Know your heroes
Although I know several great writers, I know very few great storytellers.
Because a story is a particular type of writing that emphasizes an emotional arc of challenge, personal growth, triumph or tragedy, writing a story is a different experience (for the writer) than journalism, or technical writing, or ad copy. To create an emotional arc for the characters, many writers must experience the negative emotions for themselves, and this is why great story-telling is so difficult — because it requires the storyteller to be vulnerable in ways that most writers are unwilling to experience.
Use language as a technology to improve your thinking.
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― E.M. Forster
It was Neil Postman’s book Technopoly (1992) that first alerted me to the idea that language is a technology for organizing and communicating thought.
And it is more than that.
Marshall McLuhan realized that we shape our technologies, and our technologies shape us back. That is, the technology of language not only helps us externalize our thoughts, but it also changes the way we internalize our perceptions. Thus, the purpose of…
Knowledge is meant to be shared.
Universities are in the knowledge business.
- They create it with research.
- They share it with education, books, and article publishing.
- They organize it, curate it, and interpret it in their libraries, datasets, and faculty.
Prior to invention of the printing press, knowledge resided primarily in the minds of the people who knew things. Books were expensive to reproduce, because they had to be copied by hand.
In fact, the very first university lectures were little more than a group of scribes, copying word-for-word. A Reader with a valuable book would stand at a lectern, reading from the text, so that…
It was quite by accident that I discovered my testosterone was very high for my advanced age of 52. A routine blood test had revealed elevated levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA), which is associated with greater risk of prostate cancer.
Because prostate cancer typically grows so slowly, I elected to treat my PSA with a ketogenic diet and regular monitoring, rather than a biopsy and surgery. I reasoned that if I could bring my PSA down in six months or so, I might avoid invasive and painful surgical procedures, without much increased risk of malignancy.
That worked for me…
I think we can work on our own trauma, thru introspection and rewriting the narrative of our own lives, without being in a relationship at all. I also think we seek trauma resolution thru relationships, because it is in relationships that we were traumatized.
Finding a partner willing and able to facilitate resolution of trauma is rare and valuable, because so many relationships are driven by trauma bonding that the partners are either engaged in a power struggle (control) or they seek to prevent their partner from resolving trauma, lest that partner abandon the relationship.
I wrote more about it here:
https://medium.com/storygarden/when-is-love-a-trauma-bond-7d5d6ec6fa62
Two doubts that may emerge on your journey of healing.
In ‘Relationship Chemistry, Explained’ I described the imago theory of romantic attraction, in which we seek resolution of traumatic experiences from childhood by controlling our romantic partners:
According to Harville Hendrix in Getting the Love You Want (1988), we unconsciously seek out romantic partners that remind us of the people who wounded us in childhood, because we believe only they can heal our childhood wounds.
More recent books, like Playful Parenting (Cohen 2002) and The Body Keeps The Score (van der Kolk 2014), explain that one of the ways to heal our childhood trauma is to recreate the trauma (within…
I have so many students who are feeling down right now. They struggle to keep their spirits and their motivation up.
I wrote these two articles for them.
https://medium.com/storygarden/self-sabotage-f8511958d0db
https://medium.com/morozko-method/you-lost-your-motivation-now-what-a09c8d2efd13
I'm ordering Brianna West' book right now.
And how to help others struggling with Complex PTSD
Pete Walker wrote an amazing book called Complex PTSD (2013) in which he described a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that results from chronic, rather than acute, trauma. Unlike the more familiar PTSD, which can occur as the result of a single incident, C-PTSD results from extended periods of abuse, neglect, or exploitation from which there is no escape.
Kayli Kunkel provides a concise description:
C-PTSD is a crippling but often misdiagnosed condition. It occurs when a person faces many traumatic events in an ongoing manner. …
Deliberate cold exposure is the fastest way to clear glucose from the bloodstream without spiking insulin.
Cold is so effective that it can reverse Type 2 diabetes in as little as 10 days.
And that might be why you are depressed.
We are all born into this world dependent upon our Mother’s love. Not just for for the sustenance of breastmilk, but for the emotional connection and support that all human beings need to stay alive.
Although it seems obvious to us now, such a radical proposition as the idea that infants need a Mother’s love and attention was once the subject of serious scientific inquiry. One of the most famous studies was first published in 1945 and it tracked dozens of infants in experimental and control groups.
The experimental group was denied basic love and attention and breastfed by wet…
Thomas P Seager, PhD
TPSeager@StoryGarden.co Self-Actual Engineering https://www.youtube.com/c/ThomasSeager @seagertp Join https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13613731
