, hear ourselves, that reflective listening helps a lot with that. But I also think that only listening to one’s own voice is a closed universe, one is trapped by one’s own limitations and experience. To me, expecting reflective listening to be enough for change and growth seems as if I were to introspect long enough I would be able to be able suddenly to have the insight to speak Parsi. I think there’s a hostility in refusing to offer suggestions, a condescension, a retaining of the power imbalance. I think coaching and therapy fail if they insist on working within a finite personal field.

The telephone trumps

The telephone trumps

At the end of my street is a home with an extra large gated driveway entrance and parking area. The people who live their open and close the gate with remotes, and when the gate is closed, their protective dog plays in that space and barks when cars or neighbors come too near.

Early this morning a service truck drove up to the gate, the dog started barking as the truck approached, the truck stopped but didn’t back way, the dog barked and barked and barked until I got up and went to the window and watched the standoff. A woman came out of the house, shushed the dog, said to the driver “There’s nothing I can do. I’m on a call. To Europe.” She let go of the dog, the dog barked, the woman went back into the house, the truck backed away, turned, drove off, the dog quieted, went our of my sight to the back of the house.

And I stood thinking. Why does a telephone call trump live situations? Why is a call to Europe important now that phone connectivity is everywhere and calls cost little? Why didn’t the woman take the dog into the house? What did the truck want - was it a service she had requested and she’d reschedule? And here I am still thinking, but mostly that her priority was so strongly the phone call she was on over the obstructing the truck and noise disturbing the neighborhood (or only me).The telephone trumps

At the end of my street is a home with an extra large gated driveway entrance and parking area. The people who live their open and close the gate with remotes, and when the gate is closed, their protective dog plays in that space and barks when cars or neighbors come too near.

Early this morning a service truck drove up to the gate, the dog started barking as the truck approached, the truck stopped but didn’t back way, the dog barked and barked and barked until I got up and went to the window and watched the standoff. A woman came out of the house, shushed the dog, said to the driver “There’s nothing I can do. I’m on a call. To Europe.” She let go of the dog, the dog barked, the woman went back into the house, the truck backed away, turned, drove off, the dog quieted, went our of my sight to the back of the house.

And I stood thinking. Why does a telephone call trump live situations? Why is a call to Europe important now that phone connectivity is everywhere and calls cost little? Why didn’t the woman take the dog into the house? What did the truck want - was it a service she had requested and she’d reschedule? And here I am still thinking, but mostly that her priority was so strongly the phone call she was on over obstructing the truck and the noise disturbing the neighborhood (or only me).

Combining Determinism and Self-organization

My understanding is that the human body is optimitzed for environmental conditions of about five thousand years ago, that we haven’t quite caught up with ourselves. Animals have a fear and survival response that they seem to immediately be able to turn off once the perceived danger is no longer present. Humans seem not yet able to turn off that switch, and for some humans the stress response continues to reverberate and amplify.

I wonder if meditation practices, prayer, and other forms of self-talk are trying to wire the brain so that we can turn off the fear response when we don’t any longer need it, install a balance to the auto-response to fear with an off switch.

I also wonder whether there is a distinction between adaptation, acceptance and awareness. Because cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, if there seem to be no options, we accept, justify to ourselves, rationalize. But if there seem to be options, we maintain dissonance, stress, ... so it seems to me that the whole self-help/improvement industry sustains unhappiness and dissatisfaction (suffering) by emphasizing hope, change, grasping for tomorrow, averse to today.

I think there can be a two-fold (at least) track towards a unified theory of understanding everything - the deterministic/logic/science/rational/law method we tend to value most; and a merger/oneness/butterfly/self-organizing/awe/mystery track which is woven throughout the former, might even be the mesh on which the former is built and on which it depends. Not as mutually dependent as warp and woof, rather a framework which once the thinking structure is built fades away, is not necessary for the structure but is necessary for a new or different structure and is necessary to rebuild if the existing structure is destroyed.

Safety and Protection in Santa Cruz

Community health is about optimal functioning - do we plan to create that by removing those we don’t consider optimal?

How can removing liberty help health? What kind of psychiatric health do bars and locks feed?

We are really talking about illness, disease, brains, a medical model that has been proved inadequate, supplanted by including the social determinants, ...

Protect whom? From what?

Protect Santa Cruz residents from people who cope with mood swings, fear, voices and visions, suggest safety by rejecting a group of people with psychiatric disabilities, claim to protect for rare harms by instead confining people who are more often themselves victims.

Or keep people with psychiatric diagnoses safe from their own madness, deprive them of the chance to learn the skills to manage themselves, teach them they are helpless over themselves and must be locked.

That’s not safety. That’s rhetoric.

Selecting against us, distancing to keep us as far away as you can, naming a lock-up a healthy facility, naming health instead of illness

What can be healthy about locking people up? Wwhat are we pretending and not saying?

Building a new lockup might divert attention from the current failure intention and construction is not results or accountability. Do you expect a building to by proxy for results?

Entropy

Entropy is so high, the moment is so chaotic and so full of motion that it is as unperceivable by the human eye so it seems empty

When the disorder begins to bump into itself there becomes a tipping point, critical mass, popping off - old system is less full, calmer; new system is much less full, calmer because less stuff in more space. Self-organizing begins and creates order and disorder at the same time, the disorderly outliers. And the orderly gets bigger and bigger, power laws, and topple of their own weight/size/greed thus leading to more disorder.

Whose life?

Stopped short (in her explorations) by their expectations ...

Hope and a unified theory

My understanding is that the human body is optimitzed for environmental conditions of about five thousand years ago, that we haven’t quite caught up with ourselves. Animals have a fear and survival response that they seem to immediately be able to turn off once the perceived danger is no longer present. Humans seem not yet able to turn off that switch, and for some humans the stress response continues to reverberate and amplify.

I wonder if meditation practices, prayer, and other forms of self-talk are trying to wire the brain so that we can turn off the fear response when we don’t any longer need it, balance to on response to fear with an off switch.

I also wonder whether there is a distinction between adaptation, acceptance and awareness. Because cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, if there seem to be no options, we accept, justify to ourselves, rationalize. But if there seem to be options, we maintain dissonance, stress, ... so it seems to me that the whole self-help/improvement industry sustains unhappiness by emphasizing hope, change, grasping for tomorrow, averse to today.

I think there can be a two-fold (at least) track towards a unified theory of understanding everything - the deterministic/logic/science/rational/law method we tend to value most; and a merger/oneness/butterfly/self-organizing/awe/mystery track which is woven throughout the former, might even be the mesh on which the former is built and depends. Not as mutually dependent as warp and woof, rather a framework which once the thinking structure is built fades away, is not necessary for the structure but is necessary for a new or different structure and is necessary to rebuild if the existing structure is destroyed.

People Who and Human Rights

From the perspective of the UN Universal Periodic Review, there are bold and there are subtle indignities.

When the United States signs the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities we must as well honor its careful crafting. For the wants of people with psychiatric diagnoses are diluted by so many others who claim to be stakeholders, who want to share, really direct, instead of support our decision making.

But the most sly, the most subtle deprivation is that I’m stripped of responsibilities, and that deprivation is based on my diagnosis of disability. I’m encouraged to only join low-stress activities, to ask for help to manage myself, and at the extreme I’m not allowed to vote or to sign contracts. Rights have to do with liberty, and mine can be curtailed. Duties have to do with dignity; but I’m asked for few.

We people who cope with mood swings, fear, voices and visions are consistently denied many of the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so that it seems those rights don’t fully attach to us, that we are invisible, or an exception, a yes, but ...

There is no but. The rights of the UDHR are fundamental. They are not entitlements; they are not reversible. They are meant to include me too.

So, what to do?

Education and access.

In order to exercise my rights I need to know what they are. Continue the broadband initiative and create electronic accessibility for full inclusion in the knowledge society. Require transparency, including industry-funded health non-profits and web sites. Emphasize critical thinking starting in grade school.

For my disability in particular, the psychiatric diagnostic manual is being revised. Amidst controversy. The “Clinical tensions mask social and political ones.” “As if to demonstrate the point that the creation of mental illness categories remains as much a social and cultural endeavor as a scientific process, the APA is soliciting input from the public [for DSM-V].

We change the paradigm by changing the language. Not medical. Not criminal. Words do matter. Use words that truly presume “wellness, response-ability and the value of the person’s interpretation of their own experiences”

Include me too.

------------------------

Citations:

Jonathan Metzel, Protest Psychosis, 2009. Beacon Press, Boston, p 192.

Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, 2010. Free Press, p 252.

http://www.peoplewho.org/documents/mediaguidelines.htm

http://peoplewho.org/documents/wordsmatter.htm

http://www.mentalhealthpeers.com

Motivations

In the US, there are groups who urge social justice for Native Americans, who consider the election of a black president redemptive of the abuses from slavery, and who are critical of how humans have ill-managed environmental resources. Materialistic, greedy, short-sighted are a few of the adjectives connected to a doomy view of the planet’s, our human, future.

At the same time that we worry about the death of the planet, we are extending the life of individual humans with new technology to support perinatal challenges and various disabilities, extending the length of time each of us stays alive, and trying to forbid voluntarily sanctioned easy death.

I am wondering about connecting this unwillingness to be comfortable with the death of any one individual and the global sense of shame at the much-discussed death of the planet.

Denial? Reparation? Redemption?