• The Roswell Conspiracy: Tyler Locke 3 (An International Thriller) by Boyd Morrison
• Dire Means by Geoffrey Neil
• Little Deadly Things by Harry Steinman
• The Unreturned by Martin I. Patrick
• Yesterday’s Gone: Season One by Sean Platt and David Wright

I have mixed feelings about stories that incorporate one or more conspiracies into their plots. Conspiracies certainly exist, because humans are pack animals. We hang together with our buddies, and we gang up on outsiders.

On one hand, I think that a real conspiracy should not be explained to people for the same reason that I don’t say anything to a woman about her mustache. If a hairy caterpillar doesn’t bother her to the point where she does something about it, then what business is it of mine?

On the other hand, real conspiracies probably need to be explained sometimes. One of those times may be when people need help sifting through a mountain of information.

For example, in my regular job as a software developer, one of the things I do for my customers is to make it easy for them to assemble information packets into coherent packages. I occasionally do this assembling type of work for them to show different aspects of a situation sooner than they would probably see it on their own. That may be another time to explain conspiracies – when something needs to be done now instead of later.

Imaginary conspiracies are another matter. In my view, these derive from emotional trauma we often suffer early in our lives. This kind of damage installs a filter that keeps us from accurately perceiving reality in our day-to-day lives.

The early damage caused, for example, by a domineering, uncaring father, stays with us when it is not resolved throughout all levels of our consciousness. These painful emotional memories affect our later lives, to continue the example, when we complain about a picky supervisor who has it in for us. We really do feel that management conspires against us.

The diabolical aspect of this condition is that we are attracted to it. The painful memories in our unconscious draw us into situations where we struggle, in this example, with uncaring, domineering authority figures.

We are driven to achieve a different outcome than our painful memories of what happened to us. We can expose the conspiracy for all to see. But even when we have success in our current lives, the experience will only symbolically fulfill us. Our unresolved painful feelings will cause us to again seek out situations, including conspiracies, where we repeat the struggle.

The first eBook’s story jumps around the world in impossible plot twists. The dashing hero and his sidekick solve mysteries that had lain dormant for centuries, save the present U. S. from plunging back into the 19th century, and get the girls. The conspiracies in the first eBook are all logically explained as the plot unfolds.

It was a bit too much for me. What else was left for the hero to do in other eBooks in the series?

I was provoked by the author’s Amazon page. At the risk of being unhelpful, let me offer that I have a friend who was also a winner on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Jeopardy, and so on. He got his fame and fortune, but it wasn’t enough. Those and other achievements will never be enough, because he finds it too painful to approach his early traumas for resolution.

The protagonist in the second eBook uncovers a plot to kidnap and kill people around Santa Monica who disrespect the homeless. People within the conspiracy are constantly monitored and unable to themselves escape from the hidden underground compound, until the protagonist fixes everything.

The author thoroughly explored people’s responses to homelessness. It is a real-life concern, as Santa Monica and Venice Beach have a huge homeless population, especially during the wintertime.

It was probably beyond the scope of the author’s intent on the topic of homelessness to explore its causes. If he had done so, he may have uncovered the real-life conspiracies that destroy economic prosperity and make housing unaffordable.

The third eBook was a fascinating story of how medicine and technology may affect each other as they advance. The plot developed in large part through the interplay of three characters who grew up together in a rags-to-riches situation, which began with their meeting at a middle school for the gifted.

People who participated in the third eBook’s conspiracy were not as tightly bound as they were in the second eBook. They were constantly monitored, though, which led to interesting plot twists.

I felt that the third eBook’s author accurately portrayed many situations in which people act out their early emotional damage. In my view, though, it was unrealistic to show almost all of these act-outs involved in hurting people. Our automatic behavior that is unconsciously driven by our painful memories is on display everyday in many ways.

A government-industry conspiracy is at the heart of the fourth eBook. It takes place in the future when technological advances eliminate distance as an obstacle to space travel.

The fourth eBook was similar to the first eBook in that the stories had many impossible plot twists, and explained the origins of UFOs. It was similar to the fifth eBook in that the story was driven by the unexplained disappearances of groups of people.

The fifth eBook is a bundle of the first season of serial eBooks issued weekly. Large sections of the population disappear with clues given to the possible causes. The authors had cliffhangers at the end of each week to keep the audience engaged.

I don’t know if it’s the model or the actual stories, but I wasn’t engaged. Even if I had enjoyed the stories, I don’t watch television series or record them on my DVR like some people do.

If there is something I want to view, I will occasionally schedule routine things around it. I won’t preempt real-world interactions to watch television or read eBooks.

I feel that early emotional damage may explain some part of the attraction to conspiracy stories involving missing people. It could be something along the line of the trauma suffered when an infant unsuccessfully calls for his or her mother.

We know from studying other mammals’ behavior how much an infant needs the instantaneous response of the parent. I can only guess how devastating it is to have nobody come when called, and how deeply felt the resultant “Nobody cares about me” painful memories must be.

• Russian Roulette (Hannibal Jones Mysteries) by Austin S. Camacho
• The Zul Enigma by J M Leitch

I’ve lived and worked around the Washington DC area for 25 of the last 28 years. I have yet to fully understand people’s fascination with this place.

In most collections of books and eBooks, there will be several like the two above that center on activities in the Washington DC area. There are long-running television series based on Washington DC. There are movies every year that focus on Washington DC. I think that the entertainment world’s focus on this area is a symptom of a problem, but I’m not sure how to define the problem other than that’s what people seem to need.

For example, during last month and this month, millions of people paid to see a movie about Lincoln. Did people pay to see the acting? I doubt it, based on the movie’s reviews.

Did people see the Lincoln movie to broaden their factual understanding? From what I understand about the plot from reviews such as this one, movie goers saw the same material that hundreds of millions of people were propagandized with during their childhood and teenaged school years.

I suspect that people paid to see the Lincoln movie because they felt a need to be part of the crowd. They wanted to again feel like they wanted to feel in grade school and high school: safe, secure, and dumb inside the pack. They wanted to hear the same old story repeated rather than learn something that may disturb their social sensibilities and beliefs.

Why would millions of people pay money and spend over two hours of their lives to learn nothing from a movie, rather than to type a search term such as “the real Lincoln” into Google and take twenty minutes of their lives to read some of the search results found on the first page? Although it is easy for people to acquaint themselves with truths that the entertainment world’s focus on Washington DC will never show, people don’t do it.

A slight investment in time investigating the entertainment and “news” centered on Washington DC will show that almost everything the people do in this town is destructive of the people’s lives who live outside of this town. For example, information can be presented to show how a particular brand of cereal that cost $3 for a 24-ounce package five years ago now costs $4 for a 13.8-ounce package. People will consider any reason for this symptom except to investigate the possibility that the problem is that the people inside Washington DC are deliberately ruining the currency that everyone in the country is forced to use. To do otherwise would mean that the people who live outside of this city would have to change their automatic and obedient behavior.

The people inside Washington DC have broken or are in the process of breaking every promise they and their organizations ever made. But people who live outside of this city are perfectly satisfied with accepting new promises without holding anyone to account for the defaults on previous promises. Despite all arguments and past evidence, they want to believe that something good and nondestructive is going to come out of the interference in their lives from the people in this town. Like I said, I don’t get it.

Except for a small part of the first story that was set in an embassy, the interplay of a private investigator with the Italian mob and the Russian mob could have taken place in several areas other than Washington DC. The author used his knowledge of the Washington DC area to accurately place scenes.

The first story held my interest as a mystery, and I didn’t guess how all aspects of the story would unfold. It was somewhat predictable in that it relied on alcohol, professors screwing students, and other stereotypical behavior to advance the storyline. I got a kick out of the description of a picture captioned “Never Give Up” where a frog wrapped its hand around a pelican’s throat that already contained the frog’s head.

The second story had two elements with which I strongly disagree. The first element is the common entertainment trope that a lone figure, usually a madman or rich man or scientist or dictator, can wreak mass destruction on the world’s human population. Nobody questions this, although there is no historical precedent. Everybody seems to think that as weapons of mass destruction become more widespread, the likelihood of an insane individual using them increases. To spoil the second story’s ending, that is what eventually unfolds.

The second element was the population’s blind acceptance of however the ruling class propagandized them. I disagree, as this is my problem with most of Washington DC-centered news. I continue to have hope that those who live outside Washington will see the people in this town as the power-hungry, money-grabbing, control freaks as the parasites that they are.

My answer to the question of why people don’t get the help they need is short and may trouble you.

What I told my friend was that the people in these “helping” occupations weren’t really in their jobs to help other people. They had their jobs as their way of acting out their own needs.

So it’s no surprise when my friend’s family didn’t receive the help that they required. The people in these “helping” occupations couldn’t get past their own self-involvement.

Here’s one example of how this occurs from Dr. Arthur Janov’s book Primal Healing: “If the therapist has the need to be helpful and get “love” from the patient, he can act this out in therapy. I remember feeling my need to become a therapist and be helpful, trying symbolically to help my mentally ill mother to get well and be a real mother.”

We all have these feelings to some degree from our histories. But some common personal memories such as unrelenting helplessness are too painful for us to feel and acknowledge. Even a casual mention makes us uncomfortable. So many of us set ourselves into an occupation where we can channel feelings, especially those of helplessness, away from ourselves.

Who was missing from the people my friend talked about over the past year? Men, for the most part. Not that men are exempt from acting out their own needs on other people, but our society is structured such that it’s mainly women who are in the “helping” occupations mentioned.

More broadly, it is an act-out of helplessness for us to seek out someone to dominate in the guise of “help.” When one party offers “help,” the context is often that party’s act-out of their early needs.

We act out our feelings on other people rather than be honest with ourselves about our motivations. The act-outs are unconscious. So attempts to discuss what “helping” behavior really is seldom receive consciously aware responses.

I’ll stop here short of solutions to people getting the help they need. It’s enough that my friend’s experiences may benefit others to recognize what’s going on with their own experiences.

I’ve learned much about the eBook writing, publishing, and marketing processes during the past year. This post isn’t about eBook processes, however.

I find that every day I revisit several of the premises of Getting Well for the First Time. For example, I’m in good financial shape because I implement the investment principles I describe.

The security I use to demonstrate how I implement the investment principles is my largest holding now. All of my Sandstorm Gold shares have a cost basis of zero because of the techniques I show. It also helps that the prices moved from the Canadian .60-1.50 range to the 9-10 range.

I’m in good physical shape because I really do what I wrote in the eBook. Later today, a year after back surgery, I’ll be running with the twenty-somethings in an Ultimate Frisbee game. I haven’t returned to golf yet, however, because the golf swing’s twisting motion is concentrated on the surgically repaired area.

I mention many places in the eBook how my unconscious reactions to old needs keep me from being in the present. That has become less and less of a factor for me as this year has progressed.

I don’t employ any special techniques, though. What draws me in is how much more enjoyable it is for me to immediately observe and react to what’s going on around me.

My granddaughter who graces the cover of Getting Well for the First Time also had a birthday earlier this week. It’s good to be six, too!

Many authors price the first book of a series as free to coincide with the release of subsequent books. But I wanted to get as wide of a distribution as I could at the initial release of Episode Three in order to attract other co-authors to share their experiences on these two wide-open topics.

I was influenced primarily by the research done by Dan Ariely in The Cost of Zero Cost chapter of his Predictably Irrational book. His evidence pointed to FREE! as a price point all by itself.

He set up experiment after experiment to show how much people desire something that is FREE! No matter what it was – chocolate, or some other food; beer, or some other drink; health care, or some other service – the majority of people prefer FREE!

I coincidentally was influenced in my decision by the findings in Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Healing book. He states many times how a person’s unmet needs never go away. The context of these unmet needs is most often in infancy and early childhood, when we have to have the unconditional love and attention of our parents.

The juxtaposition of these two influences resulted in my realization that the reason people are so attracted to the FREE! price point is probably due to our histories. An infant or child who does not receive the freely given love and attention he or she needs will be driven by those needs to acquire substitutes throughout the rest of their life.

I was not persuaded by Dan Ariely’s explanation of our emotional involvement with FREE! in the context of our fear of a loss. While his explanation did acknowledge the power of emotions, it did not, in my view, correctly identify what really goes on with our emotions. Because the situation was not correctly identified, the solution – be rational to “prevent us from falling under the spell of FREE!” – cannot and will not work.

Yes, we fear losing what we have. Dan Ariely describes experiments later on in his Predictably Irrational book to show that fact.

But, as an example, are the majority of FREE! eBooks downloaded by people who fear the possibility of a loss from buying the same eBooks at prices such as $.99 or $2.99? I don’t think so. By the numbers, most FREE! eBooks go to people who will never read them. There will not be sufficient time during their lives for them to read everything that they have collected.

In two chapters of Predictably Irrational about honesty, Dan Ariely also misses that the underlying feelings for dishonest actions are probably the same as they are for FREE! When we take something that we are objectively not entitled to take, we do so because, in my opinion, we have an underlying feeling such as entitlement, an underlying need.

And like his solution in The Cost of Zero Cost chapter, his solution to dishonesty, to immediately bring forth into consciousness a moral standard, does not adequately acknowledge the underlying emotions. His solution is not intended to be permanent, and as such, in my opinion, cannot be effective.

Both of Dan Ariely’s solutions involve people referencing some externalities instead of their internal states. The better explanations come from Dr. Janov, in my view, and refer to our internal states. These are in excerpts such as here: “No one is stronger or brighter than her need because need is inextricably intermeshed with survival, and survival reigns.”

Does our preference for products and services to be FREE! derive from a lack of what should have been freely given? If our early needs were not satisfied, they are still with us in our adult lives. They drive us toward FREE!, although what we get now cannot really substitute for what we needed in our early lives.

I hope this post provides some perspectives into the power of FREE! Let me know what you think through this blog’s comments, my other blog’s contact page, Paul Rice’s links, PRice@PimpUrBlog.com, your review of my eBooks, or any other way you want.

I started to think about how the insignia and ribbons were the first thing that I was interested in instead of his name on his nametag. That is just the way it is, I decided, when you are in one of the armed forces. The one thing that is different about you is the last thing people are likely to notice. People first notice all of the common elements they may share with you.

I knew his likely career pipeline, and I could say that his age was probably 37 plus or minus a year. I knew what he was probably doing in DC, a “joint” tour to interact with other areas of the armed forces. I would guess that he previously had been the Engineer, and was on his way to becoming a submarine’s Executive Officer, second in command. He looked older, though, which meant to me either that submarine life had taken it out of him, or that he had started late, or that he had already done his XO tour.

Everything was mapped out for him. He was just another actor in his life. The directors of his life were other people, many of whom he had never met or communicated with, yet who ran his life down to the minute details of where he was going to be on the third and fourth week of the twenty-second month of his current tour of duty.

I pondered one last item before I got up to speak with him. What was his reward for doing everything that people expected of him? He had probably been eager to please others throughout his entire life. Now that his career continued to move forward, what personal satisfaction did he get from all of his compliant behavior?

I walked over and introduced myself, and we chatted for the rest of the train ride. Everything checked out pretty much as I expected. Oh, a wife and two children, too.

As the train pulled into the last station, he said, “Goodbye.” I said, “Happy Memorial Day,” and that was it.

I did not get around to asking him his motivations for doing what he does. I was not consciously aware of why I did what I did during the dozen years I was in the submarine Navy. It is one of those things that people never get around to considering. It is so much easier to substitute in what you are told to think, and how you are trained to perceive yourself and others.

If you read through the pages here of Getting Well for the First Time, you will see a lot of “What was I doing? What was I thinking?” moments. I could not connect my actions with my real motivations until I was honest enough to go back to my beginnings. I would not expect a person whose livelihood depended on not asking such questions to be able to give anything but a programmed response. If he thought things over, he may find his preprogrammed life to be as intolerable as I found mine to be in the submarine Navy.

Happy Memorial Day to you, too!

The worst experiences are those that overwhelm us with painful feelings and physical pain. Where does the overflow of pain go when painful experiences are too much for us to bear?

Ongoing research in neuroscience shows us that the effects of pain are stored in our physical and emotional systems. Here is one study published in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that traces some of the long-term effects on a person’s brain from their maltreatment as an infant and child. Two of the study’s many referenced findings are that:

• people under report the degree to which they were mistreated as a child; and
• the adults who do report their mistreatment as a child are typically the ones who suffered the most severe abuse.

To summarize the study, the effects of pain do not go away. The accumulation of pain is imprinted into our body and brain’s systems from our earliest ages onward.

What keeps the overflow of pain stored inside of us?

In a word, repression. All of us react initially to pain by repressing it in order to not be overwhelmed by the painful experience. Our initial repression benefits us by keeping us physically and emotionally stable.

So what effect does repressing our pain have over the long term?

This is the crux of why I write about pain. One of the events that prompted me to start to understand the subject better happened during the Thanksgiving holiday period over eight years ago. I saw a man in his late eighties suffer daily from his memories of what happened to him during his early childhood.

I realized that the younger people, including myself, who witnessed his pain, also had no effective response to pain other than repressing it. I understood that unless something intervened to get each of us to deal with our repressed pain, this man’s agony was our future, too.

Have you known anyone who is so closed up that they are unable to love and be loved? People who do whatever they can about arranging their external world to avoid their internal world, their feelings, and their repressed pain?

I have seen many people, myself included, who have suffered in this way. It is really a pity, and I empathize with them.

We are capable of enjoying so much more of our lives than what we currently experience. But the effects of pain that we initially repressed get in the way of our full feelings.

What could each of us do about this that would improve our lives? Can we benefit from intentionally not repressing pain?

See Why I Write About Pain – Part 2 of 2

The eBook is Pimp ur Blog Episode One: Boost Search Results with Social Bookmarking. I list the places that it is available so far on the Buy My eBooks page.

We started a new Pimp ur Blog blog as well, to have a place dedicated to just the Pimp ur Blog eBook series. We provide sequential samples of our new eBook every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Yesterday’s sample, Why Do We Write? Sample 4 of eBook Pimp ur Blog Episode One: Boost Search Results with Social Bookmarking, introduced the subject of act-outs without defining them; saying how the subject is recognized; what the origins of the subject are; none of that. I thought that I would do the clean up work over here at Getting Well for the First Time, because act-outs are a central theme of the Getting Well for the First Time eBook.

Act-outs are a form of automatic behavior. Act-outs are similar to instincts in that both originate from our needs, such as responding to a threat to our survival.

Act-outs are different than instinctual behavior, though, in that act-outs are an unconscious reaction in the present to an old need. We are no longer in the past situation, but we react as if we are. As such, our act-out behaviors are seldom appropriate to our present situations.

I gave long lists of some of my act-outs starting with Part 31 of Getting Well for the First Time – Couldn’t Keep Doing What I Was Already Doing and continuing through Part 35 of Getting Well for the First Time – Achievements That Represented Something Else. It was not pretty. My act-outs were symptoms of bigger problems.

It was not all that great for me or for the people with whom I acted out my old needs. Sure, we had some laughs, but my main point is that acting out old needs was neither fulfilling nor resolving.

I said in Part 47 of Getting Well for the First Time – Fewer Automatic Act-outs how I knew I was getting well. Staying well is a big priority for me. That lets me have fulfilling experiences, such as almost everything I did last week.

If you want to read more about act-outs, my Pain on the Rise blog has 42 references to act-outs.

I was struck by how 1) the guy’s pain was in control of his life, and that 2) he was unaware of this fact. The stopping point often showed when a guy accessed a part of his history, pain kicked in, and then his pain would not let him continue with what he was doing.

For example, I started out the week listening to an interview with a guy in his forties that covered a variety of subjects. Unprompted, he voluntarily talked about a subject he was uncomfortable with, and I could sense his pain rising. It was a very personal subject, something I had not heard someone publicly talk about before.

The speaker fought against his pain the last five minutes of the interview: justifying; rationalizing; invoking ideas. All of his top-down cortical efforts to keep from feeling his pain were weak, however, compared to the strength of his rising limbic pain.

What the speaker’s efforts at the end of the interview did for me was to make me reevaluate his opinions more critically. I thought that earlier I was engaged intellectually, and might have missed how the speaker’s pain drove him, and subsequently caused the generation of his beliefs and ideas.

Later in the week I spoke with a guy in his early thirties. We discussed his company’s products and services for the most part, but we also talked about what he was doing with his life.

In one portion of the conversation, the sales guy carried on about how dangerous marriage was compared to his “player” life. I clumsily touched a nerve by laughing and remarking how amusing his feeling of danger was to me.

The sales guy responded to his pain by challenging me on that and several discussion items, including how I remembered my life before marriage. I told him that before I got married, my single life was intolerable.

However, I didn’t communicate my long-standing, unresolved problems and pain that stopped me from enjoying my life, whether single or married. My second eBook When Do I Get to Live My Own Life? details some of this pic’s time frame.

In the middle of the week while at work, I spoke with a recent college graduate who lives with his parents and works in an entry-level IT job. He started to talk about what people should realize about other people, drawing on his Psychology minor. I almost tuned him out, as I have a bias against someone who lives on someone else’s dime describing what anyone else should realize.

But the grad led off with some phony statistics that caught my attention by “proving” how other people don’t care about you. The numbers “proved” that even when other people seem to care about you, they care much more about their relationship with you. The grad’s conclusion was that other people care very little about the person you are and what you are personally doing.

My initial reaction was, “Who taught him that no one cares?” Then I appreciated that he learned “No one cares” from his parents or caregivers. I refer back to the study that demonstrated how almost all of us probably have the same basic personality now as we did when we were 3 years old. Why we stop our emotional growth at that point probably has our pain at the root.

A guy at work in his fifties also showed his stopping point last week. I was his customer, and everything he did for me was incomplete. I spoke with him about his work several times, and his pain came right to the front. He denied culpability at first, then recognized a little bit, while telling me over the phone that I didn’t care about him.  He acknowledged most of what he still needed to do, but then made only a token effort to fix one of the incomplete items. I sensed that he was close to his pain spilling out into anger.

The second “No one cares” guy’s resentment etc. was directed at me for insisting on corrective action and task completion. But what was it that made him continually put off doing good work until tomorrow, and then tomorrow never comes? It was his pain from a long time ago.

I would have liked to help these guys and others deal with their pain. That is not my profession, though.  Our defenses will not allow us to feel very much pain anyway.

Not that I am that much different, except that I intentionally try to feel whatever comes up so that it does not stay in my unconscious and run my life. After I feel it, my pain has no other place to go but away.

What do you do when you reach your stopping point?

The hope at the time of his speech was expressed as a dream.  My family and I believed in this speech’s tenets, and we worked towards making possible what we have today.

What he expressed in his speech isn’t really what a dream is, though.  A dream is a response by a part of our brain, the limbic system, to keep us asleep.  Whatever threatens to disturb our sleep is symbolized and processed by our brain’s lower parts to keep our brain’s upper parts unconscious and unaware of disturbances.

This is why I am irritated by people urging others to “follow your dreams” or similar exhortations that followed this speech.  It is the same to me as saying:  “Don’t wake up.  Don’t investigate anything having to do with your inner turmoil.  Just go along with the unreality that covers over what is really happening with you.”

What is it that so disturbs us that we need a dream to intercede to keep it from waking us up?  I have found that the more I am able to feel and connect to what bothers me, the less of a bother it becomes.  Less of a response in the form of an intense dream is needed when there is less of a threat to peaceful sleep.

To me, “follow your dreams” is an inadequate prescription for living.  If we must do something, let’s go ahead and do it.  But please, let’s try to feel what is driving us to act!  We don’t need to be unconscious, and live in a dream.