Some take up arms — guns and knives and such weapons of localised destruction. Some scrap and brawl. More often people shout and scream and a few, presumably cleverly, plant their landmines entirely in subtext.

Sparring subtextually presents a puzzle to those who prefer to be challenged. The prize goes to those who can do the most damage while maintaining perfectly plausible deniably. Taken beyond a bit of genial rivalry it may, of course, fall into the category of emotional abuse much like that detailed in previous blog posts. The rival attempts to find subtle ways to, at best wind you up, or at the extreme induce a mental meltdown in order to maintain the myth of innocence by diverting blame to someone obviously “crazy.” I personally believe, sadly, the latter precipitates many lovers’ suicides. Someone with a pathological need to release themselves from the actual or potential guilt cannot go back and undo the damage without at some level acknowledging they went too far, and with some “victims” the pain, and inability to express it properly leads to increasingly desperate behaviour.

The weapons of feuds take all forms. Someone left afflicted by severe episodes of abandonment generally responds well (from the point of view of the party attempting to inflict damage) to the silent treatment. In modern times this manifests in social media quite well – we unfriend on facebook, unfollow on Twitter and the like. Needless to say emails go unanswered. Those needing blamelessness pretend they never saw them. Others resort to bullying often illiciting friends and relying on groupthink. Those are the ones I encounter most, but I’m sure everybody knows the concept even if the tactics they encounter differ.

Sometimes the vengeful volley quite comically. When I lived in America I enjoyed a sitcom called “Cybill” starring funnily enough, Cybill Shepherd. While talented and beautiful, the ongoing feud between her best friend, Maryann, and Maryann’s ex, “Dr. DICK,” often stole the show from Ms. Shepherd.

No matter how many times I watch that video I really do laugh out loud.

I used to find myself quite rattled by the sorts of feuds that go on with those in past relationships. But if you read my previous blog post you’ll know I changed my opinion about windups. First of all, people with PTSD make it so easy – we’re the embodiment of a Jack-In-The-Box. Wind us up and sooner or later we pop spectacularly and thrash around helplessly for a while. Why people enjoy doing it I fail to understand – to me it’s not a million miles from jamming a stick in the spokes of someone in a wheel chair – disability-inspired torment.

Now that I own a hard-to-manage dog I can easily compare canine classical conditioning with my own. The pop-up person person I became is a response ingrained by years of conditioning by my dad. I wish I could remember who said it but my favourite quote on the subject is “Of course parents know how to push your buttons – they put them there in the first place.” Realising this I started training myself to react differently. I train my dog in much the same way.

My dog, Hatter, lunged at everything that moved when I tried to walk him. He decided he needed to protect me perhaps, or had been encouraged to fight, I really don’t know why. It presented both a serious challenge and a serious problem – if surprised he nipped as well as lunged. Dangerous dog laws in this country are poorly defined and discretionary. Even just nipping leaves a dog vulnerable to potential destruction.

I pay a trainer to help me deal with some of these issues. For the lunging and nipping she advised immediate distraction. I hold a “high-value treat” — i.e. a bit of meat or cheese or something he loves enough to make him drool – in front of me and say “look at me.” Much to my surprise the technique worked, er, a treat. Little by little he started to look at me when people passed by, then with bikes, then with cats – the things he loves to chase. He still lunges at dogs on leads, I don’t know why but re-conditioning takes time.

I started doing the same with myself. I work to undo many many years of conditioning starting with distraction. The fallout from failed romances continues in the form of feuds, the participants continue to plant subtextual landmines, I continue to step on them. I force myself to distract rather than react. High-value treats mean nothing to me but for some reason playing solitaire or other games does very well. (Very) Oddly I think this may mimic the “tetris effect” researchers found recently, as explained in this article: Tetris ‘helps to reduce trauma’. Works for me, at any rate – eventually I’ll be so used to distracting in the event I won’t actually need to – my body learns not to produce the chemicals that cause the stress. PTSD is as much a chemical reaction as an emotional one. And ironically, the more it happens the more opportunity I get to retrain and desensitize. The more people try to rub my nose in my greatest hurts and fears the more they beat their own swords into ploughshares. They architect their own ineffectualism. Win-Win.

Another distraction, of sorts, lies in how I interpret pot shots ringing out from feud-land. I hold up my hand, I confess – I confuse motives as malice. Yesterday, musing about such things I remembered the first time a boy at school teased me. I liked him and I thought he liked me. Why did he tease me at school? My mom told me boys do that when they like you. As an adult I know it’s because when it’s hard to express a connection, or it’s socially unacceptable to do so, or the person doesn’t have the maturity to express themselves they “pick on you.” One day, few days after the boy started teasing me, while I stayed inside and played, according to my mother, the boy in question hung out across the street from my house – sat on the curb a while but said nothing. I guess he did really like me. Quite touching to think about a shy boy trying to work up the nerve to ask a girl to come out and play. Our modern, horrifically cynical world view probably now terms this as stalking. I certainly would never dream of standing around shyly hoping to meet someone for fear of being labelled a stalker but it seemed so normal and innocent back then.

So I see, or remember more accurately, people often express themselves using annoying actions, or even annoying inactions. They stay connected. “Flattered” strikes me as the more realistic reaction. So I learn to distract, not be bothered and even feel “liked” rather than popup like an over-wound Jack-in-the-Box. Love me or hate me, I win – until you forget me completely I matter. And that, strangely, is a really good feeling.

Hatter The Hard-To-Manage Dog

I prefer not to recall December in detail. Read about my Christmas if you wish, or suffice it to say I fell ill. I wanted to somehow kick-start my recovery and knew dogs provide love, companionship and at least an hour a day outside walking, come rain or shine — all of which provide pretty powerful recuperation. So, perhaps a bit impulsively, I dragged my housemate up to Battersea, convinced the re-homing staff (eventually) my being at work in the day would have no adverse effects on a dog.

These days the dogs home mostly houses Staffordshire Bull Terriors, one of my least favourite dogs. One of the re-homing women decided I might like a collie. Well not “a” collie, but “the” collie — the only one homed there at the time. I adopted a collie cross the first time I adopted a dog. I called her Lullaby and I loved her to bits. But she was very hard work. High intelligence gifts the breed, which may not always be a good thing. An ability to think abstractly (e.g. associations), however rudimentarily, leads to a high proclivity towards — what’s the correct adjective here?

I can’t say “bad behaviour.” That implies a moral dimension. In animal ethology no moral component exists, of course. Dogs exhibit fixed behaviour patterns based on breed characteristics and the rest are learned. In the case of the dog I adopted, he shows typical collie behaviour — chasing everything that moves, nervousness, high sensitivity, good at reading facial expressions, etc. For whatever reason, he also tries to run away every chance he gets, prefers to pull hard on the lead, bites strangers, eats post, follows me from room to room, whines and cries and destroys things if forced into a separate room.

He learned the latter set of behaviours. He came with no history, probably a runaway. So what caused the hard-to-deal-with behaviours I can only guess.

Re-training him proves difficult. Well I shouldn’t say that. I’m not re-training him, I’m re-shaping his behaviour. My previous dog came with his own issues, but nothing in comparison. At first I felt stressed trying to deal with it — it’s proven costly and made me rather unpopular with less-than-understanding (to put it mildly) neighbours. And, because he’s a collie, he has a long memory so changing his associations will take some time and effort.

I found it stressful because I wanted him to be just like Rizla, my previous dog. I wanted to be able to walk him without a lead, control him with just words, to stay home without being bored, anxious and destructive watch TV without biting the screen and so on. I wanted a dog as a loving companion, not as a set of hard-to-deal-with behaviours right?

You know what? I couldn’t have been more wrong to initially feel that. Firstly, he acts purely as responses to his upbringing — presumably one without boundaries, walks, and alone time. And underneath that he’s lovely, a heart of gold. He demonstrates a sensitivity to my feelings Rizla never did. He tenses up when I’m tense, he boings around feeling confident when I feel happy and when I cry he jumps on me, puts his paws on my shoulders and tries to “clean” my face until I stop. The reason he nips is he tries to protect me when we walk.

Nearly three months in I learned to appreciate his good qualities while helping him be himself in more socially acceptable ways.

Funny thing is, I came around to this way of thinking in an utterly roundabout way and changed the way I see myself in the process.

I often blog about my illness. I write other things too, but currently I focus on getting better and my blog reflects this. In fact I started blogging to help me get better. A litany of personal disasters left me in a bad way. If you don’t know already I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, brought on by a childhood filled with gross neglect, abuse and abandonment. With PTSD, generally you get better or get worse – life circumstances and luck determine whether you get the help and support you need (you really need both of those) or experiences that reinforce the negative associations and exacerbate the condition. Since moving to the UK 13 years ago I feel the latter to be true.

People learn responses to extreme situations, responses that help them cope at the time. Being intelligent, complex people we can carry these associated responses to similar stimuluses a long time, much like my dog reacts in anti-social ways as a response to a poor upbringing — learned responses to an environment psychologically unhealthy to active intelligent dog.

Earlier this month, while still stressed and struggling with the dog’s hard-to-deal-with behaviour I found myself acting out in a similarly Pavlovian way to behaviour patterns carved in my younger days by my highly-dysfunctional relationship with my dad.

To understand where I’m coming from, if you’ve not done so already, read the first of my “Time To Change” articles. The last few paragraphs in this post probably won’t make sense without the background.

Despite pondering the time I lived my father in horrifying detail in therapy and long after that, I never considered the actual nuts and bolts of the relationship – that is, that my reaction becoming ingrained as a stimulus to a response. I thought about the negative effects, I thought about those ad nauseum.

A few weeks ago I found myself acting in a similar way to a situation which at the core mimicked that of my teenage experiences with my father. But until someone both incredibly intelligent and supportive mentioned my reaction was being drawn out of me, the penny never dropped.

I started thinking about my dad’s abuse from his point of view. I can’t really work out why he was so abusive towards me. Maybe he was abused. From the few stories relatives told me his brothers used to fight a lot as kids – I know he had to have toenail removed because one of his older brothers threw a table at him and it caught his big toe. He came from a family of nine children and I suspect with so many children and a family business to run kids were largely unsupervised. My dad, being right in the middle probably felt lost in that middle somewhere. He normalised abusive behaviour towards the weaker members of the family as normal. I get that.

What I never got, and what hurt so much, was when he called me crazy, threatened to have me put away.

When I found myself triggered earlier this month and my friend mentioned this sort of response was the hoped-for one, I found myself not thinking so much about the current situation; I thought about my Pavlovian response to a familiar stimulus. And I finally realised why.

My dad needed the scenerio to be played out exactly as it did. He needed that opportunity to call me crazy. Without it he was abusive. With it he was blameless. He didn’t make me cry every night, I was just crazy. Nothing to do with him.

In his life he never said sorry to me – not once. But he was a man who was capable of guilt — a great deal of guilt in fact. He needed to draw out a breakdown in order to stay guilt free. He played me. All these years I’d been played to keep him blameless.

Ding. The penny dropped, finally. I hit three lemons on the fruit machine and it all made sense. Funny how one astute sentence from someone else can suddenly make something so clear. Then again, for fellow fans of my favourite TV sow, it is how Dr. House solves all his cases so I’m in good company, no?

I wonder, at the same time, how to feel about people like my dad – people that try to cause pain and chaos but remain blameless. Some suggest revenge in various forms. I myself suggested, often, anger as part of the healing process. But I can’t start to convince the world that reacting to triggers the way I do is merely a Pavlovian response that needs to be unlearned and hold other people up as moral failures. To be the sort of person that thrives on pain and chaos or desperately needs to be blameless — surely that’s a similar situation: coping tools learned as children in dysfunctional environs being utterly inappropriate and anti-social. The failing is one of recognition, self-awareness and ownership of those behaviours.

I’m sure I’ll never convince some people. I’m sure there are people out there who refer to me with phrases like “emo bitch” or “crazy” or whatever. That’s okay, there are so many nice people, so many reasonable people who get me and where I’m coming from, who can see my good qualities and like me for who I am that I don’t need the people who don’t get it. I do need to stop hoping they will get it some day. I’ve carefully explained my illness to people with whom I’ve been intimately acquainted, detailing the triggers and how vulnerable I am to sudden changes in behaviour to these stimuluses. I often analogise my illness with that of someone with a severe peanut allergy in hopes they’ll understand the occasional extreme response to sometimes-seemingly tiny things.

No amount of explaining induces understanding. Seems like people either are the types to be understanding without explanation or won’t even after very careful explanation. In fact, explaining my vulnerabilities to the latter just makes me more vulnerable — after all if I tell you what triggers me and you want to draw out a response, I just give away exactly how to do it. And if people need me to act crazy in order to feel blameless then I just make it a whole lot easier.

Put now that the penny has finally dropped, I can just see it for exactly what it is and say to myself “I’m being played.” and not respond. I don’t have to bear any malice or feel vindictive, I can hang out with the people who get me, and who like me for my good qualities. I know those good qualities outweigh my illness a zillion fold and people who know me well know that too.

So, back to the dog. While realising this I started to see him in a different light too. Not as a bad dog, but a set of learned responses that need love, support and guidance to be replaced with ones which foster good relationships with the outside world, instead of ones that keep getting us in trouble. And while I’m doing that I can appreciate his good qualities and love him as much as I’ve loved the previous two.

Charlie Sheen induces not an iota of interest in me. I watched very few of his films and avoided the sitcom because it bored me. I love sitcoms but relate very little to him or his.

I read and blog a lot about mental health issues. I relate to the subject as someone trying to recover from my own issues. And I relate to comedies about people with foibles they actively try to overcome. Don’t even get me started about “Scrubs” – I love it so much I’ll gush embarrassingly.

So when the Sheen story oddness escalated and the various media put forward proclaimed pundits who bandied terms like “manic” and “bipolar disorder” I started to notice. I suffer from a mood disorder and, perhaps mistakenly, believe the more celebrities who come forward with their issues, the more normal and acceptable people will find it. Or at least just start seeing it as an illness rather than a moral failing. So I started to pay attention the endless replays on his recent television interviews.

I listened and draw conclusions based on nothing professional at all; however, I believe he’s neither manic, nor suffering from anxiety and narcolepsy as some suggest. I’ll put my chip on a square in the furthest corner of the “What’s wrong with Charlie” pool – narcissism.

I grew up with a narcissist – my father. I say grew up with rather than “was raised by” because he assumed no responsibility for raising me. When I was young I was lived in a boarding school 8,000 miles away. During high school I lived at home and my dad lived in bars and with various girlfriends. At one point he married one – his third and very much his briefest marriage (there was one more marriage to come) but never admitted it me until years later.

Why I believe Sheen exhibits narcissistic traits is the delusions of grandeur he displays. My dad talked the same talk. His drinking would never affect him, his constitution was too damn strong and he was going to live past 100 – his conviction on those points never wavered. Gods spoke to him in dreams. When wanting to impress someone he concocted stories – one day he’d say he worked as a lawyer, the next a doctor and another a real estate magnate. Towards the end of his life he convinced people he’d won the lottery and ended up “loaning” (i.e. he never got the money back) most of his (very good!) civil service final salary pension went to people around him in order to keep hold his aged entourage around him. Needless to say I ended up with no money when he passed away, in spite of on paper being the largest beneficiary on paper.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not at all bitter about that last one. I feel no ownership of money that was never mine. Admittedly I often feel I inherited horrible luck, however, just by dint of having that man as a dad.

While initially being interested in Charlie Sheen’s story, perhaps even ready to feel some empathy for him – after all, I suffer from a mood disorder and PTSD – my experiences with my dad mean I try and sometimes fail to have so much sympathy — for narcissistic personalities.

Let me stop you thinking something right here. I understand the negative connotations of the word “narcissism” but I utterly reject the concept personality traits, even disorders, carry a moral component. They may, practically, make people difficult or impossible to live with or even befriend for long periods, but I see any illness, either learned or suddenly afflicted as unfortunate, not immoral. If you take one thing from my blog posts let it be this: people with any sort of illness aren’t inherently contemptible; nobody chooses to be unwell, regardless of the cause.

The people I admire are those who choose to get well, to overcome or at least not be defeated by being unwell. I don’t see that with Sheen – I see the usual traits – blaming everyone else for everything, needing to be the centre of attention, the delusions of grandeur, etc. And I’ve seen enough of that for one lifetime. And Sheen surrounds himself with an admiring, if not outright sycophantic entourage, so he’ll never want for reassurance and never flinch in his beliefs. Who I do feel sorry for are the people who worked on the show who lost their jobs due to the row.

I suppose, like anyone, when I do see someone who has issues I secretly hope for some sort of breakthrough, some moment of clarity where they can see the outcome of their actions and at least, however hidden from view, feel remorse for the damage and destruction they may have caused others. I know, wishful thinking and not realistic.

So as I watch the news I do say to myself, “I’m really glad I’m not him.” To me no amount of money or fame can make me happy or make me healthy – in my case continuing to explore my illness, owning my behaviour and continually trying to get better suits me much better than being a successful narcissist. I only have to think of my father to remember that.

I am absolutely delighted to tell you that you and the rest of the News IT Support team have won the Team News Award for your outstanding contribution to News. There was a record number of votes cast this year – over a thousand – so it’s a huge credit to you all that you have won from such a deserving field.

Helen

The “you” refers to the team leaders, not me personally.

The “feelgood factor” evades support mostly – we dish it out but don’t get much back. This really made my morning reading this, and I feel proud to be part of a team that garners such praise. Most of us very consciously do work hard to provide a good experience for users and it makes it worthwhile when they notice the effort.

I don’t know if this will be any defence in preventing the impending re-grading from Grade 6 to Grade 5 as part of the support cost cuttings mandated recently, but it can’t hurt. I’m feeling a bit more positive at any rate.

Everyone knows the feeling: the penny drops and suddenly things make sense. That happened recently when I started learning about Post-Traumatic Stress.

Before starting my current job with the BBC I saw a therapist for about a year. We ended the sessions because she only did fixed appointment times and shift work made that impossible.

My therapist didn’t like labels so didn’t generally name conditions — she just dealt with ways to cope. But like my approach to working in IT, I need to know the root cause for problems, so I pressed the issue and she told me I suffered primarily from Post-Traumatic Stress. I took a few psychology courses as electives in when I was an undergraduate, and thought I knew all about PTS – it was what afflicted battle-fatigued solders. She pointed out abuse victims suffer from it as well, possibly more commonly. Women tended to suffer more than men, in fact.

I tucked that info away in my brain. I usually research things to death but I didn’t look into it further this time. I just assumed I understood the condition.

I started to become more cognizant of “triggers” and how serious they were, and to the extent they were responsible for my depression. I used to wonder why depression sometimes just started in a moment, like someone flipped a switch and turned it on. Triggers.

Abuse victims – physical, emotional and sexual — 3-5 times more likely to develop PTSD than those who did not face childhood abuse, depending on which study you read.

A National Institute of Justice (2003) report, based on an analysis of the 1995 National Survey of Adolescents (NSA), found a 4- to 5-fold increase in the lifetime prevalence of PTSD among sexually assaulted boys (28.3%) over that in boys who had not been sexually assaulted (5.4%). The rates in girls were similar, at 29.8% and 7.1%, respectively. The lifetime prevalence of PTSD in girls who were either physically assaulted or received physically abusive punishment compared to those who did not were 27.4% and 6%, respectively, while the rates in boys were 15.2% and 3.1%, respectively.

Source:http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/916007-overview

Recent evidence shows neglect also may be a serious factor in lifetime PTSD. One study found the incidence of PTSD higher in children from care and foster homes than in combat veterans.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_care

Sadly I dealt with both abuse and neglect for most of my childhood so I guess it’s hardly surprising I became afflicted with the illness. A couple of years back the condition was badly exacerbated by a week riddled with disaster – a friend’s untimely passing, my dog getting cancer, losing the support of close friends through both general circumstance and pugnacity. Soon after I lost my job, a victim of severe depression and an utterly un-sympathetic employer. Soon after that my dog passed away. I spent the next 5 months in bed, unable to work and, I’ve come to realise, my condition worsened.

I started thoroughly researching the topic recently, when I found myself suddenly dealing with something that was triggering me. It was something, as best as I can figure, stirred very deep panic and anxiety of the neglect and abandonment. I mentioned it to the person who was triggering me and hoped for a little time to develop a way to de-sensitise but for whatever reason the frequency increased rather than decreased, which of course just caused increasingly intense crises and so on, until suicidal ideation became all-consuming.

I spent the last week or so in a dis-associative daze, if you know me well you’ll know how bad it’s been. When away from work I numb myself as best I can, or take long baths and giving as much attention as humanly possible to whatever is on the radio – anything to stop thinking. When I let myself think my thoughts fell into some deep dark places. They got bad enough that I found myself in the back of ambulance on the way to the local hospital to be assessed. The psychiatric nurse explained the psychiatric ward was probably the worst place to be for someone with depression.

Dis-association describes the phenomenon of feeling your actions are on auto-pilot, you watch your life happening without feeling a part of it or feeling much at all. This phase enables fairly unabashed suicidal ideation. You start to think it would be interesting to watch without the fear that normally prevents it: how much will it hurt? You tend to believe you won’t feel anything at all, just note the experience with bemused indifference until you stop thinking altogether. I can’t really explain it better than that.

I continued reading whatever I could find about the condition. Trawling through google hits I found this article which perfectly explained what I had been experiencing for the last couple of years.

Last night I stumbled over another trigger and had trouble sleeping or coping at all with the anxiety. I struggled badly with the suicidal ideation this morning, but having been prescribed anti-anxiety medicine just for these occasions and not having to work, I medicated, I kept my mind off it by chatting online with online pals and sleeping until it subsided enough to function again. Sadly, this probably describes the holidays of many many people also suffering from the condition; some will even be admonished for “ruining it for everybody else.”

Post-Traumatic Stress falls under the umbrella of anxiety disorders. I knew for a long time the issue doctors called depression failed to consider the anxiety. I remember having one assessment from an NHS psychiatrist where I nearly begged to him find a treatment for the anxiety. He told me he knew best and it was depression that needed treating. I always knew I could manage the depression fairly well as long as the anxiety was kept at bay. Now I understand why, have come a little further in accepting an illness as an illness and not a despicable moral flaw and can try to start building as safe and supportive environment as possible while I get help (much easier said than done, I do realise that).

So the next step is to try to convince my GP to help me find help for the PTS rather than just pharmacological treatment for depression. Also much easier said, than done.

I want to mention three bits of media I serendipitously stumbled on in the last couple of weeks.

First is a Canadian programme, Being Erica. Maybe a bit too chick-lit for guys, but it has really grown on me. It’s about a Jewish woman with a few issues and a therapist capable of time travel and quick costume changes. Basically she goes back into time and relives her worst moments in hopes of changing the outcome.

Episode two of the current series reminded me so much of some of my past conflicts that it was spooky! And the message was one I agree with whole heartedly: you can solve conflict, if you really want to solve it, by talking *and* listening to each other.

A great episode and worth a watch.

Watch Series 2 Episode “Battle Royale” on 4oD.

Lennon Naked is an interesting re-enactment of John Lennon’s issues dealing with relationships. The film attempts to explain Lennon’s propensity to behave badly to the important people in his life with his childhood abandonment by his father. I found the the scene where Lennon describes the anguish of waiting for a father that never comes particular poignant and frighteningly familiar.

Christopher Eccleston and Chris Fairbanks both give surprisingly low key performances.

There’s no iPlayer version but the final airing is this Friday on BBC4 at 23:40.

Full description and clips here.

Finally, I found the last piece on this Radio 4′s All In The Mind this week particularly interesting. It explains the effects of social deprivation on solitary confinement prisoners. Solitary confinement presents the extreme case of social deprivation but I think it’s easy to extrapolate that isolating from other people for extended periods can do very bad things to your mental state.

Listen here – at 23:00 minutes in exactly if you prefer to just hear the piece on social deprivation.

When I was a junior in high school (third of four years for those who don’t know the American system) I took a history class entitled “Advanced Placement European History.” The coursework for the class consisted entirely of a 10-page (circa 2500-3000 words) paper due every 4th week, on the topic in history we discussed. At the end of the year students took a test graded 1-5, 5 being the highest. A score of 4 or 5 got you out of taking a semester of History in University. I scored a 3.

I enjoyed the class but in those days I had no real parenting so no structure. My father worked days and mostly went out drinking at night – there was a bar in our apartment complex so no hassle getting home for him, just a short walk indoors to get home. My father prevented contact with my mother after she was hospitalized around 10 years before.

I lacked any pro-activity whatsoever. I also digested material very fast and wrote well (I wanted to be a journalist back then, so as a point of pride slavishly followed rules of grammar and punctuation and attempted writing in active voice).

So I wrote and researched almost in one go, thanks to the invention of erasable bond typing paper. This is in 1982 folks and already my father said no to my having a computer, on account of being a girl or something similar. I wanted an Atari back then, but would have settled for a TRS-80. I used to dream of word processing! The closest thing I had to a computer was weekly trips down to Wilbur Wright Community College to use their PLATO.

I always waited until the last minute. I went to the high school library and checked out as many books about European history as I could. I brought them home and arranged them in a semi-circle on the living-room floor and lay in the middle, skimming and making notes, bookmarking the pages I wanted to quote. Remember folks, it’s nothing without attribution.

When I was satisfied that I knew the “story” of that particular epoch of European history, I put my little typing table, and my little Smith-Corona electric typewriter (so small they told you to use an “l” as a 1 and had no “1″ key). I typed a flurry of fact in narrative form, stopping periodically to kneel down by the books on the floor to find the quote I needed to back up my version.

Around about 10 p.m., give or take an hour, I’d hear keys jingling in time with a slow gate. Then the sound that shot panic through my core – the sound of keys in the front door.

When not doing homework those sounds sent me into a flash of activity – turn off the lights and television and hide behind my bedroom door before the door opened. But even if I disappeared there was no way my books did, which meant an angry pound on the door. I waited for it instead.

“It” was my dad issuing a long diatribe about my making a mess of the living room, complete with shouting, swearing and an inability to stop once he’d made his point. I’d eventually start shouting back, trying to explain he should be proud of me, I was staying up late doing homework, wasn’t what good kids did? Remember my father was Indian – grades mean everything. Mostly As weren’t good enough.

After a while of this I’d end up in tears, begging for support. I cried for two reasons, an incomprehensible but strong sense of arbitrary injustice, and a desperate need for love and support, a need that was never, ever met. Not once. Seriously. Not once in my teenage years do I remember my dad saying a single encouraging or supportive word. Unless you count the day I told him I decided to get my degree in Journalism. He said, “That’s a good field for a girl.” My brother studied electrical engineering and became even more of a hero to my father.

When I broke down I cried hard, begging, “Why are you doing this to me?” “Why can’t you be proud of me?” I wanted support. Here was the person I depended on to be my entire family, my provider of food and shelter and he was generally just a stranger shouting at me. I became increasingly desperate for support and increasingly depressed not to get any. I started self injuring, struggling with suicidal ideation and para-suicide.

I still find myself, more than two decades later, still wanting love and support and never finding it. I cling to people desperately and offer them everything and then some, just for giving me a modicum of support. The irony here is that I most need support when I suffer a rejection of some sort. Rejection triggers in me such intense feelings of insecurity I regress way further than those teen years, those first few years of depression. I go back to being needy as a small child, maybe 4 or 5 years old — the last time my dad showed me any love and support — before my parents separated.

The scene usually ended the same way. I couldn’t stop crying and my dad would start shouting, “Stop crying!” Eventually he’d put his hand on the phone and tell me I was crazy, and he was going to call the hospital and have me put away like he did my mother. I just kept crying or begging him to leave me alone, and he’d take a bottle, a glass and a box of Marlboro reds into his bedroom. Or sometimes I’d go into my room, slam the door and he’d drink and smoke and watch TV for a while. I’d wait in my room and when he’d gone to sleep I’d get up and finish my paper. I usually finished in the small hours of the night, which was fine; it gave a certain amount of bragging rights amongst the brighter kids.

How do I still, so often, end up in situations where I’m being rejected, where I find myself crying and begging for love and support (usually right after the person I’m begging has rejected me)? Oh all sorts of ways. I just do. It’s called repetition compulsion and is common with people suffering with post-traumatic stress.

We subconsciously recreate the situation hoping for a different outcome. According to current thinking, repetition with a different outcome does actually normalize a more positive experience:

The patient, in order to be helped, must undergo a corrective emotional experience suitable to repair the traumatic influence of previous experiences. It is of secondary importance whether this corrective experience takes place during treatment in the transference relationship, or parallel with the treatment in the daily life of the patient. — The corrective emotional experience (1946)

Franz Alexander

I’ve never managed to recreate the pattern in therapeutic situations, because I’ve never managed to get to a point of “transference.” I’ve only gotten that sort of emotional dependency from personal relationships, and sadly I’ve never changed the outcome.

Instead I often recreate the old scene in personal relationships. I cry and beg and berate myself. I become suicidal and self injure. Well not actually self injure, more just hammer myself with drink and drugs until I can cope better. I become more and more desperate for the love and support I still crave. I fail with people 99% of the time. I faired better with dogs – they do give you unconditional support. But there’s no conflict with dogs, and no praise or even reassurance. Just doggie affection. It’s lovely but not enough to change my deepest, darkest fear – that someone I depend on emotionally will stick around and support me when I hurt, and praise me when I do something worthy.

True to form, I recreate the same pattern. None of the praise I seek; rejection followed by me melting down, begging for support (and begging to undo being spurned); when I get desperate I generally get labels – “crazy” “psycho” (or the ever popular “psycho bitch.”) or any of a number of references to my mental state and nearly as many reminders “I need professional help.”

I equate that, on many levels, with that old scene with my father.

I keep hoping to someday find a partner who will give me enough love and support and patience to help me learn not to panic, but so far I’ve only found the same old scene. And as I grow older, I lose hope and grow weary of hoping.

The “article” claims the BBC is offering a Facebook course. Just to put the facts right, the course is actually a tutorial in “Making The Web Work For You” and the description is:

A one day course using PC’s in the training room. It will provide delegates with practical socal media and internet tools they can embed in their journalism. It will enable journalists and producers to find original stories, case studies and pictures using the latest web techniques. As part of the course delegates will learn how to use an RSS aggregator, the power of real time search engines, use their own Twitter account and start social bookmarking effectively.

I consider this article to be deliberately pugilistic at worst and misleading at best.

I work in a technical support position at the BBC and speak to people falling into many different age groups and levels technical expertise. Many people, especially older people, are still getting up to speed with web-based media. After all, they work in television and radio and have done long before there was a World Wide Web. If they don’t get up to speed with “new media” they call us and ask questions and we do our best to help, which also incurs internal charges. Having one tutor teach many people at one time is, in fact, more cost efficient than lots of people calling a few people every time they have a question about using things like RSS or social media.

As the BBC don’t discriminate on the basis of age, they’re hardly going to be sacked for having to adjust to new ways of doing things. The Sun’s condemnation the BBC trying to train staff smacks of trying to spin something beneficial into something expensive and foolish. The course helps people do their jobs more effectively with the latest tools. That’s a good thing; don’t believe the hype.

Flickr provides a setting to prevent downloading, but by default various sizes of your images are available for download.

When you prevent a user from downloading, you also disable Flickr’s link to multiple sizes of the image:

Flickr’s scripts then also disable saving the image on screen by “right-clicking” on the image and choosing a “save as” option — only a generic single-colour gif will be downloaded instead of the actual image.

To set the default downloading and viewing permissions:

1. Once signed in to Flickr, click on your account name
2. Click the Privacy & Permissions tab
3. Click edit

From here you can select who you want, by default, to be able to see all sizes of and to be able download your images.

Click here to find the link and further information about creating a Flickr Alias.

http://flickr.com/YOURALIAS will now link to Flickr photostream.

The news that @StephenFry, a huge proponent of Twitter, wanted to quit using Twitter because of the “too much aggression and unkindness around” spread quickly past the Twitterati and unto the online pages of the nation’s newspapers.

I love Twitter and look forward to seeing Fry’s tweets throughout the day. I admit, I tend to put people like him on pedestals. When I say “people like him” I mean the modern Renaissance man – funny, intelligent, successful at everything, larger-than-life sort of people. I never had any parenting to speak of and I like to think of my father as an utter dick (to prevent me from using stronger expletives), so I suspect deep down I still crave some childhood hero worship.

I also empathise with Stephen Fry in many ways. Like him I am a long-suffering long-term Mac lover, pre-web geek, and well-known for my bouts with my dysthymia. I wanted to immediately take his side, beg him to stay on Twitter and continue to enjoy interesting snippets from the day-to-day life of Mr. Fry.

I think what happened to Stephen is what I call “being broadsided,” when something comes at you from just beyond your peripheral vision and the impact knocks you off kilter. Like Fry, I battle depression and during particularly bad patches knocking me over takes little effort. Cumulative criticism engenders even deeper despair.

Everyone knows the downside of Internet-based communication. The screen acts as a sort of an emotional screen as well, and things we’d never say to someone in normal conversation we type for our own and others’ amusement with little awareness of the flesh and blood and feelings on the other side of the ascii bridge. Because this sort of refuge provides convenient cover for people suffering from various developmental difficulties and disorders, I’m told by something of an expert, it may hold greater appeal to those emotionally stunted. Admittedly, since I work in IT and used to socialise with people in IT, my point of view possibly poorly relates to others in the non-geek world.

So a twitterer called @brumplum tweeted Fry was boring, and Fry happened to read it. In a depressed phase, feeling sensitive and vulnerable he recoiled, he blocked @brumplum and swore off Twitter. This too makes perfect sense to me.

Poorly developed empathy abounded in my geek world, and situations similar to those experienced between @brumplum and @stephenfry arise often. I especially draw this sort of fire having gotten on the wrong side of a group of IT people coalesced on a once-popular IT mailing list, and occasionally on a corresponding chat room. Once groupthink set in, abusive behaviour towards me became popular comedy amongst some; others lent support but asked to do so anonymously – they use the list for networking and publicly supporting me was often quoted as being “too political.”

During (not necessarily because of) this period, my low-level dysthymia worsened to the point of severe depression. Other reasons included losing two people close to me, one to suicide, my beautiful dog suffering from cancer and a job at Blackberry I can only compare to being a recruit in Deepcut barracks. The abusive treatment further peppered my battle weariness (which is a poor metaphor for severe depression) with flack. Just like Stephen Fry I mustered up the best defence a depressed person can, I tried to prevent further damage by putting the abusers on ignore and / or blocking them. This leads to very weird-looking one-sided conversations on IRC or Facebook at times, but I quickly got used to that. I prefered it to the risk of further psycnological injury while recovering from a very serious battle with clinical depression.

Fry overreacted when he threatened to leave Twitter, but again I understand the instinct. Most depressives I know hide when they feel assaulted by life. And we don’t know how much crap someone with nearly a million followers pulls in on a daily basis.

What @brumplum said to @stephenfry I personally found in no way abusive, I should point out. I generally get comments more along the lines of (well exactly as): !- leica was kicked from #uknot by a***a [in the words of doctor evil: shush. you're hated because you go on like this, you crazy tart]. That was the latest, I don’t really want to look for more.

Fighting severe depression leaves you drained, constantly tired, irritable, and therefore fairly defenceless to attack, whatever the severity. Depression also marks you as a soft target, so, while you spend most of your waking moments staving off physical exhaustion and daydreams of demise, the type of people who need to inflict pain in order to experience the pleasure of momentary power subconsciously seek you out.

Those are the types of people who went after @brumplum and @alandavies1 in the aftermath of the Stephen Fry debacle. Alan Davies defended Fry, as a good friend should, and got flamed for it. @brumplum received rabid and undeserved flames for abusing Fry, who many refer to as “a national treasure.”

Both Fry and @brumplum sorted out their differences quickly, delayed only by Fry’s being on a plane to LA and therefore incommunicado. @brumplum apologised for what he said, and @stephenfry apologised for overreacting. A modicum of communication ended a raging tempest in a twitterpot. Kudos to both of them for being adults. It restores my faith in humanity, as they say, to see people working out differences simply by communicating.

Needless to say the idiots who bullied @brumplum and @alandavies1 continued for days afterwards. I found this to be true of several people in my situation as well. Some people just don’t know how or when to stop lashing out.

Being in a fairly good place and recovering from the depression that plagued me last year, I have the same instinct as @stephenfry and @brumplum, to try to be an adult and hold out olive branches. It’s still a one-sided proposition so far; most of the angry mini-mob who enjoyed kicking me while I was down still enjoy kicking me while I’m up – sometimes overtly but in many very subtle ways too.

Without benefit of the accord @stephenfry and @brumplum arrived at so easily, I try to understand why people need people like me as punching bags. I concluded at some point in the past or the present they are or were punching bags too, perhaps depressed as well, and find myself, over time, feeling sorry for them rather than hurt or angry.