Dory
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Posts posted by Dory
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But is there something that imbues some kids with inner stability and strength or perseverance that others lack in the environment? In relationships? With God? What?
Look at Louis Zamperini, for goodness sakes. Dude had something strong, for sure. What, and how do we get it and share it?
Am I the only one who thinks about stuff like this?
There are some things that help build resilience in kids. There are enough studies out there you won't have to search hard to find them. But that tends to be resilience with the bumps that are common in life and only if the child has no mental health problems.
I can say the most damaging thing seems to be teaching kids that they should be independent. Then when they can't handle it, they don't feel like they can ask for help. If kids are taught how to ask for help when they need it, at least if they can't handle things in life, they know how to get the support and training needed. Definitely ups the odds of them surviving.
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:thumbup: We have an ice chopper. I've resorted to using that and a good, heavy metal shovel. I have a draft cross that I swear poos like an elephant. Not only are the poos concrete but one... ummm... movement must weigh about 20+ lbs.
(It's awesome that there is a conversation on the WTM forum about concrete poo. :D )
As soon as I read draft you had my sympathy, lol. I know what cleaning up after one of those can be like. I don't envy you your massive amounts of concrete poop moving at all.
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LOL. I knew you were in Canada when I read those temps.
We have the opposite weather here... in the 40's all week but on the hot side.
Having lived in Canada myself I never complain about the heat here....when I was in Canada I always felt cold...even in summer because 30 degrees is a nice spring day here LOL. I remember people swimming in a lake and I was wearing a sweater..
My DH wants to move back to Canada... no way ..you can keep your concrete poop all to yourself.
We do have warm pockets in Canada. I dream of moving to one of those. Perhaps Kelowna or a little south of there. Summers are a little warmer. Too much Rain in Abbotsford for me.
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That is a matter of perspective. She isn't better than she would have been with two perfectly functional arms, but she is better than she was before she could use the prosthetic or learned to do some thing with the remaining arm.
Look at Bethany Hamilton, the girl who lost an arm to a shark, about whom that Soul Surfer movie was made.
Now there is an optimist, and one who can do more things with her one arm than I can do with two. Would she be happier if it never occurred? Certainly. Is she going to let it defeat her? Not on your life.
But she would've been happier if it never occurred. She was able to process the loss, and learned to work with what she had. That's awesome, it truly is. She was given something (a prosthetic) that made her better able to work around her dysfunction.
Some people don't get anything that helps them work around their problem. Sometimes there aren't any 'prosthetics' available yet for that problem. We still haven't cured autism (a brain problem).
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"Better soon" may not even mean an actual change in circumstances. . Sometimes there IS an actual change, such as a disease is gone (experienced that and so have many others), or some other major change is finally accomplished by some means.
Maybe the person with the one arm learns to do new things over time, or gets a prosthetic arm that makes life much easier than before.
Then, she is better, even this side of eternity.
But she isn't better. She has simply found a way to live with what life has dealt her. She doesn't function the same as someone with two arms, although prosthetic arms are getting pretty amazing. She is able to cope because she has found ways to help. But she isn't better.
For some people with mental disease, drugs can often help make life livable. They haven't been cured. They aren't better, they have simply found a way to live with what life has available for them. They have to accept their problem and try and work with it.
For some, they accept the long term problem, they try to work with it as best as they know how, and they are unable to find anything to help them cope and ease the pain. Often meds don't work. Telling them to suck it up would be like telling the quadriplegic to suck it up and pull it together and make their legs work. The drugs aren't working, the problem is still there.
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If a mother were to give her life for her child would you scoff at that? You say the body is innately programmed to live no matter what, and yet there are many instances where a mom puts her child's life before her own. No one looks down on a mom for that or questions how she was able to allow herself to die.
I'm just trying to point out there there are scenarios where the body doesn't no immediately try to live no matter what. This is often one of those scenarios.
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But we don't want them, and defend them to others as "ours".
We say, "I'm currently experiencing this, but I hope to be much better soon." Or something like that, at least in my world.
Sometimes things go wrong, but we want what is right and don't ever stop persevering toward that end, with varying levels of success...right?
If you experience something for years on end, you are no longer going to have the 'hope' that you'll be much better soon. That would be like my cousins dd being born with one arm saying, "I'm experiencing this, but I hope to be much better soon." At some point a person realizes that some things are not going to go away.
ETA: for someone with a processing disorder to say they hope to be better soon would be foolish. They'd be better to try and work with who they are. Why is this different.
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No, the medication does not help -- if by help you mean keep me from experiencing such debilitating manic and depressive mood swings that I still regularly end up in the hospital.
The bolded is incredibly offensive, as I would give anything to be rid of this illness. I love my children and my husband, and find no joy in the pain that I regularly cause them.
At this point, I am stepping out of this thread.
*hugs* I'm sorry. I've been unable to find medication that helps as well. Ativan is the closest I've come. I can only use it in emergency moments to ease the panic attacks or dissociation.
I'm sorry this thread has been hard for you.
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Maybe...maybe not. You are merely speculating that they are not having the same experience and responding differently and there is no way to quantify it.
The second is different, as there is a clear physical response that can be quantified (welts, airways close, etc), but yes, you both experienced a bee sting. She is just allergic and you are not.
You and I may well respond differently when walking into a home that contains cats, but the stimulus is the same for both of us; we had exactly the same experience. If you aren't allergic, you will be fine. I will be quickly getting out of Dodge to minimize my reaction.
Are you attempting to argue that some people have an "allergic reaction" to trauma, so to speak, where others are resilient?
Hmmm. That's rather interesting to ponder.
Yes I am saying it's like an allergic reaction. Because all an allergic reaction is, is the brain telling the body that it needs to attack that thing. Why is it ok for the brain to over react to things like that and yet it's wrong for it to over react to less tangible things like feelings? So because you have a name for allergies they are ok for the brain and body to act like that? Really, feelings are usually different hormones and stimuli going into our brains and bodies, our responses are how our brains and bodies have learned or are programmed to respond to those hormones and stimuli. Some bodies and brains are less able to respond to them in what society would consider a reasonable way. Their brains over respond, shut down cognitive though and the amygdala goes into hyper drive. There are quanitified studied responses out there as to what happens in the brain when someone over reacts to certain trauma or stimuli.
If I smell certain smells I often will end up curled in a ball, talking like an articulate 5yo, and sometimes sucking my thumb. I don't 'choose' to do that (it's horribly humiliating), but my brain causes the actions. It is an over reaction to a stimuli. Same as a bee sting. And I can even take a pill to help ease the reaction if I need to. Just like a bee sting.
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Life does end for everyone; this is a 100% certainty. Why end it before the end when people love you and care about you? Why leave others to fend for themselves, like minor children, if you have them?
The guy who has the heart attack and dies plays no active role in making that happen (excluding lifestyle factors, which could definitely have played a role, but not talking about that right now).
Someone who kills himself actively makes it happen, which goes against all hardwiring of the human body for self-preservation.
I see that as very different.
You say 'actively' like as if there is cognitive thought. If the rational part of the brain is not functioning at capacity, how can you say he is actively making it happen anymore then when the brain makes any other part of the body malfunction?
That would be like seeing an infant hit their head on the pavement and then say they actively were trying to cause brain damage themselves. Or finding my boys outside trying to get onto the roof so they could slide down. They must have been actively trying to hurt themselves. They just aren't capable of thinking through things thoroughly. We can understand children making poor choices because they lack the ability to think through things really well, why can't be understand that same thing when a person is struggling with depression, regression, panic attacks, or other things that inhibit cognitive thought. The mind simply starts looking for ways out of the constant pain, and if it is unable to find something due to functional problems, processing problems, or other things, it will go to pretty hefty extremes to stop the pain.
Some people are able to process the pain and emotions better then others. They are the ones that tend to walk away from horrors and be relatively ok.
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Is there, really, a huge variation to how high and low the highs and lows are for any given person? How do you know?
Maybe we all have exactly the same feelings, the same highs and lows and just respond to them differently?
That right there is how one defines how high and how low those highs and lows are. If one person feels that they can't function and yet another person feels that they can, then they don't feel the same do they and how their brain is processing the feeling is different. How else would you define how high or low a person is?
If My sister and I were both stung by a bee and both had the same amount of venom in our system and yet she ended up in the hospital, and I didn't can I really say that she and I had the same thing? Her body responded much more dramatically then mine did. Her brain told her system that something terrible was happening and responded with making the body swell, rash and almost kill her.
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Well, ok. I guess I can only speak for all of the adult women that I know, both in my family and as friends - all of whom have had tremendous lows at various times, often with good reasons (death of children, of marriage, major illness, etc).
I think it is rather dismissive to suggest that all don't experience the highs and the lows. I think we do, and I think that is the common denominator to humankind.
But no way to quantify, so it is what it is.
Oh dear no, I didn't mean to say that everyone doesn't experience highs and lows. You're right, that's pretty common to humankind. But there is HUGE variety to how high the highs can be and how lows the lows can be. There is a range that humans can live in and be ok, and then there are people that can't stay inside the range. They don't just have highs, they have moments that border on manic, they don't just have lows, they have times where they can't think in a straight line (frontal cortex very shut down), can't function, can't work up enough oomph to shower, cook, and so on. It feels like you are stuck at the bottom of an well so deep that you can't even see the top anymore. It's a dark mucky hole and you can't move, can't think, can't do anything to get out of it because you can't see anything but the dark.
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That's entirely different. All will do something. It is only equivalent if say, three of your children work regular jobs, get married and raise kids, but one decides to live homeless in the woods, and then starves to death when you would have fed him.
I'm sure you would wonder what that one was experiencing that caused this major choice that was so vastly different from all the other kids you raised.
How is it different? They are all being raised the same and yet one wants to be a farmer and another a structural engineer. That's pretty vastly different choices for having come from the same household. Why are different decisions ok for those decisions and you don't question them or wonder, but as soon as the decision is one you don't like, you question it? What about other major choices? Marriage at a super young age? Lots of kids versus no kids?
Life ends for everyone, some people might just feel that their life would be better ended a little earlier. No one questions the guy who had a heart attack at 40. It's ok if the heart can't handle it, but if the brain starts shutting down that's bad?
It's hard to lose loved ones. It's hard whether they are 80 or 30. But sometimes a person just can't handle it. Whether it's their mind that can't handle it, or their heart, or their liver, or any other body part.
Really the brain is the most complex part and the most likely to malfunction.
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:scared: That is just so far out of the realm of my experience, I can't even imagine. I live in TN. I think they've closed schools when the high was 8 because they didn't want kids freezing at the bus stop.
I was in TN last November for Thanksgiving with family. I was freezing and I'm used to northern Alberta -40 temps. The humidity made the cold seem to soak right into my bones and I couldn't warm back up.
It's a different kind of cold. Ours up here is very dry. It's nasty and harsh, but I can bundle up enough to survive outside if I really need to.
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I'd go so far as to say that almost everyone has had these moments. And trauma, and pain.
Some survive and conquer, like Eva Kor. Some only survive. Some don't survive.
And I will continue to wonder why, I guess.
Studies of the brain would say that no, almost everyone does not have moments that low, and no, trauma and pain are not the same level same amount for everyone. Even if the trauma looks externally the same. It's not conquering, it's simply having the mental ability to process it. I have a kid with a processing problem that affects his writing, that doesn't mean he isn't trying hard enough, it means his brain just simply can't process things at the same speed as some other kids.
Think of it as a processing disorder. It actually is fairly similar.
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I'm with you on the needing to move. This -40 stuff is wearing me down too. I refuse to step outside. I bribed one of the kids into running out and checking on the horses.
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I know there is no one, real, definitive answer that covers all situations. I'm just curious though. having lost family members. I hope I'm allowed to be curious and to ask the unanswerable. I find the forgiving survivors, like Eva Kor, fascinating.
I do disagree with you that thought processes are "only a factor". Every single thing you do started with a thought process, in which you did anything from a lightening rapid to exceedingly slow costs/benefits analysis and then decided to act. That's just human nature. Your brain/thought process directs your body.
There are thought processes that we have though, that we are often not consciously thinking through. Our brain makes our heart beat, and yet if a heart stops we don't blame the person for the thought processes being faulty. For someone with OCD, we don't chew them out for thinking through their compulsions, they can't help it. There are many things that we do out of knee jerk reactions, that are not thought out carefully, we just do them. For many people with depression, suicide is that same reaction. There are those few who have thought it out and do see it as the best thing to do, but many times, it's just an act of desperation because the individuals mind can't handle the pain. Our brain directs our body, but we are not in complete control of our brain.
Most cognitive thought is happening in in the frontal cortex. In some situations, where fight or flight takes over, or (for PTSD folks) dissociation happens, the frontal cortex tends to shut down rather badly.
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I'm actually not assuming hard times or horrible surroundings, but I used that example of the concentration camp as a far extreme of a situation in which everyone would be traumatized, but only some would commit or try to commit suicide. Why?
Some have identical lives to mine, for example, in that they are married several decades, have nearly grown kids, a happy marriage...whatever other facts you want to throw in, and they still kill themselves. Why?
I do believe that it takes fortitude to live, because life is hard for everyone, at times, some more than others. But everyone is not committing suicide, despite the pain level at various times. What is the difference?
how about putting it like this. My kids are all getting similar educations and yet they won't all choose the same career path. Why?
They are all taking piano lessons and yet not all of them have the same ability. Why?
Each brain is slightly different with slightly different wiring. Each person is able to process and handle different situations on a different level. Some people seem to be simply more sensitive to trauma. Some people it's not that they aren't affected it's just that their mind is better able to box it in and control the damage. Each mind is a little unique.
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I think anyone averaging two hours of sleep a night would be in serious trouble! That is something to address.
As I've mentioned, the holidays take a lot out of me. I start falling asleep in odd places after a couple weeks. And when I say averaging, it's more like some nights I get 5ish and some nights I get about 1. The odd night I'll get none. By the end of the month my body starts having a hard time regulating it's temperature and I drop weight. I don't plan on much schooling getting done in December. I've learned that catnaps, tylonol, and caffeine are my friends. You asked why some give in to suicide though, and that is one of the reasons. Sometimes, what they are battling through is just really, really hard. Even if the outside circumstances are ok, when what is going on in your head is this overwhelming, it's just hard to keep moving forward sometimes, and when you are so tired you can't think straight, logically weighing the pros and cons of suicide isn't going to happen.
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I think that sometimes it is a rational choice. Once again, you don't need to persevere through a problem to do it when it is a rational solution for a problem.
I would agree that that is the case sometimes, although I don't think it's the majority of times. I think the majority of times the struggle and pain don't really allow for terribly clear thinking.
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Ok, but we don't know what, if any, changes. I'm more interested in the thought process. Why does one persevere, and why does another, who may even have objectively better surroundings, not stick it out?
It's not always a thought process per say. Sometimes it's just the hormones pulling a person down to a point where they can't think straight anymore. Sometimes it's an injury either emotionally, mentally, or physically that just takes too much out of a person and they don't have the ability/resources/reserves to be able to handle it.
If I have had a month where I'm averaging 2 hours of sleep a night, I'm having nightmares on a nightly basis and flashbacks regularly, are we really going to say there's a thought process to me feeling a little suicidal? Or is it just that I lack the resources and strength to think through things really well at that time?
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Thanks for the shampoo recommendation. I am going to order this for my itchy dog and see how it works. Nothing else has in 5 years.
Sometimes if a dog has constantly itchy skin it's cause they don't have enough oils in their food. pet foods process out the good oils that contribute to healthy skin and coat. Dry foods have a dehydrating effect on skin and hair and increased thirst, which only partially compensates. If you feed dry foods, then it's not a bad idea to add digestive enzymes to your dog’s meals. Probiotics also help with allergies. A healthy digestive system absorbs fluids more readily from the food your dog eats improving the moisture levels of the skin and coat. I also add a little cod liver oil to the food.
You can get boxed with packets of probiotics from most vets (at least up here). I just put the packet full on their food every couple days.
Just an idea. If you've tried it already I guess you can just chuck this info out. lol
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I very strongly believe that suicide should be decriminalized completely.. that people who do commit suicide should not be revived and allowed to chose to not live.
YES I have had quite a few relatives successfully chose to take their own life. I see no sin in that action, nor do I see it a selfish act.
Yes, but there are some people who really could be helped that attempt (or succeed) suicide simply because they haven't seen their way out of it all. Maybe the suicide and reviving/saving actually would be a turning point because it would put them in a place where they would get the help they need. Sometimes people around here never find help until they land in the hospital.
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Has anyone given silver shield (colloidal silver) to a dog?
I have a friend who uses it regularly. It's worked fairly well for her dog. I have looked at it a few times but have never used it.
Incompetent vet - Need some solid advice
in The Chat Board
Posted
Just to add in here. Fleas, internal parasites, and ticks are all things that often can and do cause health problems with dogs. Ear mites, on the other hand, are extremely rare. You could have the dog checked for them to make sure, but they aren't very common at all.