The world is filled with substances that remove pain, provide pleasure, alter mood, and modify our minds.  Everything from the food we eat to the drugs we take, all have effects, that we may or may not seek, on our mind, our psyche.  I think of this frequently, and I’m often confronted with the question of “When does too much of a good thing become a problem?”

It is an issue that I see brought forward all over the place in society.  Here are a few examples that I want to share -

1. The US military has been using antidepressants and sleeping pills to address problems with combat fatigue.  Most of the soldiers involved simply need some time out of the combat zone, to rest and work through some of the horrors they are being exposed to.  Instead, military shrinks just give the troops some pills and send them back into it.  Later, these troops are developing PTSD at alarming rates.  We see the price that is paid when pain is not worked through in an appropriate way.
2. I am aware of number of people in completely dysfunctional relationships that suffer from considerable anxiety and depression.  These maladies are not coming out of nowhere.  They are the psyche’s way of letting us know that the environment we’re in is a bad one, and that we need to change it or leave it.  Instead, the medical community give people in dysfunctional, sometimes outright abusive relationships, medication that removes the anxiety and depression, and with it any chance the person will fix the underlying problem.  By attempting to provide relief from a problem, the medications insure the problem will never be solved.
3. Benzodiazepines are widely used, and while it is known that they are wildly addictive, what that actually means is not as well understood.  Continued use of these medications result in rapid onset of physical dependence.  The user has to continue to consume the medication to prevent withdrawl.  This is why despite numerous studies pointing out that these meds stop being effective after 2-3 weeks at the most, users continue taking them, often swearing to their continued effectiveness.  What they are effective at is staving off withdrawl.  Long term use of these drugs has numerous negative effects on the body and mind.  So we’ve given people pills to help with anxiety, but the pills put the person in a place later that even if they’ve addressed the issue causing the anxiety, they have to continue to use the drug to prevent anxiety: the anxiety caused by withdrawl.
4. Depo-provera is a highly effective birth control medication.  It is also used to chemically castrate male sex offenders.  Given that it does this by depleting the reciept’s testosterone levels, it is no wonder this drug also wipes out the sex drives of the women who use it for birth control (testosterone is a large component in female sexual libido).  I believe this isn’t a concern for most people who prescribe depo-provera, even if they are aware of this issue.  Female sexual libido is, most of the time, considered something of little importance and the loss of it has no consequence, particular in minor females.  No one stops to consider the psychic cost to the women on this medication from having thier sexuality essentially stripped from them.  Some will find fault with this “side effect” (I would argue that perhaps it isn’t a side effect) when the females involved are adults, but have no issue with it for minors.  I can tell you volumes about adult women who have serious mental health issues that were either caused by the repression of thier sexuality as a minor, or that could have been reduced if they had access to thier sexuality as a minor.

I find it particularly ironic that these and other abuses of drugs go on all the time, legally and by design, and yet the focus for concern is on recreational drug use.  The insidious part of these destructive uses of legal drugs is that no one questions them because of thier legal status.

Tell me, what do you think?  What are some other examples that you would add?

I seem to have some trouble remembering some of the lessons I’ve been taught about relationships, so perhaps I need to write them down and then I’ll be able to stop making the same mistakes over and over again.  So here goes -

1) crazy for it to be first, but it is the one that will keep me out of the most trouble if I follow it: is she doesn’t want to fuck you constantly just about from the beginning, and without much in the way of limits of what she wants to do sexually just about from the beginning, it isn’t going to change later and you need to just walk away.

2) if she is more interested in your kids or your wife than she is in you, that’s great for her relationship with them, but it isn’t going to work, and you need to just walk away.

3) if she doesn’t need you, walk away.

4) if she isn’t fairly crazy, walk away.

5) however, if her presence in your life means that you can’t have order in your life, walk away.  Tough balancing act, I know.

6) you have value, and are desirable.  If she doesn’t seem to feel this way about you, walk away.

7) if she isn’t a sexual deviant with a high sex drive, you’re just going to drive each other crazy.  Walk away.

if you find that you have to always drive the sex train, that she is compliant but never shows initiative or sexual want, walk away.  Even when dealing with a submissive, you can still expect them to show desire without prompting.  If you always have to prompt them, it will only drive you to despair.

9) if she is ok with you keeping your sexual desires to yourself, or if she shows a lack of interest in exploring your desires with you, walk away.

Well, those are the ones off the top of my head.  If you can think of any I’ve missed, please let me know so I can add them! 

The BDSM community has long identified a trend in society to brand certain kinks as ok and others as not, even though the deliniation is being made on a truly arbitrary basis.  I’m not talking about, “This is what I like to do, and those are things *I* don’t want to do.”  I’m talking about, “This is what I like to do, and therefore everyone should be ok with it.  Those are the things I do not like to do, and therfore no one should even be allowed to do those things, simply because I don’t like them.”  This isn’t how individuals express it, but these are the thoughts going on.  For example, I’ve met plenty of people into choking thier partners who don’t even consider themselves as kinky at all, and think that BDSM practitioners are bad people.  There are those that flog or cane that feel that needle play is wrong, people into intense 24×7 D/s who feel that incest role play is wrong, and it goes on and on.  A significant number of people in the community however do recognize the problem and do thier best to remove this sort of thinking from themselves and thier associates.  This is certainly a positive thing.

What puzzles me is that so few people are able to see the foolishness in this sort of thinking, and that even some that are able to see it in one context are unable to see it in another.  For example, I know a number of people that are quite upset over the restrictions placed on the trafficing of a specific mind altering substance.  The substance in particular is wine.  However, I also know that at least some of them see no problems in restrictions being placed on any number of the wide variety of mind altering substances currently being manufactured around the globe.  Isn’t this a my kink, your kink situation?  Or the legions who are concerned with various social networking site’s privacy features, but not concerned with government snooping into thier personal lives.  It is well established that information seized by the government is widely distributed into public, private and criminal markets (just ask the folks that had thier SSNs distributed after VA lost a laptop).  Again, my kink, your kink.  I just don’t get it.

You know, life it hard.  More so for some people than others, but that just means that those of us who have it easier should appreciate what we have all the more.  So it never ceases to amaze me that so many people, particularly those who have been given a really shit roll of the dice in life, won’t take an easy rode to security or success when it is put in front of them.  Some people just always have to do it the hard way…

Just wanted folks to know that my phone is broken.  So I’m not ignoring you, I just have to get my phone fixed.  Should be good in a couple of days.