Housing. 2

Update on my attempts to register for a council house. My application has been lost - on the computer!

Unfortunately your application has not been registered with Home link. You may have to start the process again. Apologies for this.

Of for fucks sake! How hard can it be? And the email is not signed by a person but by "Housing Advice". Thanks for fucking nothing "Housing Advice".

Housing

I finally decided to bite the bullet and apply for a council house. This is made much more difficult than it ought to be by bureaucratic thinking and incompetent web design. The website and the various systems is constructed from the point of view of the council - it's all in their language, laden with jargon no normal person uses. No thought seems to have been given to using the language of the people who have to use the system. And I'm quite highly educated, and tech-savvy so I ought to find it easy. But I don't.

There is huge amounts of writing on the screen which is not optimised for easy reading but labours on in bureaucrat mode - long lines of text stretching across the screen. Half of what is there is unnecessary but has to be read anyway to find the bits you do need to read. This is one of the basic errors that web designers make. If you are a new user there is no guidance, no step by step procedure to follow - the procedure is spelled out long hand, and you must extract it and conceptualise it for yourself.

Registering is a nightmare. The process is convoluted and confusing. The screen says one thing and does another. . In fact it is a model of poor web design. If you don't have all the information you can go back and complete the registration at a later date (though the screen says you can). The phone drone asked for my password so that she could try logging in, but what is the point of having a password in that case? I had to email the extra info (My NI number) to an email identified only by initials (no name, no words) and ask that they advise me on progress. So it's now totally out of my control.

And the advice given at different times is contradictory. Thanks for that especially.

And then at the end I have to do all the leg work to get a place: getting a council house has been outsourced to the people who need housing. And for someone like me this places a heavy burden on me at a time when I really don't need that.

And when it comes down to it there are 100 people on the list for every place offered. I'm hoping that my diagnoses will mean that I get my own place soon.

I don't really want to leave my home of 10 years, but I don't think staying here is tenable any more.

Honeymoon is over

Well that didn't take long. I've had a very difficult couple of days - swamped by disturbing thoughts and images and feeling ill equipped to deal with them. Swinging from rage to weeping. I came a bit unhinged at times. What set me off? Someone took two bites out of a slice of bread and then left it on the cutting board beside the loaf. I just went nuts - fucking slobs!!!! etc. But it did me more harm than good. I definitely need to turn the volume knob down, to be much less prone to these overreactions. It was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back, but I live with slobs and I need to find better ways of coping. Maybe I should take up smoking pot again? I never bothered about a bit of mess in those days... [joke].

I see very clearly how ART is supposed to work, but getting on top is going to be difficult. I find myself doing the technique so often it's exhausting. My negative thoughts are largely NOT about my body and symptoms, but about frightening experiences past and (imagined) future.

I'm trying to read Joseph LeDoux's book The Emotional Brain. There is a long (I mean at least 5 chapters) introduction to the history of research into the neuro-anatomy of emotion which is dull at times. Hopefully we'll get onto his research into fear soon. There are two main points from the first 5 chapters. Firstly that the contents of the consciousness are largely the result of unconscious processes about which we mostly can't be conscious. We make up stories to explain how we feel based on previous experience etc. We can be completely wrong about the reason we feel as we do.

Secondly the idea that there is an 'emotional centre' in the brain is probably wrong. Specifically LeDoux demonstrates that the so-called Limbic System as defined by previous researchers (and still a feature of neuroscience texts being published today) doesn't really exist, or do what they say it does. An aspect of LeDoux's thinking is that different emotions are produced by different parts of the brain. Fear, and especially fearful memories, for instance are associated with the amygdala and it's interactions with other brain systems. This is the fact that Ashok exploits in the ART.

Anyway I'm fed up with the slobs and I starting looking into council housing and found that as a non-citizen I have to go the extra mile to prove I qualify. So I can't register online but must take my passport in. Registration takes 8 weeks to be processed (why does everything take so fucking long in this country!). Then the system has changed and one has to keep an eye on the listings and put in bids for desirable places. 3 bids per bidding cycle. So now I have to decide whether the slobs are bad enough for me to tangle with the bureaucracy and red-tape and all the stress that brings.