Can confirm. I was given it to help with a medication known for spiking anxiety during the initial doses. Not only did my anxiety not increase, I was better able to do things I was usually reluctant to do because of stress or anxiety. It’s like I just didn’t care as much.
The major downside for me was lower blood pressure than normal, so I got dizzy easily if I stood up too fast.
Same. I’ve used tens of thousands of pipette tips. I can’t imagine what my lifetime plastic consumption is like compared to your average person. I’m guessing I’m like a small neighborhood.
100% agree, that’s my (not so) secret political fantasy - everyone working together to better their lives and those of others. Instead, we got whatever 2026 is turning into.
I have a 401k and I say fuck it: general strike these assholes. The innumerable gains we’d see by wresting back control of the country would make decimating it worth it, plus I’m likely to die in the Climate Wars™ before retirement age anyhow.
I could actively make things worse for a fraction of the price!
I can’t understand why people don’t see this. Democrats in the minority sure are fighters, but oh darn, they just don’t have the numbers, so vote harder next time! Democrats in the majority suddenly have to be super diplomatic, lest they ruffle feathers across the aisle and lose cooperation with the political party that rarely cooperates. Keep voting hard and they’ll get there, eventually!
The imagery there was just beautiful, a perfect 5/7.
Whaaaa?! I’ve always found Danish pastries to be much less sweet than American, though the American take is cloyingly sweet. Almond flavor totally tracks, though. Many I’ve seen are almond flavored or at least include almonds.
So now I have to wonder: what is he doing this to hide now?
Edit: also, can the aliens please take over now? At least just the US? I think us humans have shown we can’t handle this on our own.
It is really silly that it’s not taught.
Physical Education? Check.
Academics? Check.
Emotional Intelligence? Whoa whoa whoa there, slow down now, that’s not for public education. That’s done in the home, with Jesus!
I know Serbia and rakija! It reminds me of grappa. Sorry you’re also stuck in a toxic society and have the curse of knowing it could be better.
I’m guessing you’re also an American. I feel you, friend. The US has a cultural toxic positivity problem, amongst other issues. Got a problem? STFU and turn that frown upside down! They’re not problems but opportunities! It could be worse! It is… what it is. 🫠
So people bottle up their negative emotions and don’t learn how to deal with them. They don’t know how to seek OR give support. Some feel threatened when presented with someone else’s negative emotions, and it doesn’t help that the other usually doesn’t know how to present them, so they try to make it go away.
I have no idea how to fix it on a societal level beyond learning to do better ourselves and setting a good example for others.
You can run Doom on just about anything.
I think I need to try to celebrate little wins more. I have celebrated these before, but it feels like my wins are so few and far between anyway lol.
You might be doing better than you realize. Change on this stuff is so slow that it can sneak up on you. Do you journal at all?
I’m also on the fence about if EMDR itself works or if I’d get similar results if I was doing anything else repetitive that also required my full focus. I think it just got my overactive mind to get out of its own way, but it worked!
DBT might not be the thing for you, or may be more helpful later. My early therapy was almost exclusively CBT, which is luckily what I needed since my internal narrative was real ugly. I picked up on DBT later and I think it would have been harder to learn and less effective early on.
I’m sorry you’re in the funk. A lot of us have been there, so we can relate and commiserate. I can assure you it does get better if you keep at it. The work may never become easy, but it does get easier as you do and learn more over time.
I can confirm: authentic Indian dishes are in fact not primarily based on premixed spices made into cream based gravies.
Indian migrants have made some pretty interesting dishes by integrating with local cuisine. Case in point: bunny chow.
Thank you! I like Chicago-style stuffed, but no one on the West Coast knows what it is. Hell, most people anywhere don’t know what it is.
For those who have never had it: imagine a two-layer lasagna but the noodles are replaced with a flaky, buttery, yeast-leavened bread. It can be great, but it can also be a big pile of garbage if it’s not done right, worse than regular bad pizza.
It took me a minute. Turn the image 90° anticlockwise. Then it’s easier to see it’s an image of portions of two vertically stacked monitors with the Ubuntu Studio logo on the bottom one and part of the install dialog on the top.
Hi! CPTSD here thanks to untreated BPD dad. My partner also has CPTSD from an even shittier childhood. Between the two of us, we’ve done everything you’ve mentioned here and worked most of it out. I can write a novel - and I will, right here! Here’s what came to mind reading your post. Feel free to ask anything, I’m an open book.
It took me years to try it, then I made more progress with six months of weekly EMDR than I did during the years I waited. It dredged up formative experiences that had impacted the basic assumptions I had about myself and the world, and it’s those assumptions, like a “Me Operating System”, that made other issues so difficult to handle. Since I could see them I could challenge them, and that changed my fundamental view of everything. It was super difficult and I was a pissy little bastard pretty much the entire time. It was still worth it and I’d do it again.
It takes years to make the first big changes when you have a personality and/or trauma-related disorder, because you’re using your wonky brain to fix your wonky brain. It fucking sucks. And it’s never going away, just getting better managed. I’m over two decades in on treatment and I still sometimes do the same shit I did when I started. The difference is it’s very infrequent now, I can typically stop it immediately, and it’s comparably mild if I don’t.
You’ll make the slowest progress at the beginning, so it’s hard to see. I remember beating myself up because nothing seemed to get better, which was making it even harder to improve. I eventually moved my goalposts way back and learned to become my own cheerleader. I have victory conditions, really small achievements where I take a moment to recognize that I did something right and check in to see how I’m feeling. If I was upset, I’d find a mirror, make eye contact with myself, and talk myself down, comforting myself like I might want an ideal friend to do. Sometimes I’d just hug myself and say I was sorry I was upset and cry a bit (or a lot) until I felt better. The point was being my own best friend, even if I didn’t feel like it. Especially when I didn’t feel like it.
You’re already hitting my first victory condition: recognizing the behavior. This is huge. Soooo many people don’t, literally ever. Every damn time you do something you want to change, you congratulate yourself for noticing. If you don’t feel like it, tough shit: you still go through the motions.
The second condition is changing something in the moment. Anything. I’m also rejection sensitive and my main reactions are to fight or freeze. If I found myself spinning up, even if all I did was hijack my own angry rant and say “aaaand I’m all pissed off and shouldn’t be doing this”, then gave in and still picked a fight… great job, I did better than doing nothing at all! I’d later congratulate myself for condition one, recognizing the behavior, and condition two, actually changing something, even if just a little and even if it was ultimately a flop.
The third is stopping in the moment. Sure, you may have started, but you derailed yourself. Three levels of congratulations!
Fourth is doing something else entirely. Anything else, even if it’s silly. Yesterday, I was at the gym. It was undergoing renovations so it had that construction plastic film up everywhere. Thinking I was alone, I was being a good little weirdo and batting at it like a cat. Then I noticed a woman had stepped into the area and was watching me. I was startled, so I felt the cold shock of adrenaline, followed by embarrassment welling up, all of which used to lead to anger or freezing. Instead, I just looked her in the eye and said, deadpan, “meow”. I laughed, she laughed, crisis averted.
It’s all about recognizing incremental progress and heaping on the praise. I call the praise part “training my own dog”. Calm me is rational and can think through shit. Emotionally flooded me isn’t very bright and needs to be trained, so I give that “me” positive reinforcement when they do a good job. Just like a dog. I sometimes give myself treats when I do a very good job.
There’s much more, like learning to be better at emotional regulation so I don’t have to rely on dysregulated me being a good dog, but this is what got me over the hump of “everything sucks, I suck, and I’m never getting better”.
Edit: oh oh! Look up amygdala hijacking in reference to getting really upset and going on rants where you later look back and are like “…WTF?” My partner does this HARD if they’ve been pushing themselves too hard for too long. I at first thought they were delusional and, well… they were. Temporarily. Because their brain had mostly shut down.
The more you can learn about psychology and neuroscience, especially affective neuroscience, the more you’ll be able to recognize what drives certain aspects of your behavior, which will help you figure out what to do about it. Knowledge is power and all that.
They’re controlled opposition, at least at the national level. They’re the carrot to the stick, but both are being wielded by the same people.