It gives me grief and makes me mad

So.. It's high time, my brain has decided, for a bit of a rant.

My last sporadic post was about thinking I probably had chronic contemplation syndrome, and went sideways into being distracted by the Olympics, etc.

This post is about a few reasons why I seem to have chronic contemplation syndrome.

Lately I stumbled across this blogpost on Twitter: Infant Dies After Craniosacral Therapy: Therapist Gets Off Scot-Free. Something inside me seemed to galvanize just a little - I could feel it. The action I took was to post it to my Facebook page and let it sit there, as testament to wrong thinking, and how important it is for manual therapists to move away from piss-poor treatment concepts onto more science-based ones. Naturally there was a hue and cry and protest from a few who apparently thought I ought not mention such a scandal or whose "belief system" I had besmirched somehow. Was the therapist a PT or not? How is craniosacral therapy different in the Netherlands than in N. America? Surely it must be different, the kind "we" use "here" safer. I steadily asked questions, sent out feelers, got more links, as more information came along from those who speak/understand Dutch and are more familiar with the issue posted on the thread about it at SomaSimple.

How I feel about stuff like this, manual therapy memeplexes which are just plain indefensible or which can do real harm, is no secret - I wrote about it here, and here. What's different is that my life is organized such that I'm in a position to really be outspoken about it on many levels. I have time to write, to think, to organize, to present. I've been invited to speak at two separate venues about research I'm doing, opportunities to refute such ill-formed and misleading treatment concepts. I've worked like a Trojan online and offline to study, think, redesign my own brain, mesh the physicality of human primate social grooming with the neuroscientific and pain science basis, context, in which it all starts to make sense. It's a great opportunity.

But I'm mad at myself. For watching TV, for being disorganized, for not knowing how to find my own files on my own desktop, for having a messy bookmark list, messy messy messy, my life feels like it's still in a mess and like I still don't have a clue how to proceed. When I'm not mad at myself I easily get mad about stuff like what happened that poor Dutch therapist, stuff that happens because of very poor thought processes, because of not thinking something through first, because of adopting memeplexes that some extrovert dreamed up out of thin air then sold in a confident manner to gullible hungry-for-info people in a workshop who trusted whatever he said, applied it, then killed a baby. It makes me scream with anger. All of it. Then I look at myself again, and think, OK, I'm not gullible, I'm careful, I know that a stray thought here or an assumption there can make a big difference downstream, I've always sifted things carefully, always chucked out ideas that don't make legitimate sense without a second thought. But to DO that, to be that careful, takes a lot of inner stillness, which I'm now so good at that it feels like my brain has neuroplasticized itself into quite a rut, and when I add my ordinary introversion to it, it feels like I'll never be able to say what I want the way it needs to be said while at the same time smoothly managing to persuade the entire profession over into thinking about manual therapy in a new way, toward science and away from dangerous baseless mesodermal explanations for things. It's like I feel responsible for changing the world, all by myself, and I know that's a crazy unrealistic thing to be thinking. So I feel like screaming. Which is not a solution, just a feeling, so I rant for awhile instead.