A more careful write-up of unwinding.

Earlier, I did a brain dump about unwinding pain, and how it can feel, and more. Now I’d like to go over my hypothesis in more compact, organized form

The fascia can create bindings that put one or more joints in your body out of proper, neutral, alignment. Some of these bindings are correlated bindings, and they need to be approached by realigning two parts of your body, releasing both (or possibly “all” if there are 3+) sides of the binding at once.

The fascia does this, so your body can still act as a bipedal human, when you’re injured, or, suffered a near dislocation. You’re more clumsy and less precise (after all, your body has restricted your range of motion!), but you’re able to act to preserve your life (for example), which means this is probably an evolutionary adaption. Later, when you heal up, the fascia remembers your normal bodily alignment, and “encourages” you to put yourself back to rights. How? By making you hurt of course! You feel uncomfortable, when your body isn’t properly aligned. If you’ve had a simple injury, you’ll probably heal back, and your fascia will cause you to undo any bindings it’s created, until all stiffness and limits on range of motion go away.

The thing is, the fascia can do this, even if you’re already injured, and already subluxated. And if your fascia gets tangled up with a second injury, while the first one is still healing, you might end up with tangles in your fascia you can’t undo on your own, because you no longer have range of motion to break the correlated bindings.

That’s what happened to me. My base subluxation was in my TMJ region. There are a lot of muscles and nerves in that region, and it is not a good place to have this kind of mal-alignment in your body. But worse, I had additional bindings, that kept my TMJ locked down. Until I started to mobilize both hips, and both shoulders, my TMJ wasn’t going to start mobilizing. The net effect of this was, I first broke bindings, and started living in hell, in 2010. Today, in 2026, sixteen long years later, I’m feeling well enough to write up what’s wrong with me, before I die. I’m not better – I just know that the words should be on the internet, before I die. I don’t know I’ll get better. I just know I need to post a warning to others.

I’m not joking about being in hell, either. The one reason I don’t like posting what I’m posting is, look, I’ll be honest: I think I’m one of the toughest people out there, the kinda guy who won’t bump himself off, no matter how bad things get, and I wouldn’t have bet twenty dollars on surviving sixteen long, horrible, years, where every single moment was filled with pain, and other issues.

Next: unbound, tangles in your fascia create a gentle path for muscle and bone to follow, to get back to normal (or closer to normal) alignment. If it’s a small amount of your body unwinding, you might barely notice a kind of twisty-twitching happening. However, as I approach a binding, the unwinding feels tighter, and eventually, I can sense sore spots, where I need to manipulate my body to apply pressure to those sore spots, and break the binding they represent.

Now: unwinding causes neurological pain, which I assume comes from the fascia, which is loaded with sensory nerves. This can overwhelm your brain, and cause some seizure like effects, as well as a host of other problems. I believe that these could mimic, or be the cause, of issues like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia. It could mimic chronic depression, or PTSD, and, ordinary measures to treat depression, or PTSD, wouldn’t help, because they wouldn’t address the real pain a person is feeling.

There’s one other oddity. Because my body is twisted up, weird things sometimes happen to my body. I can have projectile vomiting, or severe diarrhea, for example – projectile vomiting comes from the abdomen, did you know that? I got to learn…. But as important,I’m sure sometimes, muscle spasms close off my veins in the pelvic region. This would cause my heart to only partially fill, and cause me to get light-headed, and possibly faint – my heart would be pushing against blood that’s slightly bound in returning, so my blood pressure would be high, but there wouldn’t be enough fresh, oxygenated blood to keep me fully conscious. If my hips are in spasm, then I can have little flickers in and out of consciousness, which would look like a tonic clonic seizure to the naked eye. I don’t know if it would register as one on an EEG immediately, but, if your brain jumps between “barely conscious” to “mostly conscious” for long enough, I imagine it affects your brain’s functioning, and hence, the EEG. One of the biggest insights I had over the years was, neurology isn’t (necessarily) about what’s going on inside your head. It’s more of a question of whether your head can handle all your body’s signalling. That’s why you see patients seizing, or getting anti-seizure meds, in fictional emergency departments. A patient who was shot, or in a motor vehicle accident, might have such crazy signaling reaching their brain, that their brain can’t take it.

Just like happens to me, under much less injurious circumstances.

Now, I’ve spent 16 years learning how my body works, and spending significant amounts of time in strange mental states, and it took me twelve years to realize my problem was pain, and another four to figure out that it would look, in effect, like a seizure. This doesn’t mean seizure disorders are all caused by neuro pain, but, it strongly suggests that some people would do better if we fixed their neuro pain specifically, rather than trying to stop the seizure directly, and ignoring the pain component. Treat the cause, not the symptom, when possible. The better we get at understanding, and blocking, neurological pain, the better medications, with fewer side effects, we’ll be able to find (or so we hope).

Neuro pain can prevent sleep; that can cause a person to show all symptoms of bipolar disorder. Lack of sleep can cause mania; neuro pain can mimic depression. Bipolar meds might actually be blocking pain, on some level, or, for some people. It’s interesting that anti-seizure meds sometimes also work for bipolar disorder. Again, this suggests that better targeted pain reduction could eliminate the damaging sleep-deprivation-unto-mania cycle, and, that might be all some people need.

Finally, folks who are in neurological pain can mumble to themselves, because there are pain signals flooding their brain, and sometimes expresses as random vocalizations. They might look dangerous, especially if and when they are very low on resources. Some day, I hope people will ask folks like me, “I’m sorry, sir/ma’am, are you in pain? Do you need a quiet place to rest for a few minutes?” instead of threatening us because we fit a profile of a dangerous person. When I’m low on resources, everything hurts, and I can just barely stay focused to speak in complete sentences. Also, there’s a lot to being human that you do on automatic, and suddenly, for me, I can’t do them on automatic any longer. For these and other reasons, understanding is nice to receive, and quiet rest is doubly valuable, when we’re triggered, and using all of our resources to appear “normal,” and still can’t manage it.

The more I think about my own unusual case, the more sure I am that there’s a lot of people suffering, without understanding what’s going on in their bodies. I hope I can change that, and maybe help figure out how to treat cases like mine.

Scream_5 essay

If I loved you, I’d do it, so I try to do it, and it doesn’t work, so I try again, and it still doesn’t work, and I get into a rage with myself, summoning all of my adrenaline, and I still can’t do it, and I want to throw a tantrum, just throw myself down on the floor and scream for a while, but it doesn’t do any good and leaves you with a sore throat. Hey, eventually, you try everything, and I do mean everything. Slap the wall, that hurts enough, to wake you up for moment, and you can hope you stay awake, but you never do. It didn’t even work for your parents, once the fear and adrenaline rush of a spanking wore off, so why would it work for you, when you know how noisy and whiny your stupid brain is?

I have to do it now, you see, if I loved you, I’d do it, but not “someday,” I’d do it now, you see, right now, and sure, the best time to plant an oak is a hundred years ago, next best is today, but you could have been too exhausted the whole effing hundred years! You can’t wait for your body to get better, you have to live your life, with other people, now! If you don’t, you’ll die, so….

 

(no subject)

I’m finding a bigotry that exists in the Democratic Party, and it’s annoying as hell, and, I need to talk about it. There’s this idea, that, if a man is a bad boyfriend, it makes him a terrible person. Now, don’t get me wrong: a man who hits a woman is a bad boyfriend, and guilty of a serious crime; one who screams and is severely threatening is almost as bad. But let’s back up.

A man who deliberately rages, in a manner that makes a woman feel afraid for her physical safety, so that the man gets his way, that’s practically the same thing as using physical force to settle a matter, because it uses the threat of physical force. Robbing with a gun in your hand is a lot worse than purse snatching for a reason. That’s a good rule, but it ignores the possibility that someone will be rageful, and feel a need to express it, for a reason that isn’t actually real, and present.

Let’s take another step back. Let’s say someone is like me – they’re in a lot of pain, they don’t even know it yet, and they feel rage, and they’re expressing it, even if they’re not directly threatening someone. Is that a healthy relationship partner? No, but it’s not that someone’s fault, and, it might save a life to say “hey, some joker I met on the internet says, maybe you’re in a lot of pain, without realizing it, and maybe that’s why you have such a temper.” But right there, we might have room in our model for a Graham Platner.

Graham Platner had some stupid, boyish, ideas that he claims he got knocked out of his head. He had a skull-and-bones, yes, a Nazi symbol, but not one that screams Nazi, tattoo, and he’s had it removed since (at least) October of last year. And he was a bad boyfriend.

Now, me, I know a guy can be tagged as abusive, for being withdrawn, and suicidal. No rage at all.(Oh, and if you read this, bitch ex, “I’d rather rip my heart right out of my ribcage with my bare hands and throw it on the floor and stomp on it ‘til I die… (gasp)than spend… one more minute…”)

Ahem. And I know sometimes, people have conditions wherein they will be given to frequent rage-like episodes, where the only thing they can do is isolate, and rage to their heart’s content, which usually isn’t very much – acting out rage can be pretty stupid. What hurts, is holding all that rage in, so you don’t frighten anyone. A man who is in this situation, due to neurological pain he doesn’t understand, is in a bind.

You see, you can go to anger management class, but that assumes that you don’t have an invisible pain that just makes you frustrated, then angry. You can learn to fight that invisible pain, to try to tough it out, but, you’re going to feel, constantly, that you’re doing anger management wrong, because you just can’t stop getting angry. Some people are like me, they’ve been bullied all their lives, and know that they must consume excrement any time they show any untoward emotion. Other people can’t live like that, but, no one should live like that. They should know the root cause of their problems.

Let’s “pop the stack” now, and go back to Graham Platner, who has been up front that he got PTSD from serving in the Marines, in active combat zones. I don’t know if I have PTSD or not. I could have PTSD, worsened by pain, or, I could have PTSD mimicked by pain, you see? But I know that dealing with something, akin to PTSD, can very easily make you a bad boyfriend.

Just as people should listen to “I’m treating my neuro pain, and now, I remember to show affection, even when it hurts a lot to do so, because otherwise people start to hate me,” so too should people listen to Mr. Platner’s “I’ve treated my PTSD and alcoholism, and I’m not a bad boyfriend any longer.”

Popping the stack one more time, the bigotry in the Democratic Party is, they’ve taken warning signs that you should be wary of a man, and taken them as truths. Bluntly, the bigotry says “Graham Platner was a bad boyfriend, we must assume he’s abusive and maybe even a rapist. The one thing we know he is not, is a ‘good man.’” That last bit is male bovine excretia, bundled, and concentrated to absolute filth.

There is no demonstration of rage or other human emotion, no nonviolent argument, no amount of crazed (but nonviolent) activity that prevents a person from being a good person, and hence, a man, from being a good man. I know this, because I am a good man, even though few would believe it, if they saw me in a zoo, or as part of The John Palmer Show on TV. My wife would cheerfully agree to both statements; that I’m a good man, and that I have episodes that would make people doubt it. The key is, I’ve learned when, and why, to isolate, and how to control encounters, so I’m dealing with people, when I don’t have aphasia, interfering with my ability to think and speak. I can’t prevent myself from raging, not all of the time. But I can make sure everyone in the household knows, if I rage at the microwave, it’s because microwaves don’t get hurt feelings.

A good man is defined by what he does, and what effects he places in motion on this earth. He can’t be defined by fools and bigots who insist his appearance and demeanor prove he’s contempt-worthy. (You hear that, ex? Now you know why Weird Al got pulled out.) And what I try to put on this earth, is nourishment for good feelings and happiness. Sometimes, I suck at it, but sucking at it doesn’t define me, especially when I’m struggling to learn to do better.

I can’t say Graham Platner is a good man, but I can say that everyone who says he can’t be, that it’s impossible, because no one with PTSD and alcoholism is ever a bad romantic partner due to those two things, but only due to underlying personality  traits, is bigoted. People do change, even after hurting the fee-fees of three women they’ve dated.