(no subject)

I'm reading two books that were suggested to me by other people, and they're both changing the way I'm thinking about things.

One is "The myth of normal" by Gabor Maté, talking about the relationship between body and mind, the way mental health and physical health affect each other, etc. What he says and how he explains it makes a lot of sense. One thing is that we all have some sort of little-t traumas that affects how we react to things in ways we aren't really conscious of; also there are personality traits that tend to correspond with autoimmune diseases, not causally in the new-agey victim-blaming "disease is just a manifestation of repressed trauma so all you need to do is think happy thoughts", but just that there's some sort of link.

The other is "No Bad Parts" by Richard Schwartz, which proposes an Internal Family System model of the mind where we are composed of separate "parts" each with their own personalities and preferences; often some of these parts get stuck in roles that started out protective and become destructive, but working with these parts can change how they function, e.g. inner critics become cheerleaders or whatever. It's basically "everyone has multiples, like with dissociative identity disorder but without the dissociation or fracturing". As far as I can tell there's no real evidence for IFS (and "lol we all have multiple personalities" feels flippant, much like "we're all a little adhd") but it might make a good metaphorical framework for figuring things out, I don't quite know.

(no subject)

I dreamed that there was a family reunion at a probably-Chicago-area pizza restaurant (where some of the deep-dish pizzas were around $100 and we were ordering like 10 or 12 so it was over a thousand dollars just for the pizza) when suddenly I found myself in the car with my mom who had decided to drive around the block or something... only she missed the street it was on (didn't turn early, which we'd done the first time, and then there was construction). I was worried because we has a thousand dollars of pizza that would be ready soon, but my mom was totally unconcerned. "I'll just do a U-turn at the next light." Only the next intersection had no-u-turn signs. "That's okay we'll get the next one." I could see several blocks worth of no-u-turn signs so I begged her to just turn left instead (since doing left-left-left-right gets you the same direction as a u-turn if the streets are a grid) but she was just insistent that u-turns were easier.

Side note: I've been doing the NYT crossword puzzle for a few years and they occasionally have UEY or UIE as the spelling of the colloquial short form of u-turn. It's probably u-ey or u-ie, but dashes don't get included (nor do accents, and I wince every time I have to enter "year in Spanish" (should be año, not ano)... not that "tomorrow in Spanish" is much better (manana just looks wrong)) and uey just ... doesn't work written down.

Anyway the whole "driver keep trying for the default (u-turn) even when a different option (left) is actually better in the circumstances" thing feels... kinda like a message about life, especially given the IFS framework (previous post). I had a friend who enjoyed interpreting dreams and one thing she said is that family in your dreams usually represent aspects of yourself, rather than being your actual family. Or at least that holds if the dream setup is "you as little kid, plus family as they were then" rather than "you as you are now, plus family as they are now", which was the case here. (So like if my dream is me as an adult doing stuff with my sister's kids, that's them, but if my dream is me as a kid with my sister also as a kid, that's me.) I'm not sure if I buy that universally but it's plausible here.