An Eternal Golden Braid

Consciousness In The Cosmos and threads involving the edges of our understanding have continued to play a role in my life. Thank heavens for that. I was out last night with some university students and the arrogance of youth was stunning. Stunning and as thin in substance as cling wrap and about as transparent. I have to find a better crew.

Thank the gods for aging. I never ever have that feeling I hear from others about wanting to turn back the clock. Don't get me wrong, I like this ride and want it to last forever, but go back? No thank-you!

Much of today I luxuriated in easing the blow of last nights horrors of social limitations by reading and pondering this entire thread. I'm always flattered when SB drops me a private message trying to tease me into the conversation. I'm flattered, because when I was growing up, I found very few people who could enter into such rational enquiry. So in my earnest ways I'd just spill it as best I could, often ending in a lot of glazed looks. Issues of the mind are still taboo. It's like it's defining the difference between the literal and the metaphorical for me. I'm thinking through Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB)





Dances with Kipling's "Just So" stories are rampant in my imagination.


Try and remember that if we didn't have a role to play we'd have been bred out by now. < g >



Mum, you are so good for me. I hope you are spending some of your days writing.
Cheers!

The hard line isn't cheap!

The Hard Line to Save Son - by TOM BRODBECK


This was in the Winnipeg Sun this morning:


Caroline, a single mother of two teens, said she was running out of options when she sent her troubled, quarrelsome 14-year-old son to a military-style, private boarding school in Ontario last year.

Technically, it's not a boot camp. But as a rigorous, highly disciplined academy that teaches respect, loyalty and responsibility, it may as well be." Read more...



I can't believe that a harder line would have done me any good. God knows, they tried. Spanking and whatever negative input only served to hack away my self esteem and destroy any hope of a positive self image.


My parents are wholly off the hook on this. What chance did they have to do anything differently than they did? I'd guess next to none, given the models they came to parenting with. What was standard wisdom then was much different than now.


With our youngest (12), it seems I've had some success softening the hard line, PU (whif) finds it second nature. We absolutely pounded the school on these issues this year. Not a ball was dropped on my part and I hounded every move to make it as accountable a process as I could. The pattern for years has been that by Christmas break things are beginning to fall apart and by spring break it's chaos.


Yesterday Manon brought home a glowing report card with unprecedented levels of performance. Even with the thickest teacher she managed a 75%.

Fight!
Ian

detaching with love does not mean disengaging

These are the tools to move toward emotional health.

I posted what's listed below tonight to an ongoing thread on the addforums.com site.  I thought it might be of interest to some others.  

This started for me in earnest last year at this time with another post to addforms.com.

=================

None of my hyperlinks followed to the cut here.  If you want better formatting for the intended embedded links you are best to go to the first link above if this is of interest.
Ian

Wikipedia is taking over my life. :D I am so grateful for the resources of the Internet.

I'm having a discussion elsewhere about detachment and ended up finding some more solid information. I was surprised that the term was misleading to some. It's been mistaken for something more closely related to disengaging, which is not the same thing at all.

The link to emotional detaching at Wikipedia was very clear about the terms. I use it almost exclusively in relation to the second sense.

In the second sense, it is a type of mental assertiveness that allows people to maintain their boundaries and psychic integrity when faced with the emotional demands of another person or group of persons.

Second sense: mental assertiveness

Emotional detachment in the second sense above is a positive and deliberate mental attitude which avoids engaging the emotions of others. It is often applied to relatives and associates of people who are in some way emotionally overly demanding. A simple example might be a person who trains themselves to ignore the "pleading" food requests of a dieting spouse. A more widespread example could be the indifference parents develop towards their children's begging.

A more extreme form of this has been called "tough love," meaning letting someone go through a painful life experience without interference for the sake of its greater educational value. This can be an excruciating experience for loved ones, who must avoid the urge to step in and rescue the person from that pain (but thereby interfere with the loved one having a much-needed growing experience).

This detachment does not mean avoiding the feeling of empathy; it is actually more of an awareness of empathetic feelings that allows the person space needed to rationally choose whether or not to engage or be overwhelmed by such feelings.

Referred at this Wikipedia entry is a link for developing detachment that I found really solid too. It's titled Tools for handling control issues.

Content:

* What is detachment?
* What are the negative effects not detaching?
* How is detachment a control issue?
* What irrational thinking leads to an inability to detach?
* How to develop detachment
* Steps in developing detachment



Emotional contagion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Emotional contagion is the tendency to express and feel emotions that are similar to and influenced by those of others. Emotional contagion may be involved in crowd behaviors, like collective fear, rage, or moral panic, but also emotional interactions in smaller groups such as negotiation, teaching and persuasion contexts. It is also the phenomenon when a person (especially a child) appears distressed because another person is distressed, or happy because they are happy.

To date, most clinical research has focused on the effects on non-verbal (and often non-emotional) displays, and relatively less has been studied about the impact of contagion effects on emotional feelings. Emotional contagion and empathy may be related, but the nature of such a connection has not to date been explored either.

The concept of insulating oneself from emotional contagion is called emotional detachment.
I still feel very strongly that this is an important element in my personal development. It spans the universe in it's impact on how I relate to every important element in my life. I could never have too much from this skill set.

So much of this gets to the heart of how we might be manipulated or how we may do the manipulation consciously or not. If I could stand to enquire more deeply, this would feed many avenues of interest for me.

happy kids are what I'm after... me=kid!

ADDvantages

Thanks to eschatology@ljin adults_add@lj for The Top 10 ADDvantages of Having ADD

The Top 10 ADDvantages of Having ADD


By ADD Coach Jennifer Koretsky Copyright 2005

1. Compassion
People with ADD have a tremendous power to connect with other people. But it goes a step further than that. We also have an advanced ability to empathize with others, and to see many different perspectives.

2. Creativity
I've never met an ADDer who wasn't creative! Writers, painters, musicians, film makers, designers, sculptors, comedians - the list goes on! Artistic talents are abundant. Composers Mozart and Beethoven are believed to have had ADD.

3. Drive
When an ADDer is bored with a task, completing it can seem like torture. But give an ADDer an interesting project to work on and watch out! When we want to succeed, and we have the necessary tools to do so, there is no stopping us!

4. Problem Solving Ability
ADDers thrive on solving problems and puzzles. Give us an interesting problem to solve and we won't be able to drop it until we've found the solution! Important historical inventors such as Thomas Edison and Thomas Jefferson are believed to have had ADD.

5. Hyper-Focus
The ability to hyper-focus is something that ADDers can use to our advantage. When kept under control and directed towards productive tasks, like accomplishing goals and living dreams, it can be an incredible asset that allows us to get the job done, and done well!

6. Sense of Humor/Comedic Flair
Most ADDers love to laugh, and many also have a knack for making others laugh! Famous comedians such as Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams are rumored to have ADD.

7. Resiliency
There's no denying that even though there are many great qualities that come along with ADD, there are also challenges. But ADDers have an incredible ability to bounce back from those challenges, and others' criticism of those challenges that we've endured.

8. Intuition
ADDers have a sharp sense of intuition. This may be due to highly tuned levels of perception, or great insight into the human mind, or something else that we have yet to understand. Whatever the reason, it's a very useful gift!

9. Idea Generating
ADDers are wonderful idea generators. We don't usually like to be bothered with details, but we can come up with ideas at lightning speed! We're a true asset in brainstorming meetings! 10. That "Special Something"
Many ADDers feel that they have a unique way of looking at the world, a perspective that others just don't understand. That is, until the ADDer meets other people with ADD! You might say that we're on our own wavelength!



From enoneoftheabove@lj This treat posted to adults_add@lj



Misconceptions about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)