cherapple

Hi, Phil. I greatly sympathize with your experience of feeling like a lone anarchist imid a sea of statists. It is a very difficult and lonely existence at times. I'm wondering why you want everyone else to change. You are free to live your life as an anarchist right now, regardless of what anyone else is choosing to do. Instead of waiting for others to be an example for you, if that's what you're doing, can you be an example for the statists of what's possible?

Welcome! Isn't it amazing what honesty and action and honest-in-action will do to for depression? I can identify with the feeling of drowning and finding the life-giving air supply that living philosophy (there's a double meaning there) offers.

One way to clear the fog is to pretend you are deaf to words and you can only hear actions. Your father is not asking open-ended questions and trying to find out more about you. For example, "I'm sorry. I'd like to hear about what you need from me. Is there anything I can do to make things better?" He isn't asking you what you honestly think and feel about him. He doesn't want honesty. He is creating the fog that you're feeling by telling you what he *wants* you to think and feel about him, regardless of his actions, and trying to get you to self-attack for not making things better *for him.* I'm sorry that you're experiencing these things from your family.

Thank you, James.

Thanks. I didn't know about ShoutCAST.

The way to self-forgiveness is think about and understand *why* you did wrong, and have compassion for your past self. "Selfishness" is a good thing. It's what finally allows you to care for others. Once you really know how to care for yourself and allow yourself to have preferences, then you are able to allow the same for others. To be selfish in the bad sense means that you don't really believe you deserve to have what you want, and so you think you have to take it at others' expense. I sympathise with your struggle to forgive yourself for past wrongs. It is possible (at least, I'm banking on it) to build a better relationship with yourself, with consistent commitment, and positive act by positive act.

Thank you.

It all comes down to self-trust.

Ah, thanks. I'll continue to ask my tech-challenged questions then. There is no play button on the page, like there used to be. I know I can click on one of the media players, but I would like to be able to stream right from the web page.

Everything else about the chat room streamer seems to work fine, but if I go to the link that you gave, I get a login page asking for a username and password.

You can no longer see which podcast is playing in the stream.

How do you feel about your body? How do you feel about yourself? In what situations do you overeat, when do you crave certain foods, and what kinds? Do you eat for emotional reasons, or when you're not physically hungry? How is your relationship with yourself? Do you like yourself? What is your history with food? How did your parents treat food when you were a child? You say you've lost weight, but you're still struggling. What do your struggles look like, if you want to share them? Your post brings up an "avalanche" of questions for me, but you're the best one to answer the questions you ask. Looking at your physical self with sympathy, gentleness, and curiosity—and how it connects with your emotional and mental self, past and present—is a great (and sometimes painful) trailhead toward self-knowledge. Congratulations on starting to walk it.

Some resources: The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewllyn, mostly for not going to high school, but helpful even for those who aren't teenagers, and who want to find ways to educate themselves Better Than College, by Blake Boles Uncollege.org That's just a start. Those will lead you to others. There is information all over the internet about educating yourself and making a living without college.

I'd be interested in hearing Stef's thoughts on this as well. There are several transgenered people that I've met or seen in the FDR community.

It's good to see you here, Valeska, and to be able to connect your profile here with your profile on Facebook. I prefer interacting on Facebook because we can talk one on one and have more control over who and how many people join the conversation. I've enjoyed the chats that we've had very much and I look forward to continuing them. (I have more questions about this post.) Conversation on the boards (perhaps everywhere, but it's amplified on message boards) is kind of like a bunch of people yelling into space, sometimes achieving meaningful contact, but mostly with the sounds colliding, deflecting, and bouncing off each other.

Another female here. I assumed you were male by your name, (lack of) picture, and sheer probability. If you want to find more females, why do you keep your own profile unclear?

Good question. We "have to" because it allows other people to remain comfortable doing what they believe they "have to" do. Other people want us to conform, so that they don't have to question their own conformity. When someone does what they want to do, instead of what they are told they have to do, it raises everything into question for everyone around them, and most people prefer to avoid that anxiety.

To put it most specifically and bluntly, *your parents* had an inability to tolerate your imperfections, and they reacted murderously toward you—thus the suicidality—when you didn't live up to their irrational standards. Be careful of taking the blame for parts of yourself that you neither chose nor created. That, too, would be your parents wanting you to fail to see the truth by removing scrutiny from them and placing it on yourself. The way to begin recovery from these things is to get to the roots of their source. Otherwise, you're left forever circling around the mystery of what's "wrong" with you, when there's nothing wrong with you and never was. You just had the bad luck of bad parenting. I'm really sorry that it was the case.

Hello there, fellow Capital Region resident. I live in the wonderful city of Schenectady (a little sarcasm there). Welcome!

Haha, "the government donated a patch of road." How generous of them. Interesting. Oh, what the world would be like, if people were allowed to innovate in any area they wanted.

How did your parents treat you when you didn't get up or go to sleep when they wanted you to? One thing I'd like to point out is that they didn't "have to" get you up in the morning, especially seven days a week, nor did they have to send you to bed before you were tired. Lots of children (growing numbers) aren't forced to go to school, do chores, or go to church. There's quite a bit of rejection of you in those actions alone, which would have taught you to reject yourself and your subconscious—to bring the subject back to dreams. For myself, I experienced a lot of anxiety producing, rejecting, and downright dangerous events both during the day and at night as a child, which led me to be a very light sleeper, and to sleep on constant hiper alert. Also when my uncsonscious has attempted to alert me to painful situations in my life, past and present, there are parts of me that come up immediately and reject the message. That makes sense because as a child, I was totally powerless to express what was going on for me, or to do anything about it. I just had to get up each day and put one foot in front of the other, no matter what hell was going on around me. I think that's why ignoring or "forgetting" my dreams has become so automatic. I was wondering if there were similar reasons for you.

I can think of an appropriate use of the word: If you're a child and you have no power to positively influence or escape a man—say one that you're forced to spend time with in a school or at a church, one that your mother brings home, or perhaps even your own father, if he is abusive—calling such a man "creepy" would be entirely justified for the child. It is important to notice when you feel uncomfortable around someone, but if a person is using the word just to be hurtful, I think "creepy" might fit *them.*

I don't have any tips for you because I haven't had much success with increasing dream recall either. I would think that three years of listening to FDR, having meaningful conversations, journaling, writing my dreams down, talking about them with interested people, and doing therapy would all combine to provide a welcome mat to my nightly unconscious, but I still wake up most mornings and my dreams pop like balloons before I'm barely awake. I'm wondering what sleeping, waking, and dreaming were like for you in childhood. What do you remember about your inner experiences, in relation to your outer experiences? What was it like for you when you woke up in the morning as a child? What was it like for you if you woke up in the middle of the night? Do you remember any particular dreams, night-time, or morning experiences? Cheryl

What are my first memories of feelings? When do I first remember joy? When do I first remember fear? When do I first remember anger? What are my first memories of sadness? What happened that caused these feelings? What happened when I expressed these feelings? What did I need? What did I want? What did I get? Did I feel heard, seen, acknowledged? When did I feel like I existed for people? When did I feel invisible? What was my experience of love and being loved? How well do I love myself now, and what or who in my childhood taught me this? If I have a very strong feeling in the present, when do I remember feeling something similar in childhood? With whom, and what was happening?

There's also a difference between chosen competition and competition that people are forced into, like sports (gym class) and grades in compulsory school.