THE FORUMS

There is NO Escape!!


What do I mean??... Well.. know matter how many chicks you bang or don't bang there is NO escape, your going to DIE someday!.
As fucked up as this sounds I think this is the fundamental truth that is running in the backround of every single human being... concsiously or sub-consciously, It's all a big distraction before the inevitable..  Whether a guy gets married in a hope that this will solve all his problems or a guy like Charlie Sheen is banging every chick possible I think underneath it all they are in search of some kind of security, control...... ultimately Salvation!.

Well....there is none!!LOL.....  A great quote I once heard but can't remember where it's from..

"Life is a meaningless energy, going knowhere for no reason"

P.S .. "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything" -Tyler Durden, Fight Club..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zub3AjqoIbA

I recall a thread of the time when Kuz talked about his experiences in the hospital about a dude that was in a similar situation acting all sad in shit.
I think there's power in staying bad-ass in these types of circumstances and not succumbing into a sad victim mentality.

It may sound harsh to the average social conditioned mind, but these situations have the meaning you give to them.
When I shattered two bones in my arm, my entire family started sending me cards and giving me gifts with 'poor, unfortunate you' texts on them.
1. I didn't ask for help
2. They never contact me otherwise
3. The accident was one of the best moments in my life

So why the fuck were they doing this shit?
They felt a sense of obligation that wasn't even there.
And my mom's all like: "Aren't you glad they care about you and give you their support?"
I was like:  "WTF, I never asked for any support, I'm completely fine. In fact, it annoys me that they try to project their victim interpretations about this situation. This was one of the greatest moments in my life."

Now obviously, cancer is a harder challenge then broken bones (and damaged nerves), but still I think the same principle applies.
You can't alwats control what life presents you with, but you can certainly control your own attitude towards it.
How do you want to carry pain, when it presents itself? Gracefully or beaten-down by it?

What a great distinction....thanks for posting this.

<<The "bad news" is that BEING COOL with everything up on the table may only happen after some emotions we don't want to feel have to come out and be felt. Felt by ourselves, and seen by others. Not wanting to do this is where all the control came from. And being OUT of control is a relief....that's what an addiction is. Relief. Until it stops working. And it always does.>>

JFM, are you saying here that the process of going through this healing process is trading one negative controlling pattern for a more positive controlling pattern?

For example, controlling our emotions by repressing them is not helpful at all...  so one would obviously allow themself to feel and express these emotions (letting go of control) and then the next stage would be having the wisdom of awareness to conciously direct emotions if need be (partly control) ... does this sound accurate?

For those interest, there is scientific neurological literature on this last piece about trying to consciously control emotions.
The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), a part of the frontal lobe of the neocortex (logical brain) has the ability to regulate emotions (top-down).
However, the amygdala is one of the big centers for emotions in the brain. This is a part of the middle brain (limbic system) a more primitive area that developed earlier in evolution than the neocortex. Emotional responses always come before evaluations or thoughts about a stimulus. So yes, it is possible to alter emotions thru PFC top-down control, but it is always a short-term strategy to cope with immediate demands of the situation (to survive for the time being).


Long-term healing can only take place thru getting back in experience with the emotional brain. When you're back in safety, it's okay to stop mood altering and feel the pain that is there, process it and heal it. But the problem with most people is that they've gotten stuck in the neocortex brain and have all these rules in there that fuck them up.
Bradshaw talks about this in the Homecoming program. "I learned to survive up in my thinking brain and shut down those lower emotional parts of my brain."
If you got all these beliefs in your thinking brain like:
"Being in pain/anger/vulnerable/sadness is bad."

Then you just keep stuck in mood altering cycles and you'll go reach for an addictive behavior every single time you're experience will go into the emotional/feeling brain (as your natural tendency and intuition will be to heal your emotions so you can feel good long-term).


Side-story on emotional repression and abandonment:
I recently read a book about the history of my grandma's parents family (of my grandma's youth). At one point, the second kid drowned at age 3 while running around on the farm.
Here's what my grandmothers grandma said to my grandma's mother at the funeral:
"Stop crying, I'm sure you'll get another one."
At first I started laughing at the absolute absurdity of the statement. Then I started imagining the scene, talk about brutal. But a great illustration of the no-feeling rule in action.
'You go repress your sadness after your son just died. It's no big deal, you'll just get another kid', which she did, she even named the boy the same name. It was considered normal.
My grandma had two brothers called Jan (one of which drowned at age 3).

At another time, my grandma's younger sister had to go to the hospital (40 miles away) for an operation at age 6. They dropped her off, then left her there for 3 weeks to go thru operation and recovery. Visiting was too expensive according to the parents, so the kid was alone at the hospital for 3 weeks. This was considered normal.

Reading this type of stuff really put things in perspective. There is no one to blame for this. Life was challenging enough as it was. People were pretty stupid 75 years ago, simply because they hardly had any time to learn. They had to work hard, they usually had way to many kids, so if you had good parenting, you simply got lucky. Life was about surviving, not raising healthy kids.