Articles 17.
17.1 *
Legitimate Suffering : What is Legitimate Suffering? - Oliver JR Cooper
“There is a saying by Carl Jung that says - “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering”. And while this has got to be one of his most famous quotes, it is not easily understood.
In today’s world it is often advocated that one should avoid pain at all costs. This is something that comes in many forms and guises. From drugs that are based on removing pain, to alcohol and numerous other things that society provides.
And it doesn’t stop in the mainstream society either; a big part of the self-help industry is also based on the avoidance of pain. Here, it is often about positive thinking or affirmations for example and not allowing ones pain to be registered in any way.
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Pleasure And Pain
What is evident, is that pleasure feels a lot better than pain. And the ego mind has all kinds of defences at its disposal to avoid the emotions and feelings of the heart and the body.
This can range from: repression, dissociation, avoidance, projection and many others. So the mind by its very nature is designed to avoid facing pain. And although this is so, it is not a negative thing; it is for survival reasons.
Without these defences, it would be overwhelming and these allow for some kind of internal regulation to occur.
Out Of Mind
So while this allows for the mind to settle the whole system and to bring sense of equilibrium back, it is often nothing more than a temporary solution. The emotions and feelings won’t have disappeared just because the mind no longer notices them or rarely comes into contact with them.
There is a saying that says ‘’out of sight out of mind’’. And just because something is out of mind, doesn’t mean it’s out of the body. In the short-term it may well appear to have disappeared, but in the long term it will lead to all kind of problems.
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Consequences
To avoid facing emotions and feelings that have built up from ones childhood and adult challenges and losses; can have the potential to create all kinds of dysfunctional and unhealthy consequences.
I believe that as a result of not feeling our pain and allowing it to be released, it can lead to:
· Depression
· These so-called ‘disorders’ that are around today
· Mental problems
· Physical Illness
· Emotional problems
· Addictions
· Obsessions
· Violence
· Abuse
· Suicide
· Self harm
· Irrational fears
· Relationship problems
· Reactive behaviour
· Obesity
A Process
This does not mean that one is forever stuck in their emotions, what it likely means is that one allows the natural emotional flow to take place. The reason they have created so many problems and become so overwhelming is due to their existence being ignored for so long.
Feeling Safe
However, in order to face ones pain and to let it go, one has to feel safe to do so. And this has got to be one of the biggest challenges around this. Just like breathing, were one breathes in and breathes out. When an emotion is felt, it will need to be released.
This will often not be possible in the moments that they arise, but this doesn’t mean that they have to be denied for weeks, months or even years after.
One of the reasons therapists, healers, coaches or trusted friends are so powerful here, is that they will allow one to feel safe enough to feel what is really going on. To embrace how they truly feel and not to pretend that everything is fine.“
17.2 *
High, Exceptional & Profound Giftedness - Jennifer Harvey Sallin
“LEVELS OF GIFTEDNESS
Giftedness is averaged to make up well less than 5% of the general population, and within that small number, there are subclassifications: mild, moderate, high, exceptional and profound giftedness. The latter three types make up only a very small portion of that less than 5%. The relatively little that has been written about the experience and cognition of the highly, exceptionally or profoundly gifted is proportionally consistent with the incidence of the phenomena, but the unfortunate result is that the net is cast wide in the existing literature on giftedness.
With various levels and concepts of “giftedness” often grouped together into a one-size-fits-all description, the highly, exceptionally and profoundly gifted are misrepresented in important ways. We all know that a mild or moderately gifted person can feel a strong sense of being an “alien” in a group of non-gifted people; so too can a highly, exceptionally or profoundly gifted person feel a strong sense of being an “alien” in a group of mild or moderately gifted people (the same is true between profoundly and highly gifted too, and so on).
Through my work, I’ve sought to understand and explore the cognitive process and phenomenological experience of how gifted people at various “levels” take in, make sense of, see, and “feel” the world – as well as the sometimes vast differences between the experience of average (non-gifted) cognition and gifted cognition at the various levels. For the sake of simplicity, I have focused on what I refer to as average (non-gifted) cognition, mild+ gifted cognition (mild and moderate giftedness), and high+ gifted cognition (high, exceptional, and profound giftedness). This is not to make the same mistake in misrepresenting or under-representing the exceptionally and profoundly gifted among us, by lumping them into lower categories. In considering their experience, it appears that their cognitive pattern is very similar to that of the highly and exceptionally gifted, but simply more extensive and speedy.
SIMPLE IS COMPLEX, COMPLEX IS SIMPLE
All of this extreme abstraction, information-matricing and questioning sets the stage for the fact that what seems “simple” or “obvious” for the concrete or mild+ thinker (i.e. time = hours, minutes, seconds, etc.) is quite “complex” for the extremely abstract or high+ thinker (time = a concept, a representation, a paradox, a puzzle). However, once enough patterning has been learned and the high+ gifted person has thoroughly immersed himself in the study of the paradox or puzzle at hand, the complex becomes simple again, and what is then “complex” for the concrete or mild+ thinker (i.e. the relativity of time) is now quite “simple” for the high+ thinker.
This is why high+ gifted people often seem so out of sync with those around them. The question “how are you today?” can feel extremely complex (How am I about which aspect of my life? Why are you asking? How should I be? and so on); but the question “do you believe time is real?” is quick and easy to answer (well, almost!). The first question might exhaust a high+ gifted thinker, whereas the second question might exhaust an average thinker. Mild+ gifted thinkers are, accordingly, somewhere in between. This is one of the main reasons why small talk and typical social niceties are not often considered specialties of high+ gifted people, and why, when two high+ gifted people meet, they can end up talking about theories of the origins of the universe or the concept of numbers or any other complex puzzle without barely knowing each others’ names.
In gifted coaching, it is often amazing to see how quickly we move from “hello” to extremely complex subjects, such as personality processing, intergenerational emotional legacies, and the nature of existence. It is rare that we spend much time on conventional details such as where one lives, one’s age, one’s sexual orientation, one’s parents or one’s personal relationships – unless of course, those elements are integral parts of the client’s personal puzzle we are actively aiming to resolve together. To an outsider, I as a coach might seem callous, as I breeze by the niceties such as asking, “how are you doing today?” or “how are your kids?” and get right to the heart of the matter. My clients might seem the same toward me. But for us, it works!
COMMUNICATING THE INNER MATRIX
In coaching and in the real world, learning how to effectively communicate what is inside one’s matrix, or the matrix in its entirety, can be extremely challenging for the high+ gifted. Because of the rarity of true peers that many high+ gifted people have in their lives, many often feel a physical, almost primal need to communicate the extreme mental and emotional intensity they have held back for years in an effort to fit in or not overwhelm or confuse others. Thoughts, ideas, insights, questions and dreams often come tumbling out like a waterfall in early coaching sessions (or in discussions in our HEPG Group), as though a dam had broken and the very universe or their essence of being is pouring out of the high+ gifted person’s mind.
This is because, for many, it is the first time they feel socially safe enough to share their matrix. But after years of holding it in, it often comes out jumbled and confused, and not rarely, the high+ gifted person himself isn’t entirely sure what he needs to communicate or not. In coaching, I help these clients learn to express what’s in their minds to the best of their ability, while at the same time coming to terms with the fact that, no matter how much we talk or write or sing or play music or dance or produce, it is never really possible to communicate everything that is in our minds, and that this is part of the experience and legitimate existential suffering of being an “individuated” adult.
Knowing this helps to reduce the sense of isolation and longing that many (if not all) high+ gifted feel, and makes communication more functional and less idealistic (this applies across all levels of giftedness). Still, communicating even smaller, selected aspects of the whole – or more importantly, representations of the whole – often remains challenging and is considered by me (and many others) to be one of the main sources of real “work” for the high+ gifted. At any moment, a high+ gifted person may be speaking, be aware of what they are saying, and at the same time, have another ongoing voice (or voices) or awareness in their own mind analyzing what they are saying, as well as actively presenting the possible counterarguments that could be waged on what they are saying or how they are saying it (or writing, or otherwise expressing). As usual for them, they are seeing their argument or subject matter from myriad possible angles and further questions are being generated as they speak or write.
And that can be very frustrating, because high+ gifted people can rarely (if ever) fully agree with what they are saying or have said – there are always exceptions, caveats, missing data, and further exploration to do! How can they communicate what is always changing? They can thus get stuck in thought-loop “black holes” where their need for clarification and precision, finding “just the right word” or explanation, or keeping their argument 100% airtight ironically actually prevents them from making important life decisions, expressing themselves adequately, creating or producing viable work to share (and income to live), or otherwise moving forward with their desires in relationships and life.
When I consult with high+ gifted clients who struggle intensely to express themselves, it is often because they believe that what they have to say is “unacceptable” or “inaccurate” since it necessarily only presents a small fraction of the whole; it is therefore “too simple,” or needs much more clarification before they can share their thoughts, ideas or desires. This can be agonizing, but as I said above, it is incredibly important to accept that all communication is necessarily flawed. We have to choose to say this instead of that, and commit to arbitrary borders in order to communicate concepts and models, when there might be a combination of truth, untruth and subtleties to both “this” and “that” and truths outside of the arbitrary borders we have chosen. One helpful example to remember is how beginning physics teachers teach that the atom is like the solar system, with electrons revolving around a nucleus. This is not true, but for the beginner’s mind, it is much easier to conceptualize this than to understand probability waves. Later, distinctions can be made, as understanding of basic concepts advances.
The high+ gifted person’s stringency with themselves and their own reasoning is only half of the problem: in reality, this stringency very often spills out onto their expectations of others, something very linked to a dysfunctional behavior of the gifted that I’ve termed binocular behavior in coaching. This is because many high+ gifted people do not realize they are high+ gifted, and thinking others should more or less experience the world as they do, they expect others to be as precise and holistic as they are. They expect others to work as hard as they do at finding “just the right word” or at deciphering layers of meaning. When they try to express as much of the whole picture as possible, or as precisely as possible, and when they expect or try to incite others to do so by demanding precision and higher-order analysis, they often find that it is very overwhelming for the person interacting with them.
What they often do not realize is that many people are simply unable (not necessarily unwilling, as it sometimes feels to the high+ gifted person) to engage at that level of abstraction and precision. The other person can go into overwhelm with all of the information given by or expected from the high+ gifted person. This helps us understand what is often perceived by non high+ gifted people as perfectionism or unrealistically high standards, and helps high+ gifted people to find compassion and respect for their non-gifted or mild+ gifted peers. When they realize that their intensity can be as disturbing to others as others’ lack of intensity can be to them, it becomes easier for the high+ gifted to relax a bit and connect better “across the divide.”
“
17.3
Rejecting The Machine - Freya India
“Freya India:
I think that’s exactly right, there is a pushback happening. I’m hopeful that my generation will be stricter with social media when it comes to our own children, and try hard to preserve their childhood.
It’s interesting that you say social media “sucks away our souls”. I saw a popular, mainstream Substacker describe selfies as “profane” the other day and it struck me. In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt also talks about the “spiritual degradation” caused by social media, which is something I’ve always felt but couldn’t articulate. Degrading is the word. When I scroll through ‘X’ I feel my faith in the world, in other people, and in love, degrading. It’s hard to put into words, but I think of that feeling when you walk into a beautiful, dimly-lit church, where your soul feels a little lighter, where the world feels different—the exact opposite of that feeling is scrolling through TikTok. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s doing the opposite to your soul.
I’ve also always felt that something about social media degrades our dignity. Everyone talks about feeling insecure or anxious after posting themselves online; for me, the strongest feeling was always shame. There’s an indignity to it, I find—to selfies, status updates, the whole thing. I remember as a teenager every time I posted a selfie on Instagram my heart would pound; it felt wrong, I felt ashamed. Checking how many likes I had felt humiliating. And I don’t think this is unique to me—girls joke about throwing their phone across the room after posting on Instagram, or shaking with anxiety. There’s something in that, I think, worth paying attention to.
I’ve written before about how sharing personal moments online degrades them, almost desecrates them. It reminds me of how my mum has always had this aversion to cutting up family photos—to stick on the wall or put in a scrapbook or something—because she felt it was wrong to cut off someone’s neck or chop off an arm. It’s a feeling like that. Hard to explain rationally, but a sense that something is too special to be treated this way. I just don’t believe we should offer our personal lives up to the market. I don’t post selfies because I don’t want to offer my face to be rated and reviewed. I don’t post my memories because it’s not up to strangers to tell me how valuable they are. If I have a daughter someday I don’t want her to be a product on display. And if I wouldn’t want it for her, why would I want it for myself?
So maybe we do need a little more shame, some stronger cultural norms around these things—where sharing private moments seems strange, where it would be unthinkable for a 12 year-old to have an Instagram account, or shameful to take selfies in sacred places. (Reminds me of another poetic line of yours: “When I see people taking selfies on mountaintops, I want to push them off.”) The other day I watched a group of young women take selfies together in a restaurant the entire evening, barely exchanging a word with one another. While eating, they started editing their photos in silence—one hand editing, the other holding their cutlery. They looked possessed. This is the same generation who say they feel painfully alone. What are we doing?
I wonder what you make of this feeling—that social media doesn’t just harm our mental health, but degrades us spiritually. Do you think that sense of shame is a warning of some kind? And what’s the way out of this? Is there a way to have a presence online while protecting our souls, our dignity, and what we feel to be sacred?
Paul Kingsnorth:
This is very interesting, because I have long felt exactly the same. In fact, I think that this sense of degradation, or profanity, is at the heart of my objection to social media and to the Machine in general. There are a lot of studies I could quote or arguments I could make, and many people have made them much better than I could - Jonathan Haidt, who you mention, is one of the very best at doing this. But at the root of it for me it is just some deep sense of wrongness. Of sacrilege. And that’s hard to justify in the language of our culture.
I sometimes wonder how much of this is cultural. If being English, and being from the pre-Internet generation, just gives me a feeling that what is happening is just bad manners. When did it become appropriate to watch pornography in train carriages? Or to watch a film on your tablet with the volume up in a public place? Or, as you say, to sit in a restaurant curating your online presence on your phone? I realise I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man, but perhaps we need more grumpy old men, and women, to put things right again.
Speaking of which, you might be too young to remember Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner for ‘decency’ on the TV, who was very well-known from the 1960s to the 1980s. At one point she led a fairly big movement of mostly older, mostly female and mostly Christian campaigners for ‘traditional values’. She was the original critic of the ‘permissive society’ as it was called back in the sixties, and by the time I was growing up she was a running joke amongst the ‘sophisticated’, university-educated, alternative comedy types. Everybody knew she was a fossil and her values were repressive and wrong. Except … these days I find myself basically on her side. She was right about where it was all going, and I suppose that if she could see our pornified present, full of anxiety and anger and broken, fragile young people, she might feel grimly vindicated.
What she represented back then was a culture of limits that was being superseded by a culture of liberation. We all pretended to believe, then as now, that ‘shaming’ people in order to keep society within those limits was bad, and that we should not judge or condemn any behaviour at all, however socially damaging. But no culture in history has ever believed that. And in fact, in the age of ‘cancel culture’ we don’t believe that either. We still shame people for all sorts of things - racism, sexism, homophobia and a host of ‘isms’ real or imagined. What we don’t shame is personal vanity, sexual licence, anti-social behaviour or any expression of sexuality, no matter how niche or damaging. What we have done is to promote personal ‘liberation’ to the exclusion of all other values - and that particular value just happens to be the one which is most easily monetised. The result is a culture in which the pressure to Instagram yourself is both psychologically damaging and highly profitable. The culture is profane and commercial at the same time. They feed off of each other.
We can all feel in some way that this is wrong: that we have let something vital go. The key thing is that, as you say, at some level we seem to feel ashamed of ourselves for the way we are living - and we are deeply unhappy, especially the young. Recently I gave a talk in which I pointed out that the Christian list of the ‘seven deadly sins’ which we used to be told to avoid in order to live a Godly life - lust, gluttony, greed, envy, pride, wrath, sloth - are now the basis of our economy and culture. We don’t avoid them - we actively promote them. This ought to tell us how off track we are. How many people will openly accept that their addiction to TikTok, Instagram etc is a problem, and that they don’t like what it does to them - but then go right on doing it? That’s how we know it’s an addiction. The question is how to break out of it.
Freya India:
I completely agree. It’s hard to break out of the addiction, but I think we have to be honest about what’s actually at stake here. Like our ability to love and be loyal, for example. I think a big fear for young people at the moment is commitment. Commitment to anything, really, but especially to each other.
As you say, the Machine killed mystery, and I think it took romance with it. Now we find our partners by swiping through endless people like products and advertising ourselves like things. When you say Airbnb has “bleached all the mystery” out of small towns, that’s how I feel about social media and falling in love. Romance is dead. You can’t wonder what your crush is up to you anymore because you can just watch their Instagram Story. You can’t wonder where they have been, what music they listen to, what their life is like; it’s all there, listed on their Facebook profile like a product description, their personality packaged into their Instagram grid. And now it’s not just places we review, but people. We leave reviews of one another constantly with our likes, comments and Tinder swipes. Again, profane.
I don’t think this is a small thing. I genuinely believe that what you call the Machine is destroying our ability to love one another. You talk about a time when people wandered in nature and got lost, when people talked to each other on trains instead of looking down, but what I’m most envious of is how people used to fall in love, how they used to stay in love. Many young people today were exposed to online porn before they even had a first kiss. Many of us have never known finding love without swiping and subscription models. We have never known flirting before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat Stories with flame emojis.
Romance is being killed in other ways, too. Our therapeutic culture pathologises love, convincing us that everything is a trauma response, that being dependent on someone is a deficiency. Science and reason remind us that love is nothing more than a chemical reaction. Now a crush on someone is just an attachment issue.
Ultimately I think we are raising a generation full of doubt. The psychologist Erich Fromm talks about “faith” and “doubt” as being character traits, as sort of dispositions of the soul. We are a chronically doubtful generation—of ourselves, of the world, of love, of each other. And we think this feeling of doubt is a reason not to commit to things, whereas really, we are doubtful because we don’t commit.
So, if I’m honest, I’m probably asking you about this because I just like talking about marriage. I love to hear about love, and what it takes—the compromise, the sacrifice, and what comes from that. My generation is starved for love stories. Or commitment stories, you could say. So, what would you say is the value of a committed relationship? Do you also think the Machine has degraded our ability to love? How do we defend marriage and commitment in the age of the Machine, and how important is that?
Paul Kingsnorth:
I think we can’t underestimate the damage that the Machine culture has done to relationships, to love and to sex. You are spot on about this, and you have more experience of it than me. Again, I’m grateful that I was a teenager when we still wrote love letters and made the girls we wanted to impress our own mix tapes on cassette! My first exposure to anything like porn was seeing my friends’ brother’s girlie mags in the shed at the end of his garden when I was about twelve. I didn’t know quite what I was looking at!
We’ve been using words like ‘profane’ and ‘sacrilege’, so let’s dive right into religious vocabulary again and call this what it is: evil. Hardcore pornography, sold to children - or to anyone, actually - is an evil thing. Teaching twelve year old boys to choke women during sex is something my grandparents could not even have conceived of. If the Devil wanted to destroy human love, affection, romance, mystery and family life, he could not have come up with anything better than dating apps, online porn and Instagram feeds. And this is exactly what is happening. Divorce has skyrocketed, the birth rate is plummeting (along with sperm counts), casual sex is valorised - and as a result so many young people long for true love, solid families and just a simple, traditional real human experience of love and longing that has never seemed further away.
Like I say, I see this as an evil thing. I worry for my children, both my son and daughter, because the pressures will come from different angles on both of them, and both will be the subject of dehumanising forces. What can be done? I see the best answer as a determined, voluntary rejection of all of this. Again, I think we can see the seeds of it happening in some people choosing dumbphones over smartphones, and in the kind of critique that you and others are offering. Now I think it needs to go further. There needs to be a movement to reclaim humanity from the Machine, and that includes - maybe should centre upon - reclaiming love, romance and real, human relationships.
If people were to create groups, communities or personal pacts with friends that saw them shut down social media, throw away smartphones, swear off porn and instead begin to meet up - phoneless - to write letters, learn again how to flirt, learn again how to say no, go out without being hampered by tech, experience the world without recording and rating it … it would be quietly revolutionary. It would be a radical rejection of the Machine’s attempts to turn us into objects. But the key would be choosing limits, and cleaving to them. We would need to go back to the understanding that, in fact, our ancestors were not wrong to reject total liberation, were not wrong to have sexual standards, were not wrong to shame those who broke them. Those limits, and that shame, could certainly at their worst be repressive and unjust. But at their best they gave us all a chance to experience real human relationships. Breaking all of the limits has led us into this pornified, commercialised desert of the soul.
We have to get out of the desert. And I think that, despite all this despairing language and the horrors we see around us, there is an opportunity to do it which is genuinely exciting. We are in a pit, and we need to start climbing out. Young people have to take the lead. They need to rise up and reject this culture, and begin creating a new one at the very local level, without waiting for anyones’ permission. If enough people begin trying to create communities with a different kind of life, rejecting the Machine and its tech and its attitudes, things will happen. I don’t mean that you all have to move to rural Ireland. Friends can get together and set new rules any time, starting now. That’s how all change starts. The rejection of the Machine begins in our hearts and then we have to take it into our communities. We need to start telling love stories again. Reclaiming love, and humanity, from the forces which are arraigned against it. That’s the battleground of the age.
Freya India:
I think you may be too humble to recognise this and too British to take it, but there is something unique about your writing. I’m 25 years old, I’m from Essex, I wasn’t raised religious, and I’m not from an academic family. And yet, here I am, reading about Holy Wells every Sunday. What is going on?
Maybe this reflects a wider shift among Gen Z, a search for “re-enchantment”. Something is happening—we are reacting against rationalism and materialism. We are sick of being sold to and selling ourselves. We are grieving a time we never knew.
Even if young people don’t put it into these exact words, something about modern life is clearly making us miserable. The story of progress isn’t panning out. We are reminded how “empowered” we are while many of us feel too anxious to function. We are told we are lucky to be so “connected” while we feel constantly alone and abandoned. We are searching for something more, for stability, for security, to feel we belong to something bigger.
One of my favourite pieces of yours, published in UnHerd, includes a line that always stuck with me: “The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.” This is exactly what I feel closed in by but couldn’t put into words—a progressive movement burning down everything that once bound us together, while companies commodify all that makes us human. “Capitalism” doesn’t cut it. Neither does progressivism. The Machine does.
Have you noticed this disillusionment among Gen Z, and desire for re-enchantment? What would you say to young people who feel this way? When you feel closed in by both relentless market forces and rapid cultural changes, where do you go? I guess what I’m asking is…do I need to move to rural Ireland?
Paul Kingsnorth:
‘What’s going on?’ might be a good subtitle for my collected life’s work. I have been exploring this sense of dis-enchantment in all my writing for over thirty years, because I think it is absolutely at the heart of the problem of our age. To me, the problems of social media and the like are symptoms of something deeper, and so is the culture war and all the political divisions that are everywhere now. The heart of the matter is that our culture has no meaning to it. It tells us nothing about who we are, what our values should be, what life is for. There is no spiritual heart to it. All our ‘leaders’ can talk about is ‘growth’, and as you note we have a politics which, on both supposed ‘sides’, promotes the interests of what I call the Machine - the technological society which is enveloping us. We are surrounded by endless technological gadgets and consumerist crap because they are all we know how to do. And if the endless promotion of growth-n-progress eats away at all of our traditions, our nations, our cultures, our natural world - well, it’s all a price worth paying for whatever we’re supposedly marching towards. Perhaps the colonisation of Mars.
I think the heart of the matter is that every culture in history has had a spiritual claim at its heart: a notion of connection to God, or in some cases the gods. Even vast empires like that of Rome had a religious core that gave meaning to its strivings. But we have nothing. We are an atheist culture - a Void, as I’ve taken to calling it. We have nothing to say to our young people about what their lives mean. And without that, no amount of information or money or status is going to mean much at all.
So yes, that search for ‘re-enchantment’ is growing fast now. I think it’s going to be the story of the near future in the West. I would not be surprised to see a serious religious revival around the corner. You’re surprised to be reading about holy wells, but I’ve been almost equally surprised to be writing about them! Four years ago, after a very unexpected conversion experience, I found myself a baptised Orthodox Christian. My daughter followed me into the Church soon after. Since I started writing about this I have heard from many, many people with similar stories. Plenty of them are of your generation. If I wanted to look at it positively, I would say that the depths of technological meaninglessness that are now being plumbed, and the misery they are causing, is leading to a kind of spiritual reaction. People think, there must be more to life than this, and then they go looking for it.
Do you need to move to rural Ireland? Well, it would get crowded. I would advise escape in some form, though. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical move, though I personally don’t think I could ever cope with living in a city again. But even writing about these issues, as you do, can be a way of escaping being trapped by them. As I said above, getting together with others who think the same, getting rid of technologies that entrap you (start with the smartphone - buy a hammer!), making yourself as economically self-sufficient as you can, swearing off social media and destructive online trends, coming together with others to reject the Machine and its values, reclaiming romance and limits and all the messy beauties of human nature: all of these can be ways of reclaiming your humanity. You never know where this will lead until you set out on the adventure.”
17.4 *
The Achilles Heel of Antibiotics - Heather Heying
“Cipro, the common name for an antibiotic once commonly prescribed, is not a safe drug. Cipro is short for Ciprofloxacin, and it is the most familiar antibiotic in a class called Fluoroquinolones.
Cipro is one of very few drugs that I always had with me when traveling and doing research in Latin America and in Madagascar in the 1990’s, when I was in my 20s. I took it more often than I like to remember. Cipro acts fast on many problems, including intestinal bugs. If you find yourself needing to board a bus for an uncertain duration while suffering GI distress, Cipro can solve the immediate problem. It seems to be your friend and ally.
I have no doubt that Cipro has saved some lives. I also have no doubt that Cipro has damaged many people beyond what should be considered acceptable, and that many of those damaged had insufficient information with which to make choices about their own health.
We deserve to have informed consent.
We do not have informed consent.
…
It turns out—I learned while unable to walk and before I had been surgically repaired and was beginning the arduous return to mobility—that Cipro had already long since been recognized as putting tendons at risk. The most recognized risk was acute and short term: people who are actually on Cipro should avoid stressing their tendons. But it also turns out that exposure accumulates, and that taking a lot of Cipro even decades earlier could have bad effects on tendons later on. Especially that most famous tendon of all, the Achilles tendon.
Fluoroquinolones, including Cipro, have been widely prescribed in part because they are broad spectrum antibiotics. Being “broad spectrum” means that the drug kills off a wide swath of bacteria. This is useful if it’s not clear what pathogen is making you sick: a broad spectrum antibiotic is more likely to help you in such a situation than is a narrow spectrum antibiotic, one that is targeted to particular bacteria. The flip side of being a broad spectrum antibiotic, however, is that it kills off your “good” bacteria as well. We all have a lot of “good” bacteria, and we depend on them for our health. We do, it turns out, contain multitudes.
The toxicity of Fluoroquinolones is not inherently related to their being broad spectrum, however, as other broad spectrum antibiotics2 are not (yet?) understood to produce such a wide range of medical problems as do the Fluoroquinolones.
From the abstract of a 2003 paper3 that I cannot access the full text of, we find the following list of “long-term toxicities” that Fluoroquinolones were already understood to cause:
cardiotoxicity, aortic aneurysm, tendon rupture, nephrotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, peripheral neuropathy, vagus nervous dysfunction, reactive oxygen species (ROS), phototoxicity, glucose hemostasis, and central nervous system (CNS) toxicity.
So, in addition to being associated with tendon rupture, Fluoroquinolones are implicated in heart, kidney, liver, nervous system, and eye damage. And that’s not all.
In 2008, the FDA announced “black box” warnings on Fluoroquinolones, with concerns about tendon ruptures. In 2013, the FDA would add its third warning in 5 years to the packaging, this one advising of the “potential for irreversible peripheral neuropathy”—serious, permanent nerve damage. Meanwhile, there was growing evidence that many broad-spectrum antibiotics damage mitochondria—and that Fluoroquinolones do so most of all4.
Fluoroquinolones have also been known to cause such severe locomotory problems that people have lost the ability to walk. Thousands of people have died. This may be a considerable underestimate.
…
By 2016, the FDA had seen enough evidence of the risks of these drugs that it was advising that they should be reserved for use only in patients who had “no alternative treatment options.” Two years later the FDA put out yet another update, warning of risks to mental health and “blood sugar disturbances.”
By 2018, the scientific journal Nature was finally reporting on the disabling side-effects of Fluoroquinolones. Therein, Nature acknowledges that one of the reasons that the toxicity of these drugs has taken so long to be made public is that drug companies are known to take “adverse action against people who expose drug and chemical harms.” Thus, the research has mostly not been done. From a career vantage point, scientists can’t afford the exposure.
17.5
The Power of Being Disliked - Mark Groves
“ My wife recently said to me, “One of the most potent vehicles for transformation, is the willingness to be the villain in someone else’s story.”
Damn. She hit me with the realness.
If you want to live a fulfilling life and have incredible relationships, you have to be willing to live with the tension that comes with being all of you. You have to be willing to be different, have different interests, different opinions, different ideas, and of course, different feelings about all the different things. You have to be willing to be YOU.
Great leaders know this… they’re willing to lead and speak in the direction they know is necessary, even if it’s unpopular. They know that the pushback they receive doesn’t mean it’s the wrong path, it’s just a natural response that humans have to change, moving towards the unknown, and beliefs and ideas being challenged.
…
To have a brilliant life and brilliant love, you have to be willing to put it all on the line, and if that upsets people, it upsets people.
Maybe this is why we have so much admiration for those who seemingly give zero-fucks… I certainly don’t aspire to zerrrooooooo fucks, but to give the right fucks about the right things feels like a good thing to aspire to.
…
When authenticity threatens belonging, belonging usually wins… (until it doesn’t)
Which essentially means that if you being you makes you the villain in someone else’s eyes, you’ll likely silence yourself to maintain the perception of goodness.
The other reason we do this can be from our childhood — if we spend our time as a kid being hypervigilant, managing the emotions of those around us, walking on eggshells, not wanting to be “too much” or “too emotional” or take up too much space… then we learned to operate from the lens of “If you’ve okay then I’m okay. If you’re not upset, I’m safe. If you’re emotionally regulated, then I am.”
As adults this has us constantly scanning for safety in our relationships… but not just interpersonal, also in the comments section of social media. Our need to be liked is unconsciously conflated with a need to feel safe…
But do you see the conundrum? Sometimes what will make you the villain in someone else’s story is what actually creates safety…
And I wouldn’t even say just sometimes…
When we are being called to take a stand and/or say a thing, we are invited to create internal safety. We’re telling ourselves, “I got this. I come first. My safety is priority #1. My self-expression is necessary.”
Remember, this doesn’t mean being selfish or ideological or relational inflexibility.
Because truly healthy relationships need both individuals to be willing to take a stand and point to the uncomfortable truths. Relationships that are liberating honour your willingness to be crucified for what’s real for you. They see that when you stand for truth, you stand for love.
What I’ve learned over the course of my life, but especially in the last twenty-four years that I’ve been deeply studying and teaching relationships, is that relationships only thrive when there is a shared value of confronting the truth over keeping the peace. Couples and people who prioritize honouring what’s real, first, have the best relationships…
That’s right… for a relationship and the people in it to thrive, there has to be a shared space where we feel safe to be alllllllll of ourselves.
We have to also expect that when we start to stand in our power, if our relationships and the human systems we’re a part of only know us a certain way, this new version of us is going to shake the system. It is normal when you change, that some of the people around you are not gonna like it…but it’s not their job to like the changes you’ve made — you’re the one who needs to like your changes.
Bottom line: It’s your job to like you, not anyone else’s. And if you need other people to like you in order to feel good about yourself, then any version of you that risks that admiration will be silenced in service of the way you prostitute your worth. (Bit of a donkey punch to the soul that one is, isn’t it?)
I, too, have had to heal my fear of being disliked. And I know it may sound weird, but I’m actually grateful for the current ideological fragility that exists in the world…It’s a potent healing space for codependent people — because no matter what position you take on any subject, you will certainly be the villain in someone’s story. You cannot win… and that’s actually good for healing… because you being you isn’t about winning, it’s about being you regardless of the outcome.
When you’re willing to be the villain, you’re willing to be yourself.
17.6 *
Why We Sabotage Good Relationships - Mark Groves
“You meet someone amazing.
You’re starting to get some twinkles in your heart and your loins.
Things feel good. Maybe too good…
And then, like clockwork, you start shit up.
Creating problems out of nothing. Testing them. Pushing their buttons to see if they'll stick around.
What the hellllllllllll is that about?
…
Your Survival Strategy is Showing
Let's talk about why this happens:
If your parents connected with you through criticism — if the way they showed "love" was by stirring shit up — then of course you learned that connection happens through conflict.
It's familiar. It's home.
But here's the more painful truth: there's an unconscious belief living inside you that says you're not worthy of a good person.
This belief causes you to push good people away because, deep down, you're afraid they'll discover that you're messed up and flawed... That something's wrong with you. And if someone really good does like you and choose you, you might wonder, “What’s wrong with them that they like you?!”
What's your unconscious response to this fear?
"We might as well just destroy it now before it destroys us."
It's twisted, but it makes perfect sense. Your unconscious mind is trying to protect you from getting hurt by recreating hurt you can handle.
Let that sink in.
Your mind would rather create a familiar painful situation that you know how to navigate than risk the unknown territory of deeper connection.
Because to the nervous system:
Different = dangerous.
"Okayyyyyyy, I have good people in my life. OH SHIT! WAIT! I'm not used to having good people in my life. What do I do?!"
It's disorienting when good things start happening. When people treat you well. When a relationship actually feels secure.
But what happens in that disorientation is that your old belief begins to die… and the sabotage is that belief, and what you know as familiar, trying to hold on.
If you can hold on jussssssssst long enough, the belief begins to change. And once you get there, to the place where you allow healthy and reciprocal love, you’ll never be able to go back to what you knew.
The type of relationship you only dreamt of now becomes your baseline.
Sound great? Well, hold your horses; there’s more to unpack.
The Fear That Drives Sabotage
We sabotage things when we don’t trust ourselves to hold something valuable.
Think about it.
You might blow up a work opportunity because you're afraid of what you'd have to become to meet it.
You might blow up a relationship because a part of you thinks:
"Oh my God, they're going to tell me they love me. And I don't even believe I'm lovable. If I hear that, it’ll freak me out! And the part of me that identifies as unworthy will have to begin to heal…”
But that part of you, the part that is scared of truly being loved, is really scared of being hurt. So there’s great value in honouring this pattern because then you can have compassion for it. And once you have compassion for the part that runs from love, you can heal it.
Your patterns in relationship reveal your wounds. The circumstances in which you sabotage show exactly what you're afraid to heal and confront.
…
The Truth About Change
Here's what I know for sure:
When you cannot trust yourself to hold something good, you will destroy it before someone else can.
But your survival strategy — as fucked up as it might be — got you this far. It protected you. It deserves your compassion.
Your survival strategy also deserves to rest and be healed… in order to honour where we’ve come from and what we’ve been through, we have to use the wisdom from our wounds to choose differently.
Do not sit on unintegrated knowledge. Do not let an awareness die without being realized.
It's time to allow yourself to have better experiences in your life.
It's time to build your capacity to hold more joy.
You know what's really beautiful? When you start to trust yourself enough to hold the good stuff without breaking it. When you can receive love without needing to test it.
When you can stop at that moment of wanting to sabotage and ask: "What if I just... didn't?"
What if you just allowed things to be good?
What if you allowed yourself to be worthy?
What if….”