Meltdown

Yikes. The last few days have been a bit strange. I've been hypersensitive and reacting to everything with rage or tears - everything is a threat to my well-being! I get this occasionally when I'm overloaded. I've been getting a bit dissociative - just blanking out and feeling like I'm floating just slightly out of my body, observing but not participating in my experience. It's a bit mental, but it can make life bearable at times. I think having taken on the Amygdala Retraining Technique I have loaded myself up with expectations. I'd given up before. Now there's this. But it's quite demanding - lots of things to do, and especially one thing to do up to hundreds of times a day -100, 200 or 300 Ashok says. FUCKING HELL!

I've been on board because it all makes sense to my scientist brain. There is a rational basis for the explanation of fibromyalgia and a rational basis for the ART. But then he introduces stuff like "alternate nostril breathing" - deep breathing but alternately closing of the nostrils. And I'm sorry but this just seems like bullshit to me. It is not accompanied by the kind of well thought out and well presented facts that the first part of the program is. It's just a "powerful" technique. Powerful? What the fuck does that mean? What does it do? And why does it do it? Given that the answers to these two questions are available to the first part of the program it seems fair to expect answers.

I must also say that Ashok overplays his one peer reviewed journal article in 2002 (8 years ago) - it was in "Medical Hypotheses" not in the Lancet or Nature. There is a reason why you've never heard of this journal before - it is obscure. It appears that there has been no subsequent research on his technique, so the idea is hardly causing a medical revolution (it means that no one has been impressed enough by his hypothesis to set up a trial and test it). I don't doubt that research would be favourable and that the understanding of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia would be confirmed. I even think that the hypothesis will shed light on many forms of anxiety and depression - I clues into my own insights and into what people like Joe Griffin of the Human Givens Institute are saying. But only the uneducated are going to be impressed by what he calls his "medical paper".

One of the good things to come out of my ruminations in the last few days has been a realisation. I do stuff around the house. I do it with the expectation that others will appreciate what I do and like me for it. This is a mistake I've made before (to my cost). People I live with, some of them anyway, don't give a shit about me or what I do. They don't even notice that I clean up after them, or make an extra effort to make the house look nice. I can't always be good company, but I do more than my fair share. But if I'm doing it so they will like me (and hopefully not reject me) and they are even aware, then I'm knocking myself out for no good reason. They don't care. They don't even know it's an issue. So why am I putting myself through this?