7 ms·

As someone who didn't have many healthy attachments growing up and has spent a lot of time with a wide variation of therapies. I agree with the article, many di

As someone who didn't have many healthy attachments growing up and has spent a lot of time with a wide variation of therapies. I agree with the article, many different therapies can fix people and I’ve found it better to have more than one type of therapy. I believe at the root of it is a mindset which centres around the cultivation of self-leadership. My multi-year long journey of what I learned and getting back to health - which most visibly manifested itself as CFS symptoms (Post exertional malaise) - can be summed up as: Trusting the therapist and understanding they are not perfect humans themselves. Accepting they are not going to fix me, they are a companion on the journey, I must fix myself with their help. Going on a journey through all major points in my past and re-experiencing what I'd been through. Whilst having the therapist with me to slowly help unfold the emotions and understand it from a different perspective (i.e. I did not cause the bad things that happened to me, it was not my fault). This helped me build a foundation, a place of support that didn't rely on other people, which gave me self-confidence to listen to the negative self-talk that I had blocked off for years, because it was too overwhelming to hear. When I started listening to this self-talk, I could then start to converse with it. e.g. "You aren't good enough", "Perhaps I'm not, but let's see what happens when I apply my focus to it", which started taking away its power and effect over me. Which led me to realising that my intellect and conscious part of my mind is probably only in control of 20%-30% of me. That I'm not a fully logically creature and that I needed to come to peace with my body's needs and messages from my less conscious mind and work together as an integrated whole, rather than trying to force my will based on pure 'rational' thought. Life has been considerably better since and my decades of depression and low energy have begun to abate. Whilst the points may seem simple, understanding like this rarely comes from knowing in the conscious mind. It is understanding that has to be understood at a deep level, which is why therapy can take a long time. My favourite way of describing this conscious acceptance but lack of sub-conscious understanding can be summed up as: “I know that, but try telling me that”.

chadwittman 6y ago
Your comment regarding your intellect and the conscious part of your mind only controlling about 20% - 30% of you is super interesting. I'd love to hear more specifically what made you come to that conclusion, as I've experienced a similar insight. Mine came from an overdose of marijuana ironically enough, but it gave me just enough perception of the feeling of two minds. I don't think I'll ever forget that experience.
- majewsky 6y ago
  You don't need drugs for that. Set a reminder for tomorrow, two hours after waking up. When the reminder comes up, list all the actions you took, and mark those where you made a conscious choice. Most actions will not have been the consequence of a conscious deliberation: - waking up when the alarm goes - hitting snooze a few times - getting out of bed with the right leg first - wearing the blue shirt instead of the black one - lifting your foot to avoid the doorstep when stepping out of the front door - breathing, for that matter, or your heartbeat, your digestive processes, etc. Honestly the 20%-30% number is way off. I would guesstimate something like 1-2% conscious decisions max.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Even when we believe we made a conscious decision we are often just rationalizing after the fact. Most people lack the necessary level of metacognition to distinguish the difference.
- AdamCraven 6y ago
  The concious mind controlling 20-30%, in itself was not that much of a realisation, I would suspect a lot of people could agree they are not fully in control of themselves. So the understanding of that I'd known for a long time came from many sources. But the difference in understanding that at superficial level vs being able to experience that at a deeper level, is what caused changes to my behaviour at a deeper level and is the real revelation. As to how I experienced that, I would preface this by saying that this is going to be very unique for everyone depending on how your mind communicates with itself so I won't go into the exact process for fear of someone trying to emulate my path exactly (self-leadership is more important than being led). It is something I came up with myself rather than a specific therapy (again, self-leadership) After many many sessions of eventually being able to see and feel the parts of myself pushing against each other. I began to see the person that I thought was me, which was the 'cleverest part', that was centered in the front part of my brain and that denied listening to the rest of my body. Was really a small piece of a whole. When I realised I could move my observation and inhabit different parts of my mind and body that is when I knew I wasn't leading the show in the way I believed I was. I could see I didn't have control of the other voices or feelings that were inside of me. They would express what they wanted. I could either deny, accept them or attempt to change it if I thought that part was maladjusted and needed help. An example of a maladjusted response might be wanting to apologise for being abused or feeling shame for things that I had no control over.
athenot 6y ago
> Which led me to realising that my intellect and conscious part of my mind is probably only in control of 20%-30% of me. That I'm not a fully logically creature and that I needed to come to peace with my body's needs and messages from my less conscious mind and work together as an integrated whole, rather than trying to force my will based on pure 'rational' thought. I've had a similar realization. I think we vastly underestimate how good our subconscious/automatic parts of our brain are. Every healthy person can run up a flight of stairs without looking where the steps are and analyzing the position of each step. Many sports involve the forming of reflexes that let your brain analyze where an object is and respond to it without even thinking about it. There's A LOT going on in terms of calculation and response. We call that a skill and once mastered, it seems effortless. So now, as a rational person, I value the conscious part of the brain not as much for its ability to be logical (though I still cherish that as a developer) but as a an agent of improvement, a programmer for the subconscious part of the brain. And the more I can offload and delegate to the subconscious, the more new and fun things I can take on with my slow but rational consciousness. Of course, there needs to be a feedback loop, to prevent the subconscious from drifting into self-delusion or a general asshole but for that, empathy and the Golden Rule have served me quite well. This is all very new to me and I'm probably not explaining things very well. But I had the epiphany on this watching squirrels in slow motion do insane calculations when tossed into the air, locking their heads on a target and twisting their bodies to land precisely on their target.
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  It’s a good epiphany to have - you can offload pretty much anything to your subconscious mind, and call it intuition. Everything can be like playing the piano or riding a bicycle, and utterly automatic. It saves a vast amount of conscious cognitive effort, which can be spent on novelty instead, feeding the underlying machine new patterns, new quanta of information. It’s like diagnosing sick systems - I don’t think about it, at all - I just look, listen, observe, take in the landscape and the music of the machine, and then point at the problem. Software, mechanical systems, networks, any domain where I have enough knowledge to know what I’m looking at, the pattern recognition system can handle the rest. It makes people think that I have expertise in many domains, but really, I’m just a one-trick system-grokking pony. The structure and function of the animal brain is remarkable. Only a few weeks ago, I was noting the habits of a hornet, which tended to pass by the same point at the same time each day, and marvelled that such a tiny handful of neurons could manage not only flight and navigation of 3d space, but a routine, habits, behaviour. What the many orders of magnitude more grey matter we have might be capable of beggars belief. There’s the old bullshit adage that you only use 1% of your brain, but there’s perhaps truth to the idea that most people horribly underutilise the power of their minds, because they have been trained to think, not to intuit.
Shoreleave 6y ago
This is a great summary and the first part nicely describes what is, somewhat jokingly, referred to as the Dodo Bird Verdict: All therapies are equally effective and it is instead the relationship with a trusted therapist that is important. I guess it depends on your definitions, but I think your 20-30% numbers are still way to high.
- AdamCraven 6y ago
  20-30% numbers, could be too high. It is hard to know. In the way that I would define it, it would be this: The part of you that is in control and makes the decisions that give you agency over yourself. I used to believe I was directing myself day to day, but I'd guess that the concious only has a 20-30% say in the matter. This opposed to who is performing the actions in which the subconcious mind is involved in 99% of the work. e.g. walking is almost entirely a subconcious activity.
- serpix 6y ago
  Eastern philosophy puts it at 1% at best, rest is pure autopilot mode.
newsetmset 6y ago
Hi Adam. I just created this account because your experience mirrors mine - in that i too have been dealing with Post Exertional Malaise for years - and the connection you just made to "negative self talk and ignorance" is extremely interesting to me. PEM is a rather obscure syndrome which no doctor i have met really understands, also i like you don't really have most of the "other CFS symptoms". Basically it's an incredibly debilitating post "exertion effect" that means that every time you try to "better yourself", workout, get work done, etc. you end up crashing hard instead of feeling like "yeah i made it, now i can relax!" - you instead feel both mentally and physically like you are on the brink of death, often for days for no reason - it feels so incredibly "unfair". You could have just been promoted, got a raise, finished a marathon, doesn't matter, you feel like you are crashing from a drug bender. Until now i have been thinking that it's either some cell level or genetic deficiency, OR that it's actually a form of burnout, ie. the way "out of the PEM prison" is through total relaxation, weaning of coffee, stopping hard workouts etc - but i have "often" tried this to little effect - what i haven't tried though is going to therapy for a "longer stretch" and your post just made me realise something: "Maybe i too am too hard on myself" - why this form of neurosis would lead to Post Exertional Mailaise i don't really know, but damn i am so happy to have found someone who's had experienced the same thing. Anyways - i just wan't to say thank you so much for writing this, and if you or anyone else have any leads to books, forums or podcasts about this issue, i would be so happy.
- AdamCraven 6y ago
  People like you are the reason I posted my story. If I can even help a small number of people to not endure the same pains, that would make me incredibly happy. The therapy is the last item in a very very long list of desperate things I've tried to cure PEM (metabolic typing, accupuncture, genetic testing, methylation, nutrition, crazy diets, and so much more). What was the cause cause of my PEM? Negative emotions alone, wasn't the direct cause. But the supression of those negative emotions. In general terms: supressed, charged emotions directed at myself caused my PEM. Or in HN terms: constant low-level burnout. Because it takes a lot of energy to hide those feelings from myself. A constant battle that I was generally unaware of that was happening at a deep level. I would deny the feelings of my body. I first had to build the support inside myself, with help of a therapist, before I could truly start to listen to the supressed emotions without being overwhelmed. This was the beginning of the end for my PEM. The book I would recommend would be: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D, which helped me a lot on the journey to recovery. I've found forums to be generally very unhelpful. Something I wrote down a while back which I hope explains why I don't think they are a good place to resolve problems: --- The unreasonable ineffectiveness of communities in solving a single problem. One person has a problem, if problem persists for any length of time, the more likely others will be experiencing that problem at the same time. If there are enough people with that problem, a community will form around solving it. If the community is ineffective in solving that problem, then the community will grow and begin to sustain itself as new members join with that problem and the existing members continue to work on solving that problem. For the community to survive, the problem must not be solved or the solution has to be close to unobtainable. Ineffective solutions will be devised to solve the problem. The complexity or discipline involved in solving the problem will exceed the ability of the individuals to implement it. The blame of solving the problem will lay in not in the community itself, but the individual not being able to implement the solution. An example of this may be a nearly impossible diet, regime or routine. If an effective solution is found to the problem. There are two possible outcomes: either the community will dissipate and active membership dwindles or it will protect itself from the existential threat and block the ideas. This is especially true if the identities or financials of individuals in the community rely upon the problem existing. Therefore, no community that sustains itself will form around the right solution. It is unsustainable. The communities with the most active members are also the most popular, propogating the problem. --- Please do let me know how you get on, I wish you the best.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
This mirrors my experience. Even down to the book recommendation in sub comments (the body keeps score). Learning to incorporate all of me, my physical and emotional needs, had drastically helped me improve from being burnt out and depressed. For so long I focussed on my rationality without any regard for my emotions. It’s like droving a car without being able to see out of the windows. I needed to listen to me, my body, learn to interpret it (still learning), learn what it needs, what I need.
op00to 6y ago
Maybe I’ve had a string of shitty therapists, because I desperately want to improve my mental health but no one has been able to help me. Even with drugs.
- AdamCraven 6y ago
  No one can fix you, it won't work. But you can fix yourself with their help. This is the most useful mindset I've found with progressing through therapy, because it is about self-leadership. "The body keeps score" is a book that may help you.

chadwittman 6y ago

Your comment regarding your intellect and the conscious part of your mind only controlling about 20% - 30% of you is super interesting. I'd love to hear more specifically what made you come to that conclusion, as I've experienced a similar insight. Mine came from an overdose of marijuana ironically enough, but it gave me just enough perception of the feeling of two minds. I don't think I'll ever forget that experience.

majewsky 6y ago
You don't need drugs for that. Set a reminder for tomorrow, two hours after waking up. When the reminder comes up, list all the actions you took, and mark those where you made a conscious choice. Most actions will not have been the consequence of a conscious deliberation: - waking up when the alarm goes - hitting snooze a few times - getting out of bed with the right leg first - wearing the blue shirt instead of the black one - lifting your foot to avoid the doorstep when stepping out of the front door - breathing, for that matter, or your heartbeat, your digestive processes, etc. Honestly the 20%-30% number is way off. I would guesstimate something like 1-2% conscious decisions max.
- nradov 6y ago
  Even when we believe we made a conscious decision we are often just rationalizing after the fact. Most people lack the necessary level of metacognition to distinguish the difference.
AdamCraven 6y ago
The concious mind controlling 20-30%, in itself was not that much of a realisation, I would suspect a lot of people could agree they are not fully in control of themselves. So the understanding of that I'd known for a long time came from many sources. But the difference in understanding that at superficial level vs being able to experience that at a deeper level, is what caused changes to my behaviour at a deeper level and is the real revelation. As to how I experienced that, I would preface this by saying that this is going to be very unique for everyone depending on how your mind communicates with itself so I won't go into the exact process for fear of someone trying to emulate my path exactly (self-leadership is more important than being led). It is something I came up with myself rather than a specific therapy (again, self-leadership) After many many sessions of eventually being able to see and feel the parts of myself pushing against each other. I began to see the person that I thought was me, which was the 'cleverest part', that was centered in the front part of my brain and that denied listening to the rest of my body. Was really a small piece of a whole. When I realised I could move my observation and inhabit different parts of my mind and body that is when I knew I wasn't leading the show in the way I believed I was. I could see I didn't have control of the other voices or feelings that were inside of me. They would express what they wanted. I could either deny, accept them or attempt to change it if I thought that part was maladjusted and needed help. An example of a maladjusted response might be wanting to apologise for being abused or feeling shame for things that I had no control over.

athenot 6y ago

> Which led me to realising that my intellect and conscious part of my mind is probably only in control of 20%-30% of me. That I'm not a fully logically creature and that I needed to come to peace with my body's needs and messages from my less conscious mind and work together as an integrated whole, rather than trying to force my will based on pure 'rational' thought. I've had a similar realization. I think we vastly underestimate how good our subconscious/automatic parts of our brain are. Every healthy person can run up a flight of stairs without looking where the steps are and analyzing the position of each step. Many sports involve the forming of reflexes that let your brain analyze where an object is and respond to it without even thinking about it. There's A LOT going on in terms of calculation and response. We call that a skill and once mastered, it seems effortless. So now, as a rational person, I value the conscious part of the brain not as much for its ability to be logical (though I still cherish that as a developer) but as a an agent of improvement, a programmer for the subconscious part of the brain. And the more I can offload and delegate to the subconscious, the more new and fun things I can take on with my slow but rational consciousness. Of course, there needs to be a feedback loop, to prevent the subconscious from drifting into self-delusion or a general asshole but for that, empathy and the Golden Rule have served me quite well. This is all very new to me and I'm probably not explaining things very well. But I had the epiphany on this watching squirrels in slow motion do insane calculations when tossed into the air, locking their heads on a target and twisting their bodies to land precisely on their target.

madaxe_again 6y ago
It’s a good epiphany to have - you can offload pretty much anything to your subconscious mind, and call it intuition. Everything can be like playing the piano or riding a bicycle, and utterly automatic. It saves a vast amount of conscious cognitive effort, which can be spent on novelty instead, feeding the underlying machine new patterns, new quanta of information. It’s like diagnosing sick systems - I don’t think about it, at all - I just look, listen, observe, take in the landscape and the music of the machine, and then point at the problem. Software, mechanical systems, networks, any domain where I have enough knowledge to know what I’m looking at, the pattern recognition system can handle the rest. It makes people think that I have expertise in many domains, but really, I’m just a one-trick system-grokking pony. The structure and function of the animal brain is remarkable. Only a few weeks ago, I was noting the habits of a hornet, which tended to pass by the same point at the same time each day, and marvelled that such a tiny handful of neurons could manage not only flight and navigation of 3d space, but a routine, habits, behaviour. What the many orders of magnitude more grey matter we have might be capable of beggars belief. There’s the old bullshit adage that you only use 1% of your brain, but there’s perhaps truth to the idea that most people horribly underutilise the power of their minds, because they have been trained to think, not to intuit.

Shoreleave 6y ago

This is a great summary and the first part nicely describes what is, somewhat jokingly, referred to as the Dodo Bird Verdict: All therapies are equally effective and it is instead the relationship with a trusted therapist that is important. I guess it depends on your definitions, but I think your 20-30% numbers are still way to high.

AdamCraven 6y ago
20-30% numbers, could be too high. It is hard to know. In the way that I would define it, it would be this: The part of you that is in control and makes the decisions that give you agency over yourself. I used to believe I was directing myself day to day, but I'd guess that the concious only has a 20-30% say in the matter. This opposed to who is performing the actions in which the subconcious mind is involved in 99% of the work. e.g. walking is almost entirely a subconcious activity.
serpix 6y ago
Eastern philosophy puts it at 1% at best, rest is pure autopilot mode.

newsetmset 6y ago

Hi Adam. I just created this account because your experience mirrors mine - in that i too have been dealing with Post Exertional Malaise for years - and the connection you just made to "negative self talk and ignorance" is extremely interesting to me. PEM is a rather obscure syndrome which no doctor i have met really understands, also i like you don't really have most of the "other CFS symptoms". Basically it's an incredibly debilitating post "exertion effect" that means that every time you try to "better yourself", workout, get work done, etc. you end up crashing hard instead of feeling like "yeah i made it, now i can relax!" - you instead feel both mentally and physically like you are on the brink of death, often for days for no reason - it feels so incredibly "unfair". You could have just been promoted, got a raise, finished a marathon, doesn't matter, you feel like you are crashing from a drug bender. Until now i have been thinking that it's either some cell level or genetic deficiency, OR that it's actually a form of burnout, ie. the way "out of the PEM prison" is through total relaxation, weaning of coffee, stopping hard workouts etc - but i have "often" tried this to little effect - what i haven't tried though is going to therapy for a "longer stretch" and your post just made me realise something: "Maybe i too am too hard on myself" - why this form of neurosis would lead to Post Exertional Mailaise i don't really know, but damn i am so happy to have found someone who's had experienced the same thing. Anyways - i just wan't to say thank you so much for writing this, and if you or anyone else have any leads to books, forums or podcasts about this issue, i would be so happy.

AdamCraven 6y ago
People like you are the reason I posted my story. If I can even help a small number of people to not endure the same pains, that would make me incredibly happy. The therapy is the last item in a very very long list of desperate things I've tried to cure PEM (metabolic typing, accupuncture, genetic testing, methylation, nutrition, crazy diets, and so much more). What was the cause cause of my PEM? Negative emotions alone, wasn't the direct cause. But the supression of those negative emotions. In general terms: supressed, charged emotions directed at myself caused my PEM. Or in HN terms: constant low-level burnout. Because it takes a lot of energy to hide those feelings from myself. A constant battle that I was generally unaware of that was happening at a deep level. I would deny the feelings of my body. I first had to build the support inside myself, with help of a therapist, before I could truly start to listen to the supressed emotions without being overwhelmed. This was the beginning of the end for my PEM. The book I would recommend would be: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D, which helped me a lot on the journey to recovery. I've found forums to be generally very unhelpful. Something I wrote down a while back which I hope explains why I don't think they are a good place to resolve problems: --- The unreasonable ineffectiveness of communities in solving a single problem. One person has a problem, if problem persists for any length of time, the more likely others will be experiencing that problem at the same time. If there are enough people with that problem, a community will form around solving it. If the community is ineffective in solving that problem, then the community will grow and begin to sustain itself as new members join with that problem and the existing members continue to work on solving that problem. For the community to survive, the problem must not be solved or the solution has to be close to unobtainable. Ineffective solutions will be devised to solve the problem. The complexity or discipline involved in solving the problem will exceed the ability of the individuals to implement it. The blame of solving the problem will lay in not in the community itself, but the individual not being able to implement the solution. An example of this may be a nearly impossible diet, regime or routine. If an effective solution is found to the problem. There are two possible outcomes: either the community will dissipate and active membership dwindles or it will protect itself from the existential threat and block the ideas. This is especially true if the identities or financials of individuals in the community rely upon the problem existing. Therefore, no community that sustains itself will form around the right solution. It is unsustainable. The communities with the most active members are also the most popular, propogating the problem. --- Please do let me know how you get on, I wish you the best.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

iovrthoughtthis 6y ago

This mirrors my experience. Even down to the book recommendation in sub comments (the body keeps score). Learning to incorporate all of me, my physical and emotional needs, had drastically helped me improve from being burnt out and depressed. For so long I focussed on my rationality without any regard for my emotions. It’s like droving a car without being able to see out of the windows. I needed to listen to me, my body, learn to interpret it (still learning), learn what it needs, what I need.

op00to 6y ago

Maybe I’ve had a string of shitty therapists, because I desperately want to improve my mental health but no one has been able to help me. Even with drugs.

AdamCraven 6y ago
No one can fix you, it won't work. But you can fix yourself with their help. This is the most useful mindset I've found with progressing through therapy, because it is about self-leadership. "The body keeps score" is a book that may help you.