Spencer > Recent Status Updates

I am getting very tired of Koppel's uncritical parroting of the notion that disaster means looting and chaos, and his suggestion in this penultimate chapter that we ought to be more open to privacy intrusions by the federal government and the domestic deployment of federal troops has not aged well in 2021.

"Collective fury, inscribed onto urban terrain in the form of property damage, can be an assertion of presence and power in the face of authorities who would rather these young people remain invisible, silenced, imprisoned or dead."

Harper endorses (only somewhat tongue-in-cheek) "you can only date people who clearly aren't as hot as me" as an okay foundation for making a polyam relationship you feel comfortable in, which... yikes.

I am very tired of Harper using the word "boo" to describe one's partner, as in, "When can you just let boo be boo?"

In one page, Harper says "Bisexual implies a binary attraction" and wrongly defines sapiosexual (which is a joke of an "orientation" anyway, but) as "attracted to homosapiens in many shapes and forms". Um. What?

Oops, started another book.

But OH MY GOODNESS, did this book come at exactly the right time for me. A species that organizes nonhierarchically and has annual free-exchanges of resources and skills? A small found family weathering an unexpected crisis?

I expect Becky Chambers and I would have a lot of things to excitedly agree about, were we to meet.

Already, I feel like the tone is a little more dialed in than in Unfuck Your Brain. I like that.

Not keen on the typos, though. "I'm using in clinically" on page 27, for instance.

Alright, Dr. Faith, let's see what you've got for me in this one (in part so I can start clearing out my currently-reading shelf).

Inhaling activates sympathetic ("with-emotions") nervous system; exhaling activates parasympathetic ("against-emotions").

Van der Kolk believes desensitization as a strategy is a mistake: "We need to help bring those brain structures that deserted them when they were overwhelmed by trauma back."

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is responsible for sense of time. When it goes offline, it's hard to recognize that an event will ever end, and that what happened in the past was in the past. Thus, grounding and a strong connection to the present is necessary for treatment.

Dissociation: overwhelming experience is fragmented, fragments intrude into present, stress hormones keep circulating, emotional responses and defensive behaviors keep being replayed.

Top-down regulation of the emotions: strengthen medial prefrontal cortex through mindfulness. Bottom-up regulation: recalibrating autonomic nervous system through breath, movement, or touch.

Thalamus mixes input into perceptive experience and sends it to amygdala and frontal cortex.

Emotional brain jumps to conclusions based on rough similarities and uses automatic, preprogrammed escape plans.

Protective factors include the ability to take an active role and being able to reach a safe harbor.

Left brain is facts, logic, and vocabulary, right is memories of sensation and emotion and "intuitive truth--the way things are." Trauma flashbacks light up the right side of the brain, as if the traumatic event were happening in the present, and the left brain's disruption means the person may not fully realize the logical conclusion that the event is in the past.

Serotonin appears to decrease emotional reactivity.

Low levels of serotonin are associated with hyperreactivity to stressful stimuli.

"It was the oldest trick in the book--a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity."

Bálint Magyar calls Russia a "post-communist mafia state". I fear a certain US president is trying to make his own post-capitalist mafia state.

Gessen points out that Russia lacks social and cultural institutions that help process feelings.