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

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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!!!

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I think you're saying that your religion runs in their family without them noticing it. Um, interpretation help for the person who's still submerged in the world of math, biochem, and technoidentity crises[1] please?

[1] I've just finished rereading a collection of Greg Egan short stories. I really like his writing, but I'm beginning to suspect it's bad for my brain.

Oh, right.

The witchy-type talent that underlies my choice of religion runs in the family. You can be a Practitioner of a number of different systems; the talent's the same. Unfortunately, the religious viewpoint of this branch of the family excludes the talent, so proper training is not provided for.

Like the fact that my oldest sister and I could both see the ghosts in our house, another sister could see auras (all the time, without trying!), and the other sister got prescient flashes on occasion, but she managed to shut those down 'cause they scared the hell out of her. It does run in my family; my mother gets flashes of things happening elsewhere rather than elsewhen, which used to piss her off until she got it mostly turned off (why does she care that someone's wrecking their car *right*now*, and why should she have to see it?), but she always knew when one of us girls was upset at school. Anniwa used to make things fall off the bookshelf when she was mad. Jo made the faucets run. Sher made the lights in her bedroom go on and off. I made the plants in the window swing back and forth. While we were still at school, mind you. Mom always knew. :)

And all of this was within a vaguely Christian framework. My mother didn't decide she was pagan until about 3 years ago...when I switched from Christian to pagan, two of my three sisters decided to come out of the broom closet, and after much discussion, Mom decided that it described her own beliefs better than the Bible did.

I already know my children, at least two of the remaining three (the third is still only 4 and I haven't seen any evidence of Talent yet), definitely have the talent. They've both seen dead people. (Yes, Virginia, "I see dead people!") #1 daughter saw the ghost that hangs out at Mom's place (Mom's uncle) and asked Mom who that was and why Mom was letting him wander through her house. (Little bit didn't realize the guy was dead. :) #1 son saw his older brother and sister the evening of the day they died. Really, really freaked out his Aunt Jo (who still tries to stay well away from all this "weird shit") because Little Boy didn't even know his brother and sister were dead yet, but didn't seem at all startled to see them walking past his bedroom door in Missouri when they had stayed home in Texas.

And I'm not allowed to train them. I have an agreement with their dad; I don't talk to them about my religion, and if they mention seeing things to him, he's not allowed to discourage them, and is *required* to tell me at once if supernatural things happen. They're not likely to see things at home, though, because I've got that house shielded to a fare-thee-well. But once they hit their teen years, all agreements are null and void. I'll be circumspect, of course, but I *will* begin telling them the way things work once they're old enough to decide for themselves, and hopefully before any Talents begin manifesting extremely and scare 'em.

Damn, that was a lot of talking for a response...

Disclaimer(s): I'm a meddlesome person who hasn't raised kids or even babysat much. I don't know you, your kids, or that much about supernatural stuff (I'm not sure what I believe in this arena, but I know that I don't know much). Giving people the tools to control their own minds is one of my personal pet issues.

It might be a good idea to give your kids general basic "here's how to control your own thoughts" training. It's useful for anybody to have, but it's especially useful for people who are likely to get trapped by their own thoughts (people with obsessive tendencies, people with emotionally controlled psi powers, probably anyone going through puberty). It could be done without any religious linkage.

Also if you're basing "teen years" on the age of puberty, be aware that that age is falling and the hormonal swooshing starts before changes are visible.

Well, understand that the children's father is an extremely fundamentalist Christian, and I'm a pagan. (The reason for the divorce, in fact; I was Christian for 9 years of our 11-year marriage.) I have promised him not to discuss my religion with them because, while it's *important* for him that the children be Christian, what's *important* to me is that they are Good People, and he's well within my definition of good people.

I assure you, the children *are* learning to think for themselves. He prizes logic, rationality, and discernment above most things, and encourages them in his kids. He just wants to make sure they are well and thoroughly grounded in the Word of his God while they are still young. As you bend the sapling, so shall the tree grow (though he's aware the bending process must be gentle and not *break* said sapling.)

And the basis of choosing the age of 13 to begin speaking my version of reality with them is grounded more in his Book than in any physical puberty issue. At the age of 13, he expects his children to be young adults, and no longer *children*, and they will begin to be allowed opposing points of view to learn how to counter them. I would not have accepted being told I could *never* answer their questions, after all. A time limit I could accept and understand his motivations for. (And when they do ask me about my religion, I tell them truthfully, that I have promised their father that I not discuss those issues with them, and that they should ask him...neither one of us has ever countenanced lying to the children.)

will begin to be allowed opposing points of view to learn how to counter them

That, there, is a line that just terrifies me. Gods forbid that we learn opposing points of view to find the underlying similarities and how to get along while disagreeing!! Eeek.

I'm glad he's Good People.

I hope your training will come before their Talents start up at full strength. Votania's very glad to have similarly talented help in raising her son -- he's five and getting stronger. I feel sorry for That Woman's daughters...

He has no problem with them learning such things, and will, in fact incorporate it into the curriculum...THEN. Not now. Believe me, well-disciplined children learn, just by dealing with siblings in a polite and disciplined manner, how to get along while disagreeing.

Is he sheltering the children? Yes. Does he have them in a greenhouse? Yes. But in the sense that you put young, tender plants in the greenhouse and feed them well until they are strong enough to withstand the weather, when you transplant them, rather than in the sense of a hothouse plant that will never be capable of surviving outdoors at all.

My childhood SUCKED, to put it simply. The only good things in my childhood were from my home. You will not find me agreeing that children need to be exposed to contrary things just to get them used to it. Just remembering what my son was like at age 10, and comparing it to myself at the same age, tells me that this is a good way to raise them...he was soooo much more secure in his sense of self, not having to be ostracized on a daily basis from state-enforced "peers" because his intelligence is a good 50 points higher than the best of them (okay, in my case it was only 30, but Christian was far more intelligent than me). He had already reached the point, at 10, where he was seeing the contradictory viewpoints when listening to the news, or reading books, and pointing them out to his father and discussing them in a rational manner.

As for the "learn how to counter them" versus "find underlying similarities"...he is a *consistent* Christian. According to his God's written word, it's an us-and-them mentality. 100% And even with that, he gets along with ME just fine

I had no training growing up, only support that I wasn't imagining things. I put my first shield around myself at 16 (and promptly freaked out). Took me three months to learn what empathy was and what had happened. First time I'd ever been alone in my head, you see. Scared me. :) I still managed to learn pretty well on my own.

If I start at 13, and explain to them what's going on, ask what they've seen, and go about it in a systematic manner, there shouldn't be any problems. All they're likely to have without actually trying things out (things that at the moment they don't know exist to be able to try them) is extra senses that most people don't...which isn't likely to be a problem without training, as long as they aren't ridiculed or told they're lying if they talk about them (and their father has *specific* instructions in that matter that he has agreed to.)

I hope your training comes before they shut themselves down fully. That happened to me at age 12. Long story short, I'm still trying to find and remove all of the Shields and Mental Blocks I placed on myself, to deal with everything going haywire during puberty. B-( not a fun process, and it's Very slow.

It's not like I have no contact with these kids (I see them just about every week, they ARE still my kids, after all); if something Happens between now and then, I'll know about it, and deal with it. This is just the *plan*. All plans are subject to change. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, or reality in this case. :)

ok B-), Just making sure. I wasn't trying to imply anything by it, except things change quicklly. by the by Hello. *laugh* I'm the one refered to as Neighbor in Az's wrightings, though you probablly already know that.

Yep, I did know who you were, and I knew no offense was intended; none taken. It's just a good discussion. :)

Ahhh, again, nice to see minds meeting and friends getting along...

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.

Glad to hear it's working for your kids. I was in the local Gifted & Talented program, so at least I wasn't alone (and at about nine to twelve my classmates started appreciating my brain and my general goodwill towards the rest of the world) but I only really found friends of like intelligence when I hit the Center for Talented Youth's summer programs at 14.

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.

I was in GT from kindergarten, really. They tried to bump me up into first grade a year early, but I wasn't emotionally ready to handle it. I missed my friends, hated being in school ALL DAY, and got annoyed with the lunch monitor too many times, so they put me back after a month. Or so I've been told; I certainly don't remember being 5.

I never made good friends 'til I hit high school, really, and then it was more a matter of that shielding thing, and learning to control my temper (and not constantly having my own emotions buffeted around by those around me) so that I was finally somebody people were willing to be friends with. Oddly enough, even before that, I was confidant to many, but friend to none.

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'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 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...

Sounds like a good plan. I am still discovering all the little tricks I picked up before formal training ensued.

I am still amused that once I began contemplating the art, my friend Savil gave me some books without me even talking about it...

Hm. I remember some things from five...

One of my earliest memories involves a lot of kid-logic, about some grownup unfairness. I think I was two. They wouldn't let me on the roof (2nd floor of house under construction); I had to be in my playpen: they said I was too heavy and would fall through. They were bigger than I was, though, and heavier; they didn't fall through: they were logically inconsistant and being unfair to me.

Later, when I rehashed this, Mama explained that it wasn't so much a matter of heavy, as heavy in the wrong place. They knew where the beams were and could walk there; I wouldn't have. That, I accepted, and resolved the old unfairness.

I can't keep track of who knows what about me, what with LJ and such like...

I had a bike accident when I was 9. Minor concussion and cracked skull. Loss of memories. I have actual memories of *maybe* a half-dozen still pictures during the year before that, and a few more, total, for the few years before that. Nothing from very young.

My *earliest* memory is a single moment of speech therapy, something I know I had once a week for two years, when I was 6 and 7 (To learn how to say 'r'). My next is a still-picture of myself working on a ceramic leaf in 2nd grade. It was a weeks' long project, and I only remember myself painting it. I remember seeing Star Wars at a drive-in, and it came out when I was 7; I saw it sometime during the summer I turned 8.

3rd grade was the year before my accident, and I remember:
* The day my first boyfriend joined our school; he sat in the front row, one seat over from where I sat in the back row, so I could see him. I only have the one picture memory of seeing him sitting there and thinking he was cute.
* The second day he wasn't there; he'd been transferred to the 4th grade class, which I discovered when I went to reading class (none of the kids in my split 3rd/4th grade class were in my reading book), and sat at the table next to him; they were out of desks in that class. We got to sit together all year. These are things I *know*, having been reminded of them since the accident, but the actual memory is only of sitting there next to him, passing a note.
* The day I had to go to the bathroom, and the teacher was doing reading with another group, and we had previous instructions NEVER to interrupt her during reading...but she was sitting in front of the door with the reading circle...I got up and went out through the coat closet. Again, I know the whole story, but the *memory* is only of holding my hand up, seeing her look up at me, and shake her head slightly to indicate she wasn't going to answer me.

That's about it, the sum total of my personal memory of the years before the summer I turned 9. Comparing my few memories of third grade with the clarity with which I remember fourth grade is downright eerie to me, and lets me know just how much of the loss was due to the accident and not just loss of memory from being young. The difference between 8 and 9 should not be so much that I would remember whole stretches of 4th grade, along with feelings, scents, flavors, etc., and only three snippets out of third, that honestly have emotions filled in after the fact by what I figure I must have thought/felt at the time. I don't remember ANY of the reading books I went through in grade school, though I can recognize them vaguely when I see them.

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!)

Scary.

One of my personal terrors is losing memory. Thus the journal; thus a habit of re-reading to keep things I've learned in mind; thus the occasional linksurfing of old memories.

Exactly. It is, in fact, the reason I started journalling myself oh-so-many years ago. And I, too, have a habit of re-reading.

This, also, would be the reason I finally decided firmly against ever using E. One of its *possible* side effects (not a common one, and mainly from extended, voluminous use) is memory loss. Enough of a terror for me to say no. Definitely not worth even the slightest risk.

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.

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