Slogging....

Slogging my way through a bit of a creative dry spell, doing the things that I know help...exercise, sunshine, decent food.

On yesterday's walk, it was cloudy when I started out. A half mile down the road was sunshine. Mike was bringing out his trash at the top of the hill and I had a chance to chat with him. Mike is in his mid-70s and was in Vietnam. He "walked point" and saw action. At the start of his deployment he was mocked for being short. Nobody mocked him after the first in-theater dust-up. After coming back home he had many health issues due to Agent Orange.

He is a cheerful fellow in spite of all that.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Psychology is a "science" where information has a five-year half-life. By the time a researcher gets his Ph.D. and starts teaching students, 3/4 of what he "discovered" is considered B.S.

That rapid turnover means that even GOOD research gets ignored if it is old.

Here is some research from 2006 that is primarily about PTSD but it also applies to victims of Criminal Sexual Assault, Aggravated Assault and Child Abuse.

Structural and Functional Brain Changes in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

10% reduction in Hippocampal volume in women who experienced Criminal Sexual Assault as children

Relationship in verbal processing ability and hippocampal volume. Red regression line added by me, ERJ. 50% reduction in verbal processing ability is suggested.

The medial prefrontal cortex modulates cognitive con-
trol of the anxiety response and is probably essential
for habituation in normative stress reactions. ...as stress
or anxiety increase, this mechanism may become impaired,
resulting in unmodified limbic activity and thus exagger-
ated responses

Further dyscontrol may result from stress-induced brain
damage. Studies in animal models of stress suggest that
experimentally induced stressors result in structural and
functional damage to brain regions, including the hip-
pocampus. It has been postulated that hippocampal dam-
age disrupts the normal negative feedback of the HPA axis,
resulting in excessive exposure to cortisol and related cel-
lular toxicity. These hypotheses are as yet unproven (in humans as-of 2006)

Stress has permanent, negative impacts on the control and emotional regulation circuits in our brain.

Think about some kid 100,000 years ago hearing a rustling of the leaves, a snake striking out and killing members of his family. His brain rewires. The rustling of leaves bypasses slow, modulated, thoughtful responses and he simply levitates away from the sound.

Our brains are still running the same operating system that we evolved with.

High cortisol levels and extended periods of high emotional "jags" are not your brain's friend.

The repeated confrontations of agitators with ICE agents is turning some of the agent's control and emotional regulation circuits to rubble. Those auditory attacks are reducing the agents ability to hear and process verbal commands from their supervision. 

I believe that is intentional on the part of the agitators. Their handlers want dead bodies for the news and they don't care whose bodies they were.