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I think I suffer from an over-active amygdala. I often easily get "triggered" and experience adrenaline release, shaking hands and voice, and find it very embarrassing as it also impacts my ability to rationalize my thoughts. I want to be able to stay calm in tense situations, particularly when I am facing a conflict or a disagreeable person.

Do you have any advice on how to train myself to remain calm? I am frankly sick and tired of trying to calm myself down, appearing weak in difficult situations, and replaying these situations back in my head afterwards. I find I have diminished self-respect after experiencing one of these events.


Do you have any thoughts on why tragedy in art, in the Shakespearean sense, has completely vanished? Movies, TV shows, plays, etc.
I feel in my gut like these tragedies missing from the art landscape is a real problem/done on purpose... But I can't quite formulate an argument as to why.


Do you have any advice on how to best detach from family's shame? I know I've been raised to manage my parent's irresponsibility and shame. In other words, they (and some of my siblings) either couldn't process their own shame and inflicted it upon me or used it as a manipulation tool against me. I'm the youngest one in the family.

Whenever they fail, I feel like it's my responsibility to shield them from consequences or I should somehow help them. When someone from my family of origin does something embarrasing and I get to know about it from a third person, it sometimes feels even worse. I'm working through this issue and getting angry at this situation helps, but not entirely.

I've defooed from most of my family as they've treated me badly in the past and even in recent years. The one sibling I have the best relationship with still keeps in contact with my family of origin and sometimes likes to complain or talk about it. I've asked him not to do that, but I still got that morbid curiosity in me and this topic slips into our conversations from time to time. I've even ignored or blocked some family members to deny them access to me via text as to avoid them triggering me.


I just listened to a call-in show where you mentioned wanting to buy glasses and getting annoyed at a saleswoman for not warning you about extra expenses and her getting extremely anxious as a reaction. Her repetitive compulsion was to provoke anger in others.

But why is it that showing excess fear and stress provokes aggression in others? Is it the primal need to dominate? I've been on both sides in these situations. I remember my aggression towards someone like that had something to do with feeling of power - feeling better than/superior. In the opposite scenario I managed past fears of making mistakes thus annoying those around me.

With greater self-knowledge now I treat others better in such situations, but I'm still struggling with provoking others, assuming they're not total assholes to begin with. I know this comes from my childhood, but why it is easier to learn to treat others better than myself?