``..stressed out dealing with some of my cow-orkers...Tips for dealing with the stress?...kickboxing action in training video. ...But it ain't enough..'' Kelley
---------
Hmm. Sounds familiar, since stress with co-workers sent me over the edge and out the door in mid-May.
The main thing I tried which worked for a while, was of course physical exercise.
But there is a problem with this solution. Timing is everything. I could kill myself for three days straight and that would do enough to get me through about two and half days of work. By the third and fourth day, I was recovering, but still at work. By then I tried to switch over to the gym after work.
Once I start to recover, my emotional life comes back on-line with a vengeance. I had to time the physical recovery so it didn't happen during work. The week I quit, I had timed it wrong. I had just got back from an unplanned climbing trip, had a great time and recovered just as I went to work to face a momentary event where the stress went off the register. If I had been worn out and or relaxed, I might have avoided the flare up. But I wasn't tired. I was getting ramped up again to go climb or cycle or something, but not work. So work became a worse trap than ever.
Psychologically, you can try to identify traps and open them. A trap in my vocabulary is something like work where you have to be, don't like it, and can't get out of. A trap. Prison. Work on changing other traps, instead.
I also tried reading enormous quantities of sci-fi, like the entire Asimov Foundation series, the Hogan trilogy on the giants. Re-read several classic anthologies, etc. This is my equivalent to playing video games. Mindless escape.
None of this works for very long---at least for me. I managed to drag it out for months on end. Slowly the antagonism built up even as I tried to match the build up with all these solutions.
So, finally there came a day.
There are some things to stay away from.
Stay away from Leo Strauss. I was reading and thinking too much about Leo, and when Abu Ghraib hit the news, it was very depressing. Depression (non-clinical) is of course an internal emotive trap, that leads to hostility, and hostility of course leads to aggression, and aggression leads to violence... And violence momentarily releases depression, only to re-start the cycle over again... Bad cycle.
Iraq and Abu Ghraib are what happens when authoritarian jerks who claim to protect `liberal democracy' assume police power (bully) on their own under the pretext of protecting democracy, i.e. the national security state. John Yoo and others figure big in these atrocities and they are just a new generation of Leos.
So stay away from reading or thinking about the righwing.
The war on terror and security have an endless supply of this poison. Their extreme rhetorical assaults with no counter-voice, and apparently no counter-prevailing public resistance---and the vacancy works havoc on my internal psychological controls. Loss of internal checks and balances opens the flood gates of frustration and impotence---precursors to depression and as we just learned depression leads to hostility and...
Pretty soon red lights start flashing, alarms start sounding. The Bad Chuckie gets lose. Kill, Kill. Kill them all...
So, the other thing to stay away from is becoming what you resist and struggle against. In the dialectic of power, the turns of the master slave struggle transforms each into the other.
This transposition happens all the time in just about every conflict, even when there isn't a large inequality. In concrete conditions as opposed to theoretical ones, the struggle itself is the transforming process as one tactic after another is taken up by each side against the other, until they become indistinguishable.
As far as I can tell, knowing all this, figuring it out and achieving the ability to analyze and recognize all these elements and their interactions seems to change nothing in the out come.
My last solution finally arrives, and it's time to quit whether that is economically feasible or not.
Not much help I guess.
CG