azurelunatic | ATTACK of the fucking CLONES!!!!!!!

Skip to Main Content

Current Mood: ecstatic

ATTACK of the fucking CLONES!!!!!!!

Dawn is dragging me with her on the epic trip to go see the movie tonight. Included will be a large sampling of her local family, including a lot of kids. Some teenagers, some starting to do the belligerent thing.

I shall have to plan diversions. She wasn't sure how OK with that I'd be; I do wonderfully with kids past the age of reason, as long as I'm not supposed to fill in totally for their parents. With a certain person who I was a surrogate mother-figure for, the situation totally bombed out. A little (a day or three) is fine. Two weeks+ is not. One movie should be great fun.

One of the guys in my class group has seen the movie already, and is probably going to be burning copies for the people who beg him on their knees.

1 am, baby. AZ Mills mall.

Darkside's going to absolutely strangle me in the morning. He's going to want spoilers, and I'm going to want sleep. He's already read the Pat Wrede version (so have I; we traded AotC for DI; Wrede for Bujold, and then returned the books the next day) but he still wants to know what's up.

I'm going to be hyper all afternoon. Wow. Hyper. Wow. Star Wars.

I'm thinking I may go in light costume; either classic Queen Amidala makeup or some light Jedi or Princess Leia hair. I almost have the hair for it now, without the black yarn to fill out the puffs. ...No, not quite.

I'm going undercover in any case; this is the branch of Dawn's family that freaks out about all things witchy. Considering that it runs in the family, and the kids really need proper training before something odd starts happening more than it already is, this should be interesting. Rings off; necklace hidden.

Star Wars! Wheeee!!!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. By "learning to control their thoughts" I didn't mean "learning to think for themselves." I meant -- I don't know a good phrase for it, but have you ever had a thought or emotion circling in your head which was hard to remove? It's not externally imposed, it's just the brain getting into a rut (sometimes fairly instantly). Being able to control that and unrut yourself. I think that depressive spirals or uncontrollable rages or obsessions would be even scarier in someone with supernatural abilities than they would be in a generic person. I also don't think the various ruts are that uncommon. It's uncommon to get well and truly stuck in them, but most people get stuck in one or another for short periods of time.

Right. The brain gets hung. I was able to stop the spin last night to fall asleep, but it takes a lot of mental power and focus to consciously move your mind off something it can't work with, or can only harm you by dwelling on, into a subject that can actually be productive.

I've had the most success with physical foci, some of the mental mechanisms associated with safewords, and a technique that I can't describe at all usefully (you push and hold it there and sit on it). It still takes energy, but less so.

How do you break out of them? Do you have any good techniques for breaking out without concentrating enough that it's hard to sleep?

Step one, identify that the system is hung. This is an important step.

Next, identify the problem sets your system is hung on.

Focus on first problem set. Quick analysis: "Is this something I can make change to right now?"

      If yes, then how?
           Is how something practical to do at this time of night given sleep you need for tasks next day, and current value of system tired?                If yes, do.
               If no, add task to list of scheduled tasks.
      If no, then there is nothing you can do. Add to queue of things to get grouchy about when grouch is scheduled.

Once mind has grudgingly accepted "I can't do this now", perform usual relaxation things.

I guess I'm more asking about "the usual relaxation things". I have great difficulty fending off catchy thoughts unless I'm entirely awake. The current incarnation of this is musical: a catchy song with a strong beat sometimes gets stuck in my head at bedtime. I can cover it up with another song, but the beats come through, and if my mind relaxes at all, the catchy song comes back. If the catchy song were a gentle song, I could probably sleep to it, but they're usually aggressive driving (in the sense of driving forward) songs that perk me up and make me want to move around. Singing and listening to music during the day helps some, but not fully.

I've had problems with other thought patterns too. It's never fully quiet in my head unless I'm really sick. I like it during the day, and can usually fall asleep to gentle wandering thoughts, but it's hard to deal with energetic thoughts at night.

(Hmmm...now that I'm thinking about this again, I wonder how much of the problem is caused by not being hyper enough during the day. Thank you for making me describe (and thus think more) about this!)

My mother practices Morse Code in her head while trying to sleep. There's the classic Kabalistic relaxation ritual that I learned: ball of golden light at feet, cleansing and relaxing your entire body as it moves upwards.

I guess on fanatic thoughts, what you have to do is grab the thought, hold it still, look at it firmly, and then deliberately draw your focus up and away from it, as though you're lifting the viewpoint on a microscope. It may still be spinning in background, but you're just not listening to it.

Great mechanism for drowning out the frantic beat of a catchy song: your own heartbeat. Unless that's going as fast as the songbeat, it's relaxing, and if you do biofeedback, you and your heartbeat and your lungs can focus on settling into the rhythms of sleep.

Try, if your mind-browser supports this, doing a total process grab from a time when you're successfully falling asleep, and reloading that whole image into yourself when you can't fall asleep, bit by bit.

It's a bit of an art, learning the focus of nonfocus.

Imagine the field of your inner view as a blank desktop, in your favorite soothing default color. Screaming magenta or cyan probably won't cut it. There is a trashcan or recycle bin on the desktop. Focus on the desktop. Pop-up windows and files and icons and bits of sound will appear; drag them all into the trash can. Do not focus on the trashcan while doing this; stay focused on the desktop. You needn't drag them one by one; keep sweeping the desktop clear. They will pop up again sometime later. Once you can maintain your desktop clear, wrap it around yourself, like a fuzzy blanket, and breathe deeply, in and out, slowly and regularly.

This can also be done in the middle of the day.

Ah, but the two aren't so unconnected. I've been known to think myself out of ruts, if they are in fact thought-induced rather than emotional, in which case, no controlling of thoughts is going to clear it up.

As for depressive spirals, uncontrollable rages, or obsessions? They're not very common in pre-teens in a happy household. And I do get told if one of the kids is acting up at all, let alone that out of character.

And self-control is very *definitely* being taught to them. *That's* been on the curriculum since the day they were born...or at least since they were able to crawl around and began to learn there were things they were allowed to touch and things they were not. A good parent imposes control on a child until they learn to control themselves, and gradually lets up by disciplining for willful loss of control, and encouragement and training for accidental losses.

Yeah, I guess the specific example I was thinking of was induced by puberty's hormonal surges. Shortly after puberty I started getting in towering rages. I was able to learn to deal with them in stages. First I worked on not hitting anyone or trying to hit them, not screaming and stomping, etc. The physical outward signs. Then I worked on not focusing on how I hated the person and wanted to kill them and so forth, which meant I broke out of the rage much more quickly. I also worked on not letting anger get that far. I eventually stopped having rages like that, but I don't know how much of that was mental control and how much of that was hormonal stabilization. If I'd had actions directly triggered by my thoughts that I couldn't prevent by getting away from people and disabling my muscles, things would have been really ugly for a while. I couldn't work on the actions and the thoughts at the same time -- the actions would have broken loose. If I hadn't had to work out how to do it myself, the process would have been much smoother and I might have been able to do thoughts and actions at the same time.

I've been working on breaking myself out of emotional ruts, because my emotional ruts tend to be locked in by thoughts and actions. It's not just being down. It's being down and sitting in a corner and thinking about how much I suck and how useless I am and not getting enough sleep or outdoors time (both of which strongly affect my mood) and not doing anything productive. If I control the thoughts and actions, the emotion goes away after a while. I really doubt this would work on a purely emotional rut, though, or any sort of brain biochemical imbalance. It's a YMMV thing.

I finally learned to control my rage. (And, not sure if I mentioned this when it happened, but I finally did confront my dad just as he was about to go off, and he hasn't since...)

Last time I hit absolute rage, I still had just barely the clarity of mind to scoop through my body and squeegie all of my rage into my pressed-together hands. This pulled it out of my mind and body, though my hands tingled like anything and it was an effort to keep them together. Then I directed it, "Go forth and harm none", because I was in no state to clean the energy myself.

At home, Votania popped up off the couch, where she had been lying, very very ill and drained (having been in the hospital the previous day for an allergic reaction to pennicillin) and proceeded to unpack boxes and decorate the house. Upon my return home, she asked me what, exactly, had gotten me that mad...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only