Monday, January 13, 2025

 Monday, January 13, 2025

     Oh, dear.  I overrode the Seroquel this morning and dwelt on troubling relationships that I can do nothing about. I allowed myself to do this.  This place of pain and suffering is where I live. Some of it is the default brain, which will always dwell in the land of troubled social relationships.  At least, that's what the results showed in experiments.  I wonder if the default brain was designed to only deal with social relationships or is also concerned about lions, tigers, and bears.

    I concluded I needed to break my mental habit of indulging in painful moments.  The other day, I wrote about my realization that my mind, rather than accepting the calming impact of the Seroquel, was preparing to do battle with it.  Much as someone might do battle with a calming drug when they know they're in danger, the mind is used to a degree of alertness to danger.  It fights the impact of the drug.  When someone slips us a mickey, that's a healthy response. When we take a drug, legally or illegally, to calm our nervous systems, our conscious minds sigh with relief, and our unconscious minds fight against it.  It assumes the hyper-alertness must be necessary, or we wouldn't be in it.  It leads me to believe the unconscious mind has limited contact with the real world. It's quick to respond to spiders and snakes and our discomfort in response to anything out there. However, it doesn't know what's really a danger to us any more than my beloved Elsa does, who is prepared to take the mailman or a passing semi-truck in my defense.

   My email problems have gone from bad to worse. Yahoo wouldn't allow me to send my update emails, the last one to go out the usual way was on December 28. I tried using Gmail. It doesn't have a forward-to-all function. I have to paste and copy the email addresses or paste and copy the text. I read somewhere that Yahoo was impacted by a virus on the Chrome server. I had as much trouble with it when I used Safari. Should I take this personally?

   My friend Melissa finally came to visit me.  We've made several attempts over the last six months, but something always came up.  She spends a lot of time in the Australian outback volunteering as an OBGYN and general surgeon. We had a lovely visit.  We mostly talk about intellectual topics rather than ourselves, but there's a lovely warmth there anyway.

  In anticipation of her visit, I finally washed my floors and dusted and vacuumed. No, I didn't do it because I was concerned about what she might think of my housekeeping. I used her as motivation to get the job done.  Mike used to say, "Where's a guest when you really need one?"  Melissa was that guest.

   I had two students today.  I  started with 4th grade GV.  He was exhausted. His five-year-old brother had kept him up all night.  Both GV and his grandmother described the brother as a disturbance.  I told him to relax and not struggle against his exhaustion. He did pretty well with the spelling.  He always does well remembering the words.  His big problem is he's overly concerned about not getting things right.  I've been working with him on this problem.  his mom has already told me she saw a difference in his willingness to attempt to solve a problem on his own in his daily life.  this is very good news, but we have to revisit his fears over and over. 

      Today, I took on using BrainManagementSkills to resolve the problem. I asked LG if his prefrontal lobe felt it was dangerous to not get it right.  He said no. it didn't. Did the back of his brain feel it was dangerous to not get everything right?  yes.  Which did he think was right?  He said the back of his brain.  Well, that is the intuitive brain. 

   I introduced the idea that the back of the brain is great for detecting dangers like lions, tigers, and bears but not that good at assessing danger when it comes to spelling mistakes.  It thinks anything we have trouble with could be a source of danger.  We have to use our conscious minds to inform our unconscious minds about the reality of our world in the here and now.

    I led LG through the exercise, during which he envisioned a little him under the fontanel. Then, he turned the little him around to speak to the back of his brain. I saw something was wrong. I asked him if he felt dizzy; he said yes. I told him to stop. Why did he feel dizzy? He said his brain felt flooded by the information.

    I told him he could control how fast it came in.  If he had a dial, what would he set it at? He said a 5.  I felt that was too fast.  I lowered it to 4, then 3, and then 2.  It still felt too fast.  I suspect he needed a small fractional part.

    I told him that he should never do this exercise when scared.  I have never had someone harmed by the exercise. The problem is if you do it when you're afraid, you won't ever want to do it again.  I have a limited number of tricks in my bag.  I can help people with fears using these.  I want him to feel comfortable doing it. my big concern with GV is that he won't listen to himself. He won't find his comfort zone.  Usually, I warn kids not to do the exercise if they feel fear. I didn't do this today. I have no idea why. For me, that warning is a standard part of the protocol.  They have to feel safe and in control.  

  I trimmed the plumbago. My big concern was the growth against the fence. It would be hard to get in there and cut it back if it got too dense.  It has to be cut back before it gets out of hand and invades the neighbors again. It wasn't too bad.  I trimmed the side against the fence,  the entire length of the top from the fence side, and half the top from the side of the driveway.  I had to stop because my right wrist gave out.

  I do hand and wrist exercises daily but haven't done the MELT routine in a while. MELT uses a ball for the hand and foot treatment, and my balls were easily accessible.

 I had to check the manual.  It came back quickly.  I did the right hand twice and the left hand once. 

   I had fourth grade LG at 4:30.  I introduced the diction/spelling exercise.  He announced he wanted to work on writing.  He had no idea what he wanted to work on.  When I asked him what came to mind, LG said New York.  What about New York?  The traffic jams.  He didn't know why this came to mind. I did. There was a news story about the recently enforced charge for driving in Manhattan and how that cleared the streets overnight.

  But then he switched topics and talked about the LA fires. He compared them to the Maui fire. He said they were different because the government set the Maui fire because it wanted the land. I hadn't heard that, but I thought better about challenging his thinking at this point—maybe at some later date.

   The death toll from the Maui fires is startlingly higher than the ones from the LA fires. In the Maui fire 2, 207 buildings were destroyed, 115 people were known to be dead, and 400 were still unaccounted for.  As of the 13th, one week after the LA fire started 12, 000 homes have been lost and 25 lives. Holy cow! What a disturbing set of statistics for Maui. 

    I asked LG if the LA numbers made him feel better. It became clear that these events had been disturbing for him. He felt better after hearing the LA statistics and discussing how people evacuated an area.

   He told me of a recent event when his dad's speaker started smoking.  He played them with an amplifier, and it overheated. He said the speakers were right behind him.  It's this incident that triggered his concern. Hopefully, what we did today did something to comfort him. There's no point living with that level of fire.  These poor kids.

   I made an unfortunate comment about house fires started by a neglected cigareete are more dangerous.  His father and his grandmother smoke. Both have clothes with burn marks as the ashes fall. Oh, boy.  I didn't push that idea. The poor kid was traumatized enough.  I wanted to create a sense that he could take action if a fire struck his area.

   He's not the only one who fears fire.  Hawaii has a great deal of vegetation. That's why we live here. We love to be in nature.  We're in the middle of a dry spell now. We all worry about fire. The only good news is that we are unlikely to run out of water.  Here, they put out fires with helicopters with containers dipped into the ocean, flown over the affected area, and dumped, as well as from fire hydrants and hoses.  I was so glad I slept through the New Year's Eve displays. Here, they're bigger on  December 31 than they are for the Fourth of July.