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Saturday, 27 October 2007
Alcohol prohibition works!
Well it has finally happened. The unachievable has been achieved!!!! This is history making and should be the highest priority news around the world. Our Police Commissioner, Carl O’Callaghan has found a way to make the prohibition of alcohol actually work. Where millions have tried before him and failed. Where societies since man first inhabited the earth have tried and failed to make prohibition work, Carl O’Callaghan has succeed.
The West Australian newspaper reported it today. This is extraordinary news!!! Fitzroy Crossing, a very remote town in northern Australia has a very bad history of alcoholism and domestic violence particularly amongst its aboriginal inhabitants. News laws, only a few months old now only allow for the sale of low strength beer in this very isolated town. Carl O’Callaghan reports that in the past few months there has been a 30 percent drop in domestic violence and many families and children have been able to enjoy a full nights sleep for the first time in years. This is due to the alcohol prohibition. I am sure every Muslim nation in the world will now be eagerly seeking out Carl O’Callaghan to find out his answer to the prohibition of alcohol.
All we have to do is stop people having access to alcohol then this wont happen.
There is one very big problem for the prohibitionists like Carl O’Callaghan. There is lots of money to be made in Fitzroy Crossing at the moment. The inhabitants have plenty of disposable income and there is a high demand for mood altering drugs of some kind. With this (lethal) combination what is likely to happen? I don’t think you need three guesses.
If prostitution is the oldest profession in the world then drinking alcohol is a close second. Banning it just does not stop people from drinking alcohol. How many times does history have to show us that before we actually learn it.
Worse case scenario. Fitzroy Crossing will evolve a well establish illicit drug infrastructure. Come to think of it, hasn’t that happened some where else before? Now I remember, old scarface Al Capone in the USA with the temperance league. Did you know that old Al died of tertiary syphilis in a federal prison. Well it just goes to show you that crime does not pay!
The government foresight on Fitzroy Crossing.
So finally when the government gives up on the new legislation and it reverts back to the sale of all kinds of alcohol. The inhabitants of Fitzroy Crossing are also left with a well establish illicit drug trade and organised crime structure. Thus the inhabitants are left off worse than when they started. Come to think of it hasn’t that been happening to aboriginal Australians since the white man landed here 200 years ago?
The thirty percent drop in the past few months as reported by Carl O’Callaghan? There are a few possibilities. I can make domestic violence drop by fifty percent in Australia over night. I know how to do this. You want to know how? Well I will tell you how. One makes alcohol illegal and marijuana legal. That is guaranteed to cause a dramatic drop in domestic violence throughout Australia. Perhaps this is already happening at Fitzroy Crossing. Marijuana is replacing the gap left by alcohol.
The butler did it.
There is a big gap in the drug market in Fitzroy Crossing at the moment. There certainly is the demand and that is not going to go away for at least a couple of generations, if ever. So there could simply be a gap in alcohol and drugs at the moment until people get organised. Certainly the drug dealers will be salivating at the new employment opportunities in Fitzroy Crossing. Then of course there is the good old moon shine. Home made hooch. Due to its isolation home made stills could be hidden in a million different places up there.
I worked in a prison for a couple of years and there were alcohol stills being found on a weekly basis. The ingenuity at producing alcohol in prison was incredible. The hiding places and methods used were truly a testament to human creativity and the Little Professor ego state. As an employee I was not allowed to bring any vegemite into the prison. Why? Because it could be used in fermentation and thus produce alcohol. So Carl O’Callaghan better get onto that one and we will need new laws banning vegemite at Fitzroy Crossing.
Basically anything that ferments can be used to produce alcohol, potatoe peelings were a common one in prison. As I understand it any food that contains carbohydrates can be used to ferment alcohol. That adds up to an awful lot of foods. Carl O’Callaghan will also need new laws banning all such foods at Fitzroy Crossing. Of course with home made alcohol the government has no control over the quality and what people are actually ingesting.
Making alcohol? More than one way to skin a cat.
It seems fairly safe to say that with time people in Fitzroy Crossing will start to get organised and begin producing their own alcohol and thus we have the beginnings of an organised crime structure. This is precisely what has happened throughout mankind when alcohol prohibition has been tried. Will Carl O’Callaghan succeed where millions before him have failed? Time will tell, but I know which one I would put my money on.
Graffiti
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Thursday, 25 October 2007
Near Death Experience
Rob van Tol,
(See my blogs I like list, to visit him) talks about death denial and that confronting death is a key to living a full, authentic and happy life. Well any counsellor will tell you that there is a lot of truth to these statements.
What seems to happen most times is that when a person has a NDE (Near death experience) or there is a NDE of a close loved one they will do a reassessment of their goals in life. Rob shows a good example of one of these. However after time the impact of the NDE wears off and they again get lost in the trivialities of life. They start to fritter their life away again like ruminate about how they can getting a bigger and better car or being concerned about what the neighbours think and so forth.
Be different even if the neighbours disapprove?
I have found that one of the advantages of being a counsellor is that clients can sometimes provide you with that situation of the NDE or some significant life crisis. Often you are counselling people who have had a very bad things happen to them in their life and thus they are confronted with their own mortality or their life being considerably altered. This of course can effect the counsellor personally and they can then do a ressessment them self as well.
I have always wanted to do it
I am reminded of a client who I counselled for some time. A man in his early twenties. It was one of those situations where the client and therapist just clicked and we developed a very good rapport over about a year. He had done some very bad things and was on some very serious charges and facing a long stretch of prison time. As it turned out he did not go to prison by the skin of his teeth.
Sometimes clients are forced to do this with their lives. How does the counsellor respond to that and do they also re-evaluate their own life?
I saw him for the 6 months leading up to the trial and for the 6 months after and he used that experience for a similar revaluation of his life. It also effected me personally and I even attended the courts on the day the verdict was given. So I was in a position of seeing someone who I knew well and this again showed me the need to keep my priorities right and not get lost in the trivialities of life.
Maybe this is an advantage of being a counsellor and maybe why I live my life by the totem:
“When was the last time you did something for the first time”.
Go on!!
Do it!!
Take that leap of faith into the unknown.
If you get hurt, such is life.
There is one other thing I am going to do before I die and that is organise a trial wake for myself and attend it. People always say such good things from the heart at a person’s wake. They give such really good stokes to the deceased. Many times I have wished the deceased was there to hear them. People never seem to say such things when the person is alive. Well I am going to organise a wake for myself, invite all my best friends and enjoy the party.
Graffiti
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Sunday, 21 October 2007
Child development
Its amazing what you learn in the blogosphere. Look at this little gem I found in a blog.
In practice, most people say they have around one bowel movement a day. Generally, they are happy with this. Naturopaths say they should actually have about as many bowel movements a day as meals eaten.
It never ceases to amaze me how humans can complicate matters. Human communication is really very simple and yet we make it so complicated by bringing psychology into it.
What ever you may think of Freud and his theories he was a good observer. He proposed that there were three main developmental stages which all children go through.
Oral stage - first year
Anal stage - second and third years
Phallic stage - fourth and fifth years
The oral stage is all about satisfying and stimulating the mouth. Taking in and spitting out food, biting and aggression, sucking and so forth. Still to this very day the ‘great dummy debate rages’. Should a child be given a dummy to suck on? Is it OK for a child to suck their thumb? My mother used to report that when she had small children (me and my siblings) at the local child health centre there used to be posters on the walls stating. “Dangerous, dirty dummy”, because dummies were out of fashion at that point.
Then of course there is the whole area of feeding a child and what you do if a child refuses food and so forth. This is a psychological minefield of the worst kind. Such a simple thing becomes so complex because the personalities of mother and the child begin to intertwine.
If this stage is not dealt with effectively the child can become fixated at the oral stage. They basically get stuck there and then you get a whole array of psychological problems resulting. Common ones are addictions such as alcoholism or in particular cigarettes which are all about oral stimulation. And of course eating disorders also represent an oral fixation.
The oral stage actually has two parts
Sucking and biting much to the terror of the breast-feeding mother. The biting part of course is related to what is called oral aggression. When a young child gets quite angry one way of expressing that is to bite and this is usually seen as quite a high level of aggression expression by a child as it is such a primal mode of anger expression. Just look at how monkeys and dogs display their aggression with the barring of teeth, biting and so forth.
If successfully dealt with the child then moves onto the next stage, the anal stage which is all about anal stimulation and of course toilet training. Another aspect of parenting where there are no answers only opinions just like the naturopaths and their opinions about bowel movements!!
There is a group called the Tanala from Madagascar who have a very severe toilet training system. It begins at age 3 months and is expected to be completed by about 6 months. Physical punishments are used. At the other end of the scale there are the Siriono who are a group of South American indians. They use little or no punishment, commence training at about 18 months and have it completed by age 6 years.
Different child rearing methods to deal with different circumstances?
Which one is right? Unfortunately there is not an answer to that. However as with the oral stage people can also get fixated at this stage and then you will get two reactions. First you get the person who is seen as very anal. Particular, neat and tidy, orderly, very punctual and a Be Perfect type of person. You then can get others who go the other way and ‘shit all over the place’. They are particularly disorganised and untidy, chronically late and so forth.
Trust issues can result form this stage as can a sense of boundary which is one of the central features of the paranoid personality. These people have very rigid boundaries and they are hyper sensitive to them being transgressed. You never hug a paranoid without first asking them, even if they agree they will still think you have some ulterior motive for doing so. In addition you can get strange sexual behaviours such as infantilism where the man wishes to be dressed up in nappies and treated like a baby who is wanting its nappy changed.
Finally there is the phallic stage and for the female this is where the hysteric personality develops from. She gets fixated in the phallic stage. She falls in love with and wants to be father’s lover and spurn mother. This of course can lead to many marital problems in later life as she seeks in a man, a father figure who she can finally have at the expense of mother. In her mind she is having sex with a man who is her father and not her husband which does not help a marriage at all.
The hysteric personality uses sex as a communication mode more than most.
This is also a very complicated stage as it raises the whole area of childhood sexuality. Children are sexual beings who have sexual feelings. This horrifies many parents and adults who just want to shove it all in the too hard basket and pretend it all does not exist. In the society where I live there is a strong move to desexualize children as much as you possibly can as we are obsessed with pedophillia and allowing children to have their sexual side is seen as only encouraging the pedophiles.
Oh well, yet another generation with sexual issues in the making is being raised to keep counsellors employed for many years to come.
The other thing that adults do is they project their sexuality onto the child, when in fact they are quite different. As a child grows it discovers that when it touches it genitals it feels good. There is nothing odd about that. It also discovers that if it has an itch on its backside and it scratches that then it also feels good. The child's touching of its genitals is very different from adult masturbation which is much more than just touching the genitals because it feels good.
They are doing it because it feels good. No need to project adult sexuality onto it.
Phallic stages fixations are many and varied. Think of all the sexual dysfunctions and then of course there are all the sexual deviations. Then there are all the other things where sex gets mixed up with other stuff like love, power, submission. money, attractiveness, religion and so on endlessly. Holley Molley there are lots of them.
But lets see the glass half full rather than half empty. Human psychology is an awesome thing, so intricate, so complex, so multi dimensional and so on endlessly. A subject I find fascinating and is a never ending area of study. How to raise a child is such a interesting topic.
And there is just one other question here. What is proposed is that a child uses eating, elimination and sex as a means to establish its personality and identity. Why?
Why would it use those things? Why not use something else like dancing or singing?
Perhaps what Freud has done in that listening to people speak he has discovered that those three things of feeding, elimination and sexual feelings are particularly difficult areas for parents and children to resolve.
An alternative theory of personality development could be somewhat more flexible. Instead of accepting that it is these three things, one searches for the area that was a particular problem for the individual child and the individual parent.
I am reminded of one particular client who had a stage mother. The mother lived through her child and her performances on the stage as an actress and a singer. So this was where the child developed some of her main personality features and identitiy. So one does not look at the oral, anal and phallic stages, instead one looks for the battle ground between the child and the parent. It is on that battle ground that the child will develop its significant personality features and identity. So the task for the counsellor is not to look at the oral, anal and phallic stages but to find the battle field between mother and child, and when found they can then understand the how and why of the child's personality development. The remedial program can then be formulated and then be put into place.
Graffiti
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Saturday, 20 October 2007
Are you a superego, ego or an id?
I did the quiz
www.blogthings.com/areyouidegoorsuperegoquiz/
and I got
Superego is like the Parent ego state. You are basically as boring as bat shit.
This is the Superego person
Ego is like Adult. You are basically dead from the neck down. You live life in your head, think and keep away from your more primal urges.
Id is like the child. You are basically a hedonistic low life who will walk on others to have your primal urges satisfied
Is this guy the Id? 5 wives to be wifely?
I am an Ego but with some Id and thus can act out my desires and have a life of pleasures!!!
Graffiti
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Friday, 19 October 2007
The life coach
Can people change their life script?
Well there has been a heck of a lot of research on what causes people to change their script. So it would seem that some, indeed a significant number of people believe such change is possible or they wouldn’t ask what causes the change in the first place.
The factors that lead to an effective therapy outcome are:
40% factors outside the therapy room. The persons day to day life - work, family, living circumstances, finances, social life and so forth.
What do you actually do in your day to day life, everyday, day after day.
15% Hope. The person believes there is hope and chance of them getting better.
15% The theory and techniques. This allows the client to understand self so it makes sense to him or her.
30% The relational. The relationship between the client and the therapist.
So inside the therapy room the relationship between the client and therapist is the most important factor.
When I read these figures I found them interesting particularly the 40% being factors outside the therapy room. Perhaps this is where the life coach comes into effect. Being a life coach is the latest fad thing in the city where I live. Lots of people are promoting themselves as such a thing. Over the years as a therapist I think I have become one of these without even knowing it.
What has become of me?
A life coach is not a therapist or counsellor in that they do not employ any therapeutic techniques, particularly regressive techniques which are directly aimed at the Child ego state. They are more of a guide or mentor on day to day living and making decisions about the direction to head in life and so forth. I find that I have done more and more of this in working with clients over the years. Without a doubt I also use the relational and regressive therapeutic techniques on a daily basis so I am not a life coach in the true sense of the word. But over the years I have also come to see the value in ‘life coaching’ as part of an overall therapeutic approach.
Life coaching is seen a s a bit of a mickey mouse approach. Quite basic and simple which by and large it is but its therapeutic value to my mind had been grossly under rated. As an example of this just look at the figures I cited at the beginning of this post.
Do you actually do this? Enjoy your self each and every day?
I am reminded of one particular client, a man about 30 years of age. He was quite a difficult client who had a significant drug problem. It was a manageable drug problem but it did make life hard for him. I had been working with him for some time and he had done OK but it was slow going.
He came into some money at one point (ask no questions and be told no lies) and he was wondering what to do with it. His teeth which he had never been a topic of discussion between us were quite unsightly. Crooked, discoloured and so forth. I suggested that he get them done, so he could have that ‘winning smile’ as I called it. He was reluctant and said that he had better things to spend his money on (!!!) and he didn’t really care what they looked like and so forth. Anyway I put the pressure on him and he finally relented and he had some quite extensive dental work done.
Now suggesting that he get his teeth done is hardly a deep and meaningful therapeutic treatment strategy!. Your usual psychotherapy treatment plan does not include such things. It does not require an indepth understanding of the depths of the human psyche after years of intensive study. But it is kind of a life coaching type of thing to do.
Do the people you see each and every day, actually enjoy themselves?
Well he came in one day with his teeth done and they looked great. As I mentioned before with him therapy had been two steps forward and one step back up to that point. However all of a sudden he went ahead in bounds and changed his script in significant ways. Over time he made numerous comments on how much getting his teeth done had meant to him. Every time he looked into the mirror he saw himself with that ‘winning smile’ as he called it and felt good about himself as a result.
Obviously changing his teeth did not change his script. All the work we had done previously had been setting the stage for the change to his script. However changing his teeth significantly assisted that change. If he had not had the dental work done then I suspect he would have never achieved what he did.
When you think about it the thing about a person’s day to day life is that it is completely unrelentingly relentless. It is there with you every minute of every day, day after day and wont go away. How you look, and dress, what you do, who you hang out with and so on. This of course makes it a very potent psychological force which reinforces the persons view of themselves and others many hundreds of times per day. Maybe this is an explanation of the above statistics where day to day factors are 40% of a therapeutic outcome.
I think over time I had come to realise this without even knowing I was. I do initially focus on such matters and spend quite considerable effort with the client on such life coaching matters. If the client can make a few of these changes early on in therapy then they are getting a new and different positive reinforcement hundreds of times each day. As I watch what I do with clients I see that I constantly refer back to such matters on a regular basis.
Is life meant to be a serious business?
So it seems that I am at least in part a life coach!
Well it is trendy to be one of those these days!!
One has to move with the in crowd, doesn’t one?
(I need to be careful here as I am letting out my trade secrets)
Graffiti
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Wednesday, 17 October 2007
Types of relationships
Acquaintances
These are full of potential relationships. This is how people make selections for more serious relationships - that is the ones that provide the life giving strokes, allow the script to be advanced and so forth. Thus every acquaintance is a possible friend or enemy. The more acquaintances you have the more choices you have. So say hello to everybody. They can be static relationships that can last that way for a long period of time. ‘Waving’ relationships or ‘Hello and goodbye’ relationships, everything is on the surface.
Acquaintances form a mask or shield which the person places between them self and the other. This he calls the ‘persona’. The persona is a way of presenting oneself and is best described by a series of adjectives such as gruff, sweet, innocent, competitive, compassionate, busy, loving, charming and so on. The persona it the AC and is developed by the child’s need to get on in the world. The child decides; “I am OK and will get by in day to day life if I am ....”.
Kids learn how to have a social persona face to cope in life
It is formed from years 6 - 12 when most children first go out on their own and have to deal with people in the outside world who are not first screened by themselves or their parents. In such situations the child quickly discovers that it must develop ways to avoid unwanted entanglements and to promote wanted ones in a world he never made. It is an adaption to the world. It is not Free Child.
Relationships develop
Why do some people remain acquaintances and some do not. Some we move onto games and intimacy with and some we do not. There are main 2 reasons.
1] We may not move on to something more because there is no room to. One’s life is too full and you have to wait until someone dies for a spot to become available.
2] They do not fit for the script. We fall in love or find someone attractive because they fit for our script. As an acquaintance our Little Professor ego state [A1] checks out the other and decides that this person has a very real chance of allowing us to get our unmet needs met and not met at the same time.
Competitive relationships
In some relationships the parties can compete for a particular ego state or position in the relationship.
Competing for the Parent position - This is a power struggle for the powerful position in the relationship. This type of situation can often lead to the game of Uproar and often happens after about the first 2 or 3 years of marriage. The honeymoon is over, they are beginning to realize that what they thought they could ‘train’ the spouse out of or into is not going to happen. So there is a period of disharmony or uproar about who is going to ‘rule the roost’ or who is really going to wear the pants in the relationship. They come to counseling because they are arguing about the big three - children, money or sex. But the real reason is the power struggle for the top dog position, they are establishing the basis of the relationship for the next 20 or 30 years
Competing for the Child position
In this instance both parties are wanting to take the Child position where they are taken care of by the other party. They do not want to do the looking after they want to be looked after.
In this instance you do not tend to get uproar or shouting, rather you have two people who are tending to be passive and doing nothing. or playing helpless, Poor me is a common type of game. The resultant feelings are not likely to be anger (at least not openly), but more likely to be disappointment, frustration, sulking, sadness and depression.
I can't cope so you have to look after me.
Graffiti
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Tuesday, 16 October 2007
The relational
Roses says:
I like "in the transference" better than "with". It's nicer I think - well way rougher and hurty, but it's nice. The therapist is making themselves much more vulnerable so it sounds a tad ouchy. But strangely enough, that's how trust is built somehow.
Graffiti says:
The interesting part about this Roses is that you entering the Twilight zone!!
Do do dodo, do do dodo... (You know the music)
The relational as I am describing it here blurs the line between therapy and non therapy. Therapists and particularly professional organisations like the Australian Psychological Society do not like such blurry lines at all!
When a client and therapist get together they have a treatment contract. That means they both agree that what is going to occur between them. The client is going to be the client and the therapist is going to be the therapist. In this country that means that both parties must abide by the laws of the land and by the rules that are provided by the various professional bodies such as professional practice guidelines and ethics rules. These clearly define the form that the relationship will take. For instance it would be considered very improper for a therapist to borrow $10,000 off a client.
If you don’t have treatment contract then none of the usual professional practice or ethics guidelines apply. For instance if two friends get together then no professional practice guidelines apply and their relationship is only bound by the laws of the land. For instance in Australia that means that neither person is allowed to assault the other but they could borrow money and so forth.
So this raises the question of can you have treatment with out a treatment contract? If you go this way then you enter into the blurry zone. There is one easy solution to all this, why go there in the first place? Why enter the relational where the therapist submits to the relationship and stops being the doctor as that instantly takes him out of the relational. Why go into the blury line between client and therapist? The answer to this is of course that very many people agree that one of the most therapeutic things for a person is to be in the relational. Its curative powers are acknowledged as being the most potent as compared to any technique one may use with a client.
How does one get there even if one wanted to. The relational as shown in the diagram:
it is not therapy and
it is not, not therapy
So what is it?
Roses asks: Do you learn from your clients Tony?
The answer is a resounding yes Roses, and that is a central feature of the relational. Every relationship changes me or has an impact on me. Some more than others but every person who I relate to weather they be my spouse, neighbour, friend or client has an impact on me and I change or transform as a result of that relating.
Every relationship impacts on us and changes us no matter who it is
If the person chooses to be in the doctor or therapist detached role then the changes will be reduced but unfortunately that also means that the therapist is less ‘engaged’ with the client and thus the client will also change less. So if the therapist lets go of being the doctor then the transformations on both sides increase and one can then say that it is more therapeutic for the client.
Logically of course it can be done. I am going to establish a family group. People can come and be in this family group if they choose. This grouping will do things like go to the movies, eat together, go on picnics, go on holidays together and so forth. Also in this group people can talk about their feelings and relationships and reactions, them self and others and so forth. Also in this group, very explicitly, there are no treatment contracts, in this group there will be no therapists and no clients. No therapy occurs in this family group as it is a family not a therapy group. In this family group people can be in the relational and there are no treatment contracts.
Graffiti
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Monday, 15 October 2007
The need for treatment without a treatment contract.
The relationship between the counsellor and client is usually seen as one of the most important aspects that leads to change in the client. It is how they perceive and relate to the therapist that is most important of all for the client. More so than what techniques the therapist uses with the client.
However there is one problem and that is with transference. That is, how the client feels and reacts to the therapist. Most therapists, in fact the vast majority work WITH the transference rather than being IN the transference with the client.
This is how a therapist works WITH the transference. It is all theory, just words, and not real relating. To be real the therapist has to be IN the transference and be transformed like the client is.
So when a client reports being scared of the therapist, that he may leave the client or be rejecting and so forth then the vast majority of therapists will work WITH that. This means the therapist will assume the ‘doctor’ role which automatically means the client is seen as being “ill”, and in the patient role. The therapist will seek to understand why the client has these irrational feelings and how that comes from their past and so forth.
Doing such a thing automatically pulls the therapist out of what is called the relational. In this instance I take the relational to mean the relationship between the client and therapist, where the two parties relate on a more human to human level. Inherent in the relational is the transformation of both parties. For the client to change or transform the therapist must also transform and change. So it is much more of an equal relationship in that sense than the usual therapist client relationship.
As soon as the therapist starts thinking and operating in a therapist like way then they are removed from the relational as is shown in the diagram. They become the doctor and the client becomes the “ill” party in the relationship. For the therapist to remain in the relational they have to almost surrender or submit to that relationship and reject the therapist or doctor role.
So if we have therapist and client, and the therapist works WITH the transference then we can understand that. That is well known and understood. However, what if the therapist chooses to be IN the relational with the client. If he or she chooses to reject the doctor role and stop seeing the client as ill what does that leave us with. What is it? We know it is being IN the relational, but what actually is that?
He is saying who he is. To cover it all up is what many therapists do and they can stay out of the relational and not be transformed.
It leaves one in quite a new set of circumstances!. It leaves a therapist and a client in the relational without being a therapist and client!. There is treatment occurring without a treatment contract! Now that is a revolutionary position to end up in.
As soon as one starts to think like a therapist the relational ceases to exist.
The most potent therapeutic force ceases to exist.
To not think like a therapist then there can be no therapeutic contract.
One is then doing therapy with no therapeutic contract.
That is an impossibility.
But the relational is possible.
So what is it then?
Graffiti
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Thursday, 04 October 2007
Is being safe good enough?
Well it raises an interesting question.
In the city that I live in there has been a media frenzy because this old footballer died. He was 41 and a hero in his time on the football field and since then he has become a high profile media person. He was a very much liked person who it seems was a good all around guy. Chris Mainwaring was his name.
The actual cause of death is unknown and subject to an autopsy. But it is known that he had called police to his house late at night as he was being very loud on his front lawn. He sent them away and then a few hours later he was found dead. It has been intimated, but everyone speaks in legal speak at these times. It has been alleged suggested that he had taken some form of stimulant, probably an amphetamine and he suffered a heart attack and died.
She is a risk taker. Look at the emotion. She certainly is living life to the full.
This person is what we call in Australia, a larrakin. That means he is allowed to break the rules, maybe even a law or two and all is forgiven because we like people like that. Heck! We all come from the social effluent of the British Empire. Those incorriables who the United Kingdom no longer wanted became Australians. So larrakinism is a good thing in the psyche of the Australian.
He died at 41. That means he could have lived another 30 years but would that have been worth it. He was a risk taker. That is what a larrakan is. A rule breaker is a larrakin. Ned Kelly was precisely that.
So would you do it?
Risk takers
Would you trade 30 years of life so you can live life your way. He could have been more conformist and not been a risk taker. But then on his death bed he would have said: “I lived life in a safe way and lived longer”. Is that worth it?
Conformity is so seductive
My logo for life is as I have said many times before:
“When was the last time you did something for the first time”.
Continually step outside your comfort zone and take risks. Chris Mainwaring did that by apparently taking amphetamines and by him being a larrakin. Of course he was taking no more of a risk than did Peter Brock the racing car driver who died. He took no more risk than did Steve Irwin and his death by Stingray.
Risk taker
It is safer to take illicit drugs than it is to sky dive, bungee jump, be a racing driver and work with wild animals. So would you do it?. I don’t mean take illicit drugs. Would you do whatever it is that takes a risk in life for you. Would you do something that increases your chances of dying, or being rejected, or being put down, because that is what life is all about. Then on your death bed you could say you have lived life. Is that what it is all about?. Chris Mainwaring lived on the edge by apparently by taking amphetamines, just like Peter Brock and Steve Irwin did in their own ways.
Would you give up 30 years of life so you could live life like that?
Or you could live the 30 years and then say on your death bed that you at least lived the 30.
Graffiti
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