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The guy you are arguing with is an idiot trying to make you angry to "win" because you said to not get angry. Just ignore the troll.

Communism is literally not dictated by the few. Communism is anarchist in that there are literal no leaders. What you are thinking of is leninism, where a group of few used the ideas of socialism and communism to hoard power and money, spread misinformation, and destroy education. Because educated people don't like authoritarian leadership.

Like how in the USA, education has been villianized by the right in their propaganda. They cut funding to public education. They remove what books can be found in libraries. They can keep people ignorant of ideas they find threatening to their power structures. Such as socialist and communism ideals. Any book that talks of breaking down the hierarchy is considered a threat.

I completely understand where you are coming from, but you got to realize that that concept of communism has been warped by western propaganda and selective education.

People hungry for power will use what ever ideology appeals to the people to gain power. Look at Donald Trump. He was historically a Democrat from New York uninterested in politics. He ran as a Democrat the first time but made no headlines. He switched parties and started talking pro-christian rhetoric. He is very obvious no Christian.

You see it with "Protect the children" anti-abortion groups. Who have no interest in actually protecting children. Groups that target trans people with the same stance have no interest in actually protecting children. Groups who are say they want to stamp out pedophilia use it to target privacy laws.

And you have groups like Nazis and Lenist who used socialism and communism as a means to an end. Those groups used those movements to consolidate power and wealth to the 1%, and used violence against others as a way to ensure their continued control, they were neither communist or socialist in practice, only in their speech.

Are you okay?

She never did it unguided. And the way the therapist did it was different than what I've seen online. She would lay down and the therapist had her hold two paddles. One in each hand. The paddles would vibrate or lightly shock her, alternating between left and right. She did this while she was reliving old traumatic moments from her childhood. It was supposed to help process the information differently or something along those lines.

For my wife it was mainly a good therapist she saw weekly. I think what helped her improve that most was a form of radical acceptance .

• Intrusive thoughts don't define me
• Intrusive thoughts do not last forever
• I'm not alone

Or something like:

• I am not my thoughts. They are not my authentic self.
• I am just an observer of my thoughts. I simply watch as they pass through.

Often the reaction to the thoughts is what gives intrusive thoughts power. Accepting the thoughts for what they are takes the power from them. This is hard since often intrusive thoughts are ingrained into your most moral values, so to take that power is difficult.

One thing she had me do at the start of her therapy was to ask her a question when ever she had an intrusive thought: what if? What if you killed that person? What if you said that racial slur? For her it would be the end of the world, bringing it into reality would often ground the thoughts. For the driving example, "What if I hit a child?"

Well, then there would be a loud thump. We would get out and check on the child. We would call for help while we did what we could. We would probably go to the hospital. The cops would try and determine if it was accidental or not. You might be in jail. You might not. That is out of our hands.

Just follow the thoughts to the logical conclusion. That aspect of her work stopped shortly after we started, though.

She also did some trauma therapy. OCD can be rooted in childhood trauma. My wife had a sister with bi-polar, and owho ften got violent. Her parents wouldn't speak to the kids about it. So my wife's childhood was filled with this constant unacknowledged stress and tension, because she knew something was wrong but everyone pretended it was all okay. Coupled with her autistic hyper empathy, this sent her into a anxiety driven downward spiral.

Another thing she said that helped was EMDR. It's sort of a pseudoscience but my wife swears it helped a ton. So, anicdotal but worth a shot.

Anyways, thats all I can think of. I would recommend trying to find a therapist who specializes in neurodivergent people and go from there.

My wife has severe OCD. She has gotten to the point she has basically 0 symptoms now. Where before she couldn't drive or leave the house. Here is what I've learned through our journey.

• The repetitive actions are often caused by intrusive thoughts. My wife's stemmed from actions that were tied to her morality, and her memory. Such as, she would drive around the block 5 times because she would have this thought, "What if you ran over a kid but you don't remember it?" Which was the worse thing she could have done.
• 90% percent of people with OCD are also neurodivergent, namely autistic. My wife wasn't diagnosed with Autism until after her OCD diagnosis.

Watched this with some friends while nursing a horrible hangover. It was awful but there are some "so bad it's good" moments litered throughout.

As Llamapacolypse said, it has it's dark moments. What I wrote above is some of the darkest. It never goes into too much detail when it involves some of the more triggering things. Just a fade to black.

That said it's such an intensely human series. So much love and compassion litered throughout the whole thing.

It's also such a unique experience. Most fantasy books have huge massive reveals that shock and take you by surprise. Malazan has these things. But it also does it in reverse. You'll read something and then a book or two later it changes context entirely, completely blowing your mind.

The Crippled God from Mazalan Book of the Fallen. I should probably spoiler this. And trigger warning.

Zombies aren't real. And will take on any qualities the writer wants. Some people write zombies as brain eating mindless undead. Others are super fast group thinking infected humans. It's all up to your imagination.

Because Mike Johnson isn't in my district or anywhere near it. But I know my representative's voting history, and that's what matters. Local governance is very important.