This was a really great detailed discussion covering a lot of interesting ground, a worthy 36 mins of your time to understand the evolution of the Covid Virus over the time its been around.
Being politically on the Left (and quite active as that on twitter) I have felt it necessary to keep pretty quiet about the following but I am, what I would call an Original Anti-Vaxxer of 35 years standing. For me, the historical data is clear, clean water, sanitation, improved access to good nutrition, protection from the elements & relative relief from poverty saved us from disease epidemics, vaccines were just bystanders to this great shift in child mortality in the early 20th century IMO. Also, germ theory uptake was massive too, I mean basic hand washing, cleanliness. Where people live in filth, conflict, oppression, malnutrition & general human degradation vaccines do provide relief but not entirely without cost.
Big Pharma profits so massively from vaccines & drugs, we need to ask where is the profit in providing clean water, relieving poverty etc - there is none, no monetary incentive, though the human profit is obvious to all. In the same way, war is profitable, incredibly lucrative, but detrimental to all lifeforms on Earth bar the .01% Superich - yer, the ones with all the big Yachts, private Jets & now Private Space Travel, those ones.
Again all this is just in IMO - I'm not even sure I'm legally allowed to have a public opinion on these subjects any more with the highly censored & oppressive nature of the times we are in.
Anyway, that was a personal byline really - the message is in the video - in which 2 highly credentialed mainstream Dr's describe the preferential nature of Natural Immunity proffered by the latest version of the virus - which incidentally came about by passing through a largely unvaccinated population - their healthy immune systems effectively downgrading it for the good of all.
Also, they discuss how for many people, the vaccine has provided a vital bridge over which to escape the worst of the earlier more deadly versions of the Virus, but will become pretty redundant imminently, as Omicron becomes naturally endemic with every chance of providing long term natural community immunity.
In this new virus reality described above, Vaccine Passports do not have any meaningful purpose whatsoever other than a State imposed profound injury to our fundamental human rights.
I've just found Sukie & love her wonderful healing resource YouTube Channel - here are some powerful anti-anxiety exercises anybody can easily learn/do. Im finding them extremely useful.
I'm particularly glad to find someone talking about the 'physiology first' nervous system dysfunction that I experience as opposed to the 'mental first' anxiety that gets talked about so much. The 'mind over matter' school usually has pre-eminence in the Patriarchic mindset.
I see & personally experience a massive distinction between a direct nervous system response in a dysfunctionally baselined Parasympathetic Nervous System & anxiety created from actively worrying about something. In my experience they are largely different things with some area of overlap, so the remedy for each would necessarily be quite different. I think they mutually contribute to eachother but in a healthy nervous system that returns easily to a functionally appropriate baseline state - its a different ballgame.
Obviously, once my physiology is caught in a habitual GAD response my mind can & does take off with it & run wild if I let it, but its the physical response that predominantly needs to be tamed imo.
I find it funny that as a young woman I heard that Menopause very commonly was a cause of Anxiety, immediately i assumed this to be a mental thing. Of course there may be a mental element as well for some people. but, in my own experience, it is a purely physical, biochemical, physiological change, as if the loss of hormones has downgraded my nervous systems capacity to tolerate stress.
To be fair my nervous system was already pretty broken pre menopause, but menopause was like removing the brakes from my physiological anxiety. Bio ID Progesterone does help. But physically releasing the Vagus nerve with cold water & exercises like these are definitely the way ahead & completely free!
I’m wanting to state here that my own sense & experience of quite severe, long term brain damage resulting from untreated mental illness plus all of the isolation, lots & lots of isolation, that’s a contributor to that too, anyway, I definitely feel that in the last year there’s been some really significant progress due to i’d say, ‘forces’, kind of a special social force that’s forced me to co-operate where I was really really unwilling & not brave enough to try.
So Thankyou special social forces, I’m very much in your debt for helping my brain rewire after so much time left to rot.
Just coming up to my 55 birthday in a couple of days & still inventorying the past a bit I think…. no stress…… keeping the peace…..💜
I’m kind of accounting for why my Bipolar diagnosis took so long here in a way. I’m piecing together some of the highs and the crashes I had in my twenties and thirties whilst ‘not knowing’ what they were. (I first said out loud that I had Bipolar in my teens…..you forget…….I forgot, brain damage makes you forget a lot of things, Drs were endlessly disinterested in me because I did not take the meds they offered) I knew what the low was, of course, when I had depression that was really self explanatory & required huge huge effort to dig myself out of the psychological, as well as the physical & brain chemistry aspects of that.
But often the highs just felt like really flying on all levels & being super well & super sexual, taking on more & more things with a weird peripheral awareness that it was unsustainable in some way that I could not see, that was out of my view.
For example when I was with my boyfriend who was 17 yrs older than me, 1994 through 1999, I had at least one serious high that resulted in a crash that laid me down with, what seemed to be chronic exhaustion for 18 months solid. My brain didn’t work properly for the first year of that as I remember. But describing cognitive changes from the inside to others is really terribly hard. That low was particularly interesting because it was not just depression primarily, although that was there intermittently, it had this complete physical exhaustion element that was most prominent.
A lot of my crashes throughout this time were kind of engineered by binge drinking. I could drink 8 pints of dry blackthorn cider on a bad day on an empty stomach…… if anyone gave me spirits I’d try & kill myself with it, or so it seemed. I basically had no self control once I’d had one drink.
I think my drinking was the natural impulse to blow up the intrinsically painful over blown nervous system circuitry & physical strain of the high. Also, now I know I was struggling with BPD as well. So the weird paranoid stuff, losing time (disassociation), confusion, emotional dysregulation on a daily basis really. So fucking stressful. Relentless, like being on a sandy beach with the sea pulling the floor away all the time as you try and stand there, only you don’t know why it’s happening or why other people (unbeknownst to you standing on much better ground) are able to stand perfectly well all around you. In fact those others would sometime point & mock that I wasn’t able to stand steadily, that my floor kept going away. That I wasn’t doing something right somehow, so it always my own fault. Ho, ho, ho.
(The general statistics on alcohol, the damage alcohol does, the only reason it’s legal is because it causes brain damage & that helps the powers that be keep us compliant which they need)
Well, I feel really mean leaving that intimate account where I did. In trying to protect the person’s identity, by giving less detail, I just made him look worse than he deserved….. so I can either take it off that bit or add more data.
We were a right couple of freaks, we really were very out of the box & experimental. We did experiment with drugs but it was pretty mild & innocuous. We both had terrific childhood trauma that we couldn’t work through. I was incredibly unstable & volatile throughout our entire relationship.
In his defence on that occasion, I do know he absolutely genuinely meant no harm to me, it was really really unfortunate, I had no idea what had happened to me, so I’m completely sure he did not know & of course prior to the crash I would have been hypomanic with hyper sexuality. He undoubtedly believed he could restore me to my former sex bot status me by having more sex with me. Sadly not but no one’s fault.
For years, this episode, I genuinely believed I’d been spiked with drugs, I had to have been I thought, it was incomprehensible that my own inner chemistry set could have achieved such extraordinary mental & physical lockdown.
That wasn’t the beginning of my history of mental illness, it was roughly the beginning of my Bipolar though I think. I’d made an enormous number of very weird & impulsive choices already by that age but BPD mostly covers it. I mean I don’t know. I certainly had issues with paranoia, rage, binge drinking, impulsive risk taking, especially sexually back at 15.
My BPD type behaviours, I think began pre-puberty or the cusp of that…. Psyche Drs will not diagnosis BPD during teens because, at some point most teenagers act out in a BPD way but for the majority the more extreme behaviours stop. I sort to control my eating for the first time at about 14 & dropped masses of weight very fast, in a deeply unhealthy manner. I stayed very very thin until I was pregnant at 20.
It’s not the beginning of my history of sexual misadventure either but I don’t feel the need to go over that again here, publicly. At the end of my work with the Psychologist 18 months ago he referred me to the rape crisis team despite the heavily historical nature of multiple traumatic experiences. He said that it would be well worth defusing some of that trauma even at this late stage.
The PTSD specific therapy EMDR is a top choice for all & any unintegrated trauma work imo. Though I’ve not done it myself for trauma , I will do, I must do & I recommend it to anyone.
I did have some with a hypnotherapist about 10 yrs ago for giving up smoking……although I did not stop smoking, the therapy itself was amazing.
I just watched the video I posted with the last blog & realised that my writing did not really relate that greatly to the content….. their conversation just inspired that whole thought in me re Oxytocin from the very beginning when she talked about a mysterious spiritual element commonly occurring that enables the first putting down of addictions for some/many people. It struck me that people able to increase their feeling of at oneness with another person, a group of people, a place, an animal, family, community etc, the more that is developed the more regulated your oxytocin will be & the more overall contentment you may be able to access. Sure there’s other psychological needs like status & I dunno, having kids or whatever too but those mentioned above cover a very wide vector of well-being.
The discipline element, self control, delayed gratification capacity that they mention was described as a strengthened linkage between the old emotional limbic brain and the evolutionarily newer pre frontal cortex. This link &/or pre frontal cortex are areas where I have brain damage from, I think mainly from my untreated Bipolar episodes (though Anorexia terrible awful for everything) My first recollection of a crash from a high or possibly hyper mania was at the age of 18. I don’t remember the high, that actually figures now I’ve had a more conscious experience of mania…. I just know I was very busy, very scattered, prone to unexpected emotional outbursts, that’s all I remember but the crash that first crash was like being killed.
I remember waking up in bed completely unable to think or move or speak, I don’t remember being in pain but I bet I had the same nervous system pain that I have described when I crashed from my last big high in 2015/16, only I’d managed to be less conscious of it somehow, a kind of numbness. Unfortunately in this incredibly vulnerable state….. so hard to say this……my boyfriend had sex with me, I was unable to speak…… I guess that’s kind of unintentional assault because I did not/could not consent & was unable to brook much opposition as my body was so weird & weak. It was unpleasant. I love sex & fancied my boyfriend a lot but I found it unpleasant. Why do men find numb lifelessness in women so damn sexy……
It took a few days to slowly regain normal function & there was this disorientation which I think is a hallmark of bipolar crash. I don’t remember if I went into a depression or not, I assume I did. What’s salient though is the sense of being brain damaged, or having lost function & I think finding I had newly increased impulsivity & increased difficulty with decisions & having more anxiety & confusion, that all started back them. That was the beginning. It helps me to piece things together, thinking back. I lost a lot of the sense of coherence & time & the overall comprehension of my life, the big picture got lost very early on.
Well this ended up being a bit personal….. hmmm might take it down later x
In this fascinating video Russell Brand & the author of "Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke" discuss how even relatively low Dopamine surges demand brain chemistry to self correct pretty swiftly causing a slight low. This is a general human response, as in everyone will experience this although i'm aware that as a Bipolar 1 sufferer i'm probably more experientially knowledgeable re: high & low dopamine at very extreme levels than a lot of people.
I had various degrees of Anorexia throughout roughly 2002-2008, some poverty related but much related to my Emotional Dysregulation that I now know to have been undiagnosed BPD plus BP1 - I was very very conscious at that time that i desperately needed Oxytocin, I was in the aftermath of a bad relationship break up but also a very disorientating Bipolar high (I was undiagnosed ) - I remember I used to fantasise about having my hair brushed by kind women friends which is terrifically emblematic of Oxytocin production to my mind, but I was suffering such a serious Bipolar depression by that point that I was not able to muster the strength to get any help.
I was always researching natural health & I found that Oxytocin was in development as a pain relieving, mood improving, anti anxiety medicine at that time, 2004 ish - I did not have a pet yet, a really top valuable Oxytocin provider. Singing in a group & along with music is also another well known way to get 'free' Oxytocin. But I was single & having drunken one night stands in a desperate bid for Oxytocin but to no avail. You get masses of exciting Dopamine but without that lovely cuddle hormone to soften the drop.
In fact i'd go so far as to say I don't think you can make Oxytocin from casual sex when you are drunk, which is why you might feel uncomfortable when you next see the person rather then warmly fond..... that's just my personal observation. If i'm correct, that makes that kind of sex much more expensive in terms of problematic brain chemistry (see video above) than sex in a trusted pair bond scenario. (i'm open to this maybe being a bit different for some intrinsically polyamorous types; assume naturally high Oxytocin status?)
Just to clarify, the following is not about people who have an innately strong Oxytocin supply naturally. That is they do not suffer from any of the mental health issues mentioned, get over break ups with relative ease, feel naturally welcome in life generally, for want of a better description. I know because I don't so easily get these things up & running..... its a huge conscious effort for me.
One further point I want to insert here is that naturally occurring post-birth Oxytocin & indeed any pair bond Oxytocin famously can bring with it an increased sense of a spiritual dimension to life, I guess coming in via the feelings of safety, connectedness, oneness pointing the self towards an increased sense of an overarching cosmic consciousness. Which is lovely & a bit magical.
I tried to find research on the down side of supplemental Oxytocin & whilst there seemed to be only a positive response in sufferers of serious nervous system dysfunction; PTSD, Anxiety, ASD, ADHD, eating disorders etc, 'well' people in the research could suffer the unwanted side affect of increased empathy to the subtle emotional signalling of strangers/acquaintances, potentially resulting in unnecessary intense emotional reactions. (This last bit makes me think that BPD might included a particular hyper sensitivity to Oxytocin or the absence of or problems with creating it in some way)
It seems to me to be beyond obvious that we should trial supplemental nasal spray Oxytocin in the deemed largely 'untreatable' Anti-Social Personality Disorder/Sociopathy/Psychopathy & Narcissistic Personality Disorder cohort. These disorders all suffer from a basic, deep seated lack of empathy, resulting in huge problems in life & relationships. Maybe its been done. I hope so.
It seems pretty obvious that unimpeded Oxytocin production during childhood, the steady feeling of belonging in a family, in a community, being physically comforted when you need to etc etc powerfully lays a framework for nervous system wellness in later life & that Physical & Psychological trauma interferes with Oxytocin production among other things, of that there is no doubt.
I find this subject absolutely fascinating. It accounts for why, for myself, casual relationships, one night stands are innately painful in a way that's really hard to describe. I think that making love without making Oxytocin requires the participants to be 'out of it' in some way, so with a blunted awareness of the lowering of boundaries & self consciousness, vulnerability etc hence why inhibition removing alcohol is a drug of choice wherever very casual sex is lauded as a very casual pastime.
I haven't so much as had my hand held romantically for over a decade..... that's quite extreme isn't it. I've had one serious 2 year relationship since I gave up alcohol in 2007 & zero casual hook ups...... the reason is within the statement I think.
In my defence I was undiagnosed, actively misdiagnosed as not having Bipolar in fact & yet knew absolutely there was something seriously wrong with me for the longest time. My dating aversion has been as much to protect others from my emotional dysregulation as it has been to protect myself from triggers. Unfortunately, my best efforts at close friends were also smited by undiagnosed BPD elements that I did not understand at all & was immensely frustrated by too.
So happy to now know what's wrong with me, so happy to be working on myself & being my own wellness project - Happy Valentines Day 💜 (for tomorrow)
I could not be without this supplement- read this article if you suffer from any chronic mental illness also any chronic pain condition too. Of course there are limited studies, big pharma cannot patent it or profit from it & it would safely replace many of their highly lucrative more dangerous alternatives.
DLPA (DL-phenylalinine) is a more bioavailable form of the essential amino acid phenylalanine. Phenylalanine is one of the 9 essential amino acids, meaning it is not made in the body and must be obtained from outside sources.
Many people take DLPA as a nootropic supplement for:
Mood Mental Sharpness
Pain Relief
There are plenty of reports that DLPA can improve cognition and general feelings of wellbeing, and there is some clinical evidence that backs up these claims.
DLPA is made from combining D-phenylalanine and L-phenylalanine. D- and L-phenylalanine are isomers, meaning they are mirror images of one another. L-phenylalanine is found naturally, while D-phenylalanine must be synthesized in a laboratory.
DLPA, then, is both of these isomers combined into one substance. It provides the best of both worlds. Phenylalanine is a precursor for tyrosine, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine, and the skin pigment melanin. By affecting these systems, DLPA can have various nootropic and health effects.
