Gun Blog Variety Podcast #150 - Let's You and Him Fight

It's called "rooting for injuries", and it's what the anti-gunners are doing.

• Beth wrote a textbook called "Women's Handgun and Self-Defense Fundamentals", and she tells us all about it.
• A $1M bond for man accused of kidnapping a family and forcing them to... shop at Target? Sean looks a little deeper into the story.
• Barron’s back with more on the expected second wave of ransomware.
• Miguel is fired up today. He's irritated at those members of the pro-civil rights community who are blindly doing exactly what the anti-gunners are telling them to do.
• We welcome Special Guest Ali Slocum, who tells us about her journey from anti-gunner to gun student with instructor Jenna Meeks at Carry On Colorado.
• Tiffany is still on assignment.
• Pain? Anger? Sadness? It's all in your head, but Erin tells you why that's neither a dismissal nor a bad thing.
• Protect Minnesota is against a new bill that would bring Stand Your Ground to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Weer’d starts a three-part series on their anti-self defense press conference.
• And Barron brings us our Plug of the Week for the Mission Critical baby carrier.

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Listen to the podcast here.

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Thanks to LuckyGunner and Remington for their sponsorship, and a special thanks to Firearms Policy Coalition for their support.

Blue Collar Prepping Transcript -

It’s All In Our Heads, But That's Okay

About two weeks ago, I received an email from one or our listeners in reaction to my segment on PTSD. I won’t go into great detail on what the letter said, because it’s personal and not my story to tell - but I can say that the listener thanked me for the segment and said it had great applicability to his situation, because he was about to observe the anniversaries of the deaths of two of his children.

So I hope my segment helped you, dear listener. And thank you for writing, because it brings up a worthwhile topic for discussion: why does loss of a loved one hurt us like a physical injury?

The answer again comes from Lawrence Gonzales’ book Surviving Survival, and it’s very simple: the brain is the organ that interprets what is and isn’t pain.

It doesn’t matter to the brain if you’re upset because you’ve stubbed your toe or if you’re upset because you’ve lost a loved one. All it knows is that you’re upset and showing the physiological signs of it -- increased heart rate and blood pressure, rapid breathing, crying, yelling or screaming or cursing, etcetera -- and so the brain dutifully interprets this as pain.

There are two effects going on here. The first is that the brain doesn’t differentiate between emotional pain and physical pain, because to the brain there is no difference. Pain, anxiety, arousal; all of these are interpreted by the brain from nerve signals that the body is sending out. So when someone looks at you and says that your pain is “all in your head”, you go ahead and give them the stink eye, because duh, where else would it be?

What’s more, because the body sends signals to the brain, and the brain loves to notice and remember patterns -- recall the phrase “Fire together, wire together” -- this means that your posture can influence how you feel. If you adopt a posture of grief -- shoulders hunched, head forward of your hips, face in your hands -- you will start to feel sad even if you have nothing to feel sad about. Similarly, if you smile, the neurons that fire when you smile go “He’s smiling! Therefore, he must be happy! So we’ll feel happy!”

This gives us some effective strategies for coping with grief. First, realize that something “being in your head” doesn’t make what you are feeling any less real. Everything you sense and feel is by definition all in your head, so just stop with that self-defeating line of thought. You feel what you feel, and your feelings are valid.

Next, adopt a posture that your brain doesn’t associate with sadness, and you will start to feel better. (Incidentally, this is why exercise is also good for helping overcome grief and depression -- your brain associates other mental and emotional states with those postures, as well as the endorphin release that comes from exercise).

If at all possible, adopt a posture of a desired emotional state. For example, putting a pencil between your teeth uses many of the same muscles as smiling, so -- fire together, wire together -- you start to feel better because your brain thinks you're smiling and therefore happy.

Finally, understand that your desire to lash out in anger is completely understandable. I thought I was just a jerk with a hair trigger temper because every time I stubbed my toe I had an instant, white-hot desire to hurt, maim, kill and destroy whatever object I’d bumped into. Well, as it turns out, this is actually a reflex that’s been hardwired deep into mammalian brains as a survival mechanism.

If the brain senses pain from the body, its first assumption is that we are being eaten by a predator, and so our immediate reflex is to kill whatever is hurting us before it kills us. The fact that you’ve been able to think “Why would I want to murder a doorjamb? That’s a ridiculous overreaction” isn’t something to be ashamed of; instead, feel relief that your mind was able to realize you weren’t being eaten and was able to reign in that impulse before you did something drastic, like hurt your hand punching the door.

Don’t ever feel ashamed of your feelings. What you feel isn’t your choice, but how you react to those feelings is.

• Surviving Survival - http://amzn.to/2shaYUE