It had a brief wave of popular use as therapy in the early 2000’s iirc. Partners telling their so’s that they had cancer etc…
I’m guessing modern use would be microdoses well timed apart.
Getting clean X is pretty key but those comedowns are a bitch. My day after scheme was always to put a tear jerker on early in the day to get it out of the way and then massive amounts of weed the rest of the day. Must have worked as I am totally well adjusted and sane now! 
Yeah. Although it’s one of things that seems hard to distinguish actual good science and evidence from hippy adjacent bullshit.
As far as I can tell. PTSD and trauma therapy was one area that had a lot more substance.
I mentioned MDMA therapy earlier in the thread, and I am reluctant to mention it again lest it sound like I am crossing that line between mentioning the possibility and recommending something. I have never done MDMA, or any “hard” drug for that matter. But I have a lot of stuff to work through that I know is kinda there and banked up, and MDMA is one of the options I am seriously considering to help me process it. It’s a little morbidly fascinating how we can build up our psyche around avoidance of traumas.
Anyway, I really only wanted to bring it up here for a few reasons;
From the little I do know about the practical aspects of it, there are a few important things to keep in mind if you want to try it. One is having an experienced trip sitter who can be there with you for the experience. The other is to approach the session with a sense if intentionality around what you want to be thinking about, and also to do integration work after the session.
Ive read some peoples accounts and saying that for weeks/months after the session they actually felt worse, but I am not sure if that is partially a sign of progress since they are integrating experiences instead of dissociating. Ive read a lot more accounts of people who said it did good things for them.
This is all to say that you seem to have the intelligence and ability to look into this possibility yourself and make your own judgement. https://maps.org is the home base for this stuff as far as the US is concerned, and who knows, you may qualify to be part of a trial there if you were interested. Their listings of people who might be able to assist with integration is at https://integration.maps.org
There is a lot of momentum gathering around this treatment modality, so if it seems like you might want to try it at some stage my suggestion would be to keep tabs on it in some way. Again, I am at pains to repeat this - I am not recommending this at all. But for me personally the potential of this treatment to assist with processing and healing brings me hope. I am not rushing into anything because I think the experience in the field is accelerating so much at the moment that what is known and what options are available will increase a lot year on year for a while, but I would think in the next 12-18 months I will try it.
The interview I referred to is called “Escape from a House of Horror” by dianne sawyer last year. They interview 2 turpin girls. I’ve watched it a few times now and it’s very very similar to my story, except their degree of isolation from the outside world was a bit more than mine, and we didn’t have as extreme abuse like chaining - although some of the stuff my sisters went through was truly unspeakable, what I did see. My dad was abusive, but not to me. My mom was abusive to me, and my dad was abusive to my sister, and the youngest was not supposed to have been born at all. When I was about 5, probably during the peak of all the most dysfunctional shit because that time period gets really blurry - they were on the verge of divorce, due to her drug use and infidelity and racking up massive debt for no reason. I can’t talk about the circumstances of my youngest sister’s birth publicly because other than my mom and 1 other person I think I am the only one alive that knows and I can’t risk my sister seeing it. It’s truly fucked though.
my dad was certainly no saint but I do view him as a victim here, although not a blameless one. That’s been difficult to grapple with over the years - because he was so close to me, and the dearest and closest friend I ever had. Without his kindness and closeness I do not think I would have survived. However, I do remember him being quite cruel to my little sister. I never have talked to her about it because she seems to have made peace with him and they seemed to have resolved it before he died, it’s their thing. She was lucky IMO. Things actually did stabilize when the youngest sibling was born, but quickly deteriorated.
They show video of the home as they found it (the turpins). Ours was considerably, considerably, considerably worse. I struggle to describe it to normal people. Like, there is no space to stand or breathe or do anything. Everything is filthy around you, rotting, decaying, bugs, broken glass, you name it. Your parents’ space is fine and they have plenty of food (they kept their own refrigerator) but you have nothing. It was exactly how they described it, except like I said I dont think the physicality was quite as much. The control and isolation and severe neglect was all there though. I remember several times my mother locking herself in her office for days at a time (my dad had gotten very very ill around the time my youngest sibling was born - later we found out he had a rapid onset case of diabetes, heart disease, and muscular dystrophy - which accelerated fairly quickly, and a lot of the age of 8-17 he was in and out of the ER and intensive care). Because of this I absolve him of a lot of the conditions we dealt with. He was too sick to do anything and to me, it seemed like he had a substance issue that he was dealing with but never acknowledged to me or anyone else. For him it was the painkillers and muscle relaxers he needed just to be able to move around without agony. It was hard to watch for so many years.
anyway this is all to say conditions were shit for a long long time. I got lucky and when things blew up with my mom and I escaped in the divorce, I got to live a pretty normal age 16-18 with my dad before I set out on my own (I can talk about that another time). I gained a ton of weight super fast and started doing really really well in sports, and had a brief stint as a pretty stellar athlete before my knee started to deteriorate too much. I finally was allowed to have friends and my own life and my own interests and I felt so free, and even despite the trauma I just went through (lost the dog, the bat attack, some other horrible shit I didnt mention) it felt like a really peaceful time.
In those years I dont know how my sisters fared and I feel like I had abandoned them. I was first to escape and have dealt with cutting my incubator off the easiest. next was my next sister who is a year and a half younger than me - her line was when my incubator refused to see her first born grandchild out of some petty thing we didnt even understand. I don’t think my incubator even knows she had a grand daughter that has lived and died. How fucked is that?
It’s difficult for any adult child to come to an understanding that not only does your parent not give a single shit about anyone but themselves, but that they probably never cared about you at all beyond what you could give them in that moment. It’s really hard to grapple with sometimes because so many people I’ve met have absolute wonderful parents and to those people this stuff is truly unimaginable and frequently they’ll outright deny it, make excuses for abusers, or try to minimize/downplay it.
It’s started to ruin relationships of mine that didnt ever have this kind of problem. For instance, my step grandma was around this time. She saw EVERYTHING. She’s even told me she and my grandpa had considered several times going to CPS but they didnt trust the government or something retarded so they decided to just “keep an eye on it.” Fuck you you fucking enablers you could have stoppped it the entire fucking time and you did NOTHING. The more I think about it the more I get enraged and hope they all rot in hell, every single piece of shit that saw it and did absolutely nothing. I’d spit on their graves if I ever found out. I get that angry.
Anyway it’s truly crazy watching this interview. Jordan describes getting a cell phone accidentally and getting glimpses of the outside world through it and it gave her hope - that’s EXACTLY what the internet was like when it came to me around the age of 12. I could finally see the world beyond the tiny little glimpse of it I was allowed to see and it gave me a lot of hope and it probably isn’t a coincidence I gravitated towards computers.
pretty big hand I played tonight that pretty much won my tournament:
that deep breath ahahaha
Yeah I mean calling there is mandatory, his line looks full of shit, especially the timing of the shove. Like what am I supposed to believe he has. Even if he did backdoor a flush or river two pair he would probably need to take a second to decide what to do with it. The most believable hand is that he had 87 all along and decided to flat the turn despite the flush draws. If so that’s life.
yea i think it’s not even close as it might appear, guy was fairly hyper aggro and I’d been caught barreling many many times. that’s kinda why at the start of the hand I said “next all in decides this,” it was just super super aggro on both sides. I had planned on shoving 12k into 11k on almost any river there and was surprised by the donk all in
the timing of the bluff on his end was a bit poor though - when I raise the flop there without a crazy hand it’s a lot of draw or draw + pair type of hands and turn/river would’ve massively helped those. other than that I’ve got maybe some air bluffs that will barrel most turns mixed with 9x, mid pairs like 66-88, and overpairs and he can really only fold those out, and i haaaaate folding pairs. it was a harder call because I’ve been in spots so many times like this in this home game and I’ve never ever been good.
i wasnt so much as worried about the flush unless he had like 75dd and I also did have the A diamonds, not that I think that’d make a huge difference but it was a point in my favor there. J9 made a lot of sense to lose to or the 78
It’s an amazingly terrible bluff because I’m pretty sure you literally only fold losing hands. Like I call with a 9 or better and I can’t have something like a better 6 because I don’t play it like that.
Yea, HU hands are really difficult to analyze. From my perspective it looked really strong because he’d never taken a line like that.
Opponent was interesting. My poker buddy from 2p2 describes him as “unorthodox” but I’d call him one of the stronger players in the league. He bluffs with a very high frequency and can come out of nowhere with weird hands he somehow sneaked into the pot with when multiway. He has a very similar style to myself a very long time ago, which I have adapted recently as I have started to rebuild my game.
We had about 75 hands HU by that point, roughly, and had been 3 handed for about an hour before that - so there was a looooot of history here. 2-3 handed if I have the chips I’m playing really aggressively and what I had noticed was that he adapted to my wide button opens at first by 3 betting me light, which is standard. I’ll fire back a pretty wide 4 bet range if the stack sizes are deep enough which i did start doing. That’s really hard to deal with, so he adapted by flatting me pre and donking an extremely wide flop range and then trying to steamroll me out of the hand after that or induce bluffs from me with weaker hands, which was working well for a little bit.
I’ve played ~500k hands of HUNL but most of that was 10 years ago. it was the only game I ever did really well at. I love it but there’s no good games anymore that I can find.
poker’s been a good outlet whilst not drinking. scratches a dopamine itch and I am enjoying it again, somehow, for the first time in a while.
i’m running a bit shit and stuck a little but nothing horrific for me. trying to rebuild my game. I am a bit unorthodox and like to learn things on my own. my baseline is the concepts from theory of poker that I’ve tried to build off of.
my best games are HUNL, LHE (6 max), and mixed games. love stud but it’s never spread anywhere. considering learning PLO but I am not sure I’ve ever won a single PLO pot in my life.
my interest got reignited by my cousin who started playing and I started donking around 50-100NL cash on bovada, $20ish sng’s and some shots at bigger tournaments. I feel like I’m playing pretty ok and learning the game (it’s changed a bit since I last played online) but overall the strength of the players feels very very 2008ish and i like it.
if poker talk bugs anyone here just skim over it like my hearthstone shit, sorry, it’ll likely pass soon. speaking of that, my followers have long told me if I focused on poker like I did on hearthstone I would’ve made a lot more money. i kind of agree. it’s frequently more boring and less complex though.
I have played with a guy who spoke extensively about his drug addiction and how he move on from it by channeling his energy into a gambling addiction and a sex addiction.
This is the most concise video I have seen on PF ranges.
kenny rogers’ version of the gambler is the best one come at me
6 max double ups are a pretty interesting tournament format, especially the bubble play. I find myself tossing Aces/kings away so frequently and other monsters. very odd form of sng. I went on a hot streak and won 10 buyins today. I bubbled a few close ones at the end or it would have been a few more.
sweet think I just grabbed myself 4 weeks of paid medical leave.
I told my director quite honestly I’m not performing to my best level and it really has been eating away at me, my options are to quit or waste away til i get laid off, neither of which I can stomach, but I wasn’t sure what to do. Ended up negotiating what seems fairly certain as several weeks paid and as much unpaid as I need.
Awesome, use the time well and I hope you get to feeling better asap
I’d say I feel much worse but there are signs of some improvement. Certainly less beer bottle waste which is something that tended to clutter my apartment up and was a lot of work to deal with. It also attracted pests around the garbage bags full of bottles in the backyard (mostly flies). So that’s all cleaned up and noticeably improved. I also am noticing I’m sleeping through the entire night most of the time now, which is something I never had before really.
Emotionally I’ve felt very depressed and a bit raw. I had a rough week in poker - which I’ve been trying to get back into - with 2 absolutely brutal bubbles in my small multi-table league game. AK > AA and AQ > AA a few times into losing an all in on the flop in a massive pot with an 85/15 that busted me at 4th where the money woulda quadrupled my buyin, and one other very similar bustout like that. Stuck about $1k in that game but it’s so soft if I keep playing I know it’ll be a good thing I just have to stick to, and my bankroll is still healthy.
My all-in chip EV graph has been pretty hilarious until I finally ran super hot last night and went 12/14 on my double up SNG’s, so that was a bit of a morale booster.
I’ve been doing larger MTT’s and had a few runs that threatened to go deep but other than the small WSOP cash I haven’t had much success there - hoping to bink one for a few thousand soon, that’d be a really nice come up with all these medical bills.
Overall I’m enjoying the game a lot which I haven’t in a really long time so it’s nice to have something that kinda scratches that addictive itch that isn’t too unhealthy for me that I also enjoy. There’s also sometimes a bit of socialization to it in live games, although, people at Commerce are mostly complete toolbags. I’m going to go to commerce and donk around the $200 NL Mexican poker game I think this weekend - but it’s a bit intimidating, all the players are hispanic and only spanish is spoken at the table.
nice little $1600 tourney cash tonight - needed that for little morale boost. i’m still in makeup to myself but i think i can squeak these out every now and then. i got 2/27 tonight basically just ICM folding in spots i normally wouldn’t and lost flip at the end. didn’t play many hands at all and other than one wild three barrel bluff didnt get too crazy. i am trying to adapt a tighter tourney style and keep the wild chip slangin to cash where it works a lot better.
i havent drank in a month and have been very depressed last several days like can’t really get out of bed but it’s getting better.
doin bucket list shit and one of the things i could knock out this weekend is getting a tattoo. i’ve always sorta wanted one but never knew what to get. still can’t decide. don’t even know a location.
taking ideas. i really like darth vader, but cant think of anything id be in love with