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Honestly? If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to me.

Have you ever heard the expression, “No one can tell me what to do”? There’s a companion expression used by recovery groups (alcohol, drugs, behavior): “No one can tell me what to do, not even myself.” It refers to the behavioral phenomena of not being able to stop one’s own destructive behavior, even when it means pain, sadness or loss.

But there’s also another way to look at that expression. ‘No one can tell me what to do” can also refer to the fire to be the best and can breed a healthy distrust of beliefs, people and especially government that ultimately leads to our greatest advances and strongest individuals throughout history.

The power that lies behind this expression can be cultivated into a miraculous tool as an individual can at once lift this ban (on what people tell you) to collect valuable information and skills that allow you to not have to start from scratch while at the same time keeping a healthy ‘distrust’ for bad information, bad people and mis-truth.

There is a balance. ‘No one can tell me what to do’ is a behavior that in any one of the extremes (never listen, niave) is very detrimental to an ease of living and can stop advancement in career, love and life. But in the right amounts at the right time, anything is possible.

As I moved forward in life and started recovering from a hard childhood, this topic came to be a central issue in the move forward to a healthier, happier me. Real change started when I understood how this dichotomy worked. I was better for being able to allow some more things in and leave other things out.

But I wouldn’t listen to me if I were you because no one can tell me…

It’s like when someone is trying to help you parallel park and they are waving you back and you think “damn, that’s getting too close” and they are looking right at the space imploring you, begging you to “come on back!”. But you’re convinced you have no room and flip it into drive to go that 1 inch forward and back one inch, on and on…

Truth is, we have no idea how big our car is. We don’t know how it fills up a lane on the street or a parking space. We don’t know how much room we have when we turn or when we try to maneuver around someone. A friend of mind related a story about how his dad (a car salesman) taught him that when he got a new car he was to find a place where he could park the car in a road lane (safely) and see exactly how much of the lane the car took.

I tried this and was aghast. I have a skinny old truck and the damn thing was about half the size of the lane. What I had thought was a large sized vehicle was actually pretty tiny.

This scene is all too familiar, right? And you want to know something? This phenomena is exactly what my moderate case of Body Dysmorphia is like. It’s like thinking your driving an enormous car (my body) and trying to squeeze it into a very small, compact parking space (usually my clothes.)

Here’s a quick definition of Body Dysmorphia:

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is characterized by an excessive preoccupation with a real or imagined defect in one’s own physical appearance.

and this defect:

We imagine it (body issue) is often much worse than it is until it gets to the point where it is hard to feel comfortable mixing and even talking with other people without worrying about how we look.(1 Infrapsych)

Mine is my stomach and breasts. For a girl I have smallish breasts…but I’m a guy and it’s not okay in this day and age of perfect and TV. Everyday I battle my own dysmorphia which has been likened to a form of hallucination.

And it’s taken me most of my life just to admit it because heaven forbid a MAN would have any of these ‘girly’ problems. But guys do have it and at an ever increasing rate.

Recently I lost 20 pounds and two pants sizes. Doing this has been a mixed bag. While it is great and I am loving the way I look and feel, I am further plunged into confusion as my already twisted self-perception is turned on its ear and my true self-reflection becomes even more muddied.

What to do?

I have lots of mirrors in my apartment which I am forcing myself to stop and look full on at myself to help dispel my misconceptions. I am also going to a gym so i can see other men and what their bodies look like (without being accused of being gay.)

I am soliciting the perceptions of close friends on how they perceive me (turns out, most of them couldn’t even entertain the idea that I had ever been ‘big’.) I am also looking to a personal trainer to help me tone my body and get a fresh perspective on the truth.

I also have an excellent IBP therapist that is very effective in treating both mind and body. Together we are exploring my body perceptions and their relationship to my childhood and where these perception came from.

So really, if your gonna drive the thing around and show it off to the world, you really should understand and know exactly how big this ‘vehicle’ of yours really is 😉

Citations:
1. http://www.aboutourkids.org/aboutour/disorders/body.html
2. http://www.infrapsych.com/root/1033/General/General_BDD.htm#Introduction

Admittedly reddit is quite vocal about atheism. However, I am a christian and I know there must be others on this site. What book of the Bible do you find most important, and for atheists, which book do you find most offensive?

What book? I’d say we need a new book. The book you speak of is sooo old and sooo manipulated, who knows what parts were really the ‘word of God’ and which parts are the work of some Roman ruler or a Pope we don’t remember.

Look, I love Jesus, I think he was an amazing man with some beautiful ideas, but your followers these days, do none of the things that Jesus triumphed like loving all neighbors and eschewing violence and abject greed. We need another telling or another book or maybe another religion.

How about a religion where the user is at even par with the host and is an essential component to the creative process as opposed to a leaf in the spiritual wind?

How about a God that has NO interest in us other than to give us exactly what we ask for. How about a God that does not judge, does not make rules and does not punish based on 4000 yr old rules that have come to pass as important issues.

How about placing the human at the center of the spiritual Universe, at work on their lives in conjunction with the God as opposed to only subject to some celestial whim.

How about the idea that we are an earth bound God, on par with the God of the Universe and responsible 100% for each and every thing that happens in our lives based on what our mind, our creative spirit creates in connection to this God.

What then?

My problem with Christianity and most other ancient religions is that they were developed and then we spent the last 2000yrs evolving mentally away from those tenets.

And now we must make some choices as to the role we play in the Universe, in our life’s constant creation. We can choose to ignore the responsibility we have to this creative process and continue to think we are at the whim of some not-so-benevolent ruler in the sky or we can start accepting the responsibility and start creating the world we really want to live in.

Professor Gordon Parker, a psychiatrist from Australia says the current threshold for what is considered to be ‘clinical depression’ is too low. He fears it could lead to a diagnosis of depression becoming less credible.*

NO! Too many people HAVE depression. We are waking up to the fact that a large portion of the population shares a low level depression caused by the racing pressure of keeping up with our world and our technology:

*inundation *abandonment *childhood injuries never dealt with *financial stress *marital stress

all handed down by society and our parents. Any combination of these type of common stresses can raise a person’s level of depression to an unhealthy status. And we wonder why heart disease and blood pressure problems dominate health statistics…

Some important resources:

• http://www.adultchildren.org/
• http://www.ibponline.com/aboutibp.html
• http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/depression.cfm

I’m going to look for sources now, but you actually could not possibly be more wrong. Recent studies (actual studies by neurobiologists showing mechanism, not pseudoscience sociology pieces) show that modern society does not provide the extreme crises that past society did. We rarely face life-or-death decisions. And the brain is made for them and does not develop properly without them. Just look at how adolescents are sheltered. Their frontal lobe is fired up in full-on mode and they’re tasked with learning how to deal with it and we do everything in our power to make sure they aren’t exposed to even the most trivially emotionally challenging experiences. The research is less than a year old, but very promising.

Look, while you run and research (which maybe you should have done before replying) I will remind you that I am addressing the topic of the article that is undercutting the truth that there are more openly depressed people now than at any other time in our history.

My agenda was to argue back at the article that there is NOT ENOUGH attention paid to the subtle form of depression that when layered together form a more massive depression.

While you are researching look up:

1. fragmentation
2. disconnect
3. interior somatic awareness
4. technological mastery

I really am not trying to argue about this stuff. While you may have read an article somewhere that disagrees, I lived through the uncoupling of a massive depression that stems from ancient issues and current issues combined.

We can both be right about the WHYs of how the depression got there and I certainly am interested in the results you find but the part you skipped over, I guess, was where I was addressing the articles attempt to undercut what is a world wide epidemic of depression.

*http://www.scientistlive.com/18556/depression-overdiagnosed.thtml

This is a link to a prank performed by improveeverywhere…

It is civil disobedience!

How?

Sheer annoyance. Skirting the laws. public displays. we are here, we are waking up. We are becoming self-aware in ways that the government doesn’t understand. This may be a small and seemingly silly act by a group of people, but really, this is a way to push back without getting angry or getting arrested.

Testing the waters of civil disobedience.

Push back against what? Sounds more like a bunch of privileged, self-important wankers trying to justify their goofing off.

ETA: “Civil disobedience without getting arrested” isn’t civil disobedience.

That sounds like a comment based in the judeo-christian work ethic that basically states that all people must have a job, must follow the party line and must work towards state sponsored goals to have any value to society.

I would rather see some people spend their time like this, challenging mores and societal rules, as opposed to flowing along like sheep in the pen waiting for the next morsel from big brother.

Imagination is key here. BTW, who said there is a hard and fast rules on what is and isn’t civil diobedience?

That would be the opposite of civil disobedience. How can there be so many rules for an idea that is based in lawlessness and anarchistic models…

Anything that rattles the establisment (govt and corporations) seems like a good thing to me.

No, it’s based in anti-elitism and a resentment of privileged folks (mostly white boys with too much money and free time) deciding that they get to elect themselves arbiters of what the “sheep” should care about, and that obnoxious pranks take on social importance when they’re in on them.

I feel that your comment is based on all the particpants being bored white rich kids. If you watch the video of the ‘prank’, there are young women (20s), older women (30s) older man (50) and his two daughters (12)…are they elitist? Maybe…you totally have a point about being bored. This could be a bored prank thats fair. But not to an American right now. It means more right now.

At its very worst this ‘prank’ reminds us, as a society, to keep a sense of disobedience against the State, the governing power, or you get things like this disastorous Bush regime, lawless corporations and the ongoing rape of the Earth.

Know what I mean?

I, being American, want a revolution right now! If you are an American under the age of 50, any sign of a fucking pulse from your fellow Americans is a piece of utter Hope…

Just the idea that we may wake up from this corporate takeover, this globalization, this malaise

Thank you elitist rich white bored kids…

It’s too late for me, go on without me…
No really, I’ll hold them off. You go, save
yourself.

Alone.