Narcissist Trauma Survival and Recovery Community Group
Support for those anyone who is or has been in a relationship with a narcissist. Together we are much stronger than any of us would be alone. A place for non-judgemental mutial support, advice, and comfort.
Yesterday, I was answering Snowy's post. I don't know about you, but sometimes when I am trying to be supportive or encouraging, I start thinking about what I am saying and ask myself, "how do I KNOW"? Maybe that doesn't "make sense", but sometimes the support or encouragement seems counter-intuitive or flies in the face of "common sense". I've made the statement here at times that it was when I "dumped" the "expert's" advice, I finally began to make progress, especially in regard to dealing with N mayhem. That doesn't mean I throw everything away, I have just learned that I CAN believe in myself as much or more than believing in experts or custom, sometimes. The "best" experts don't present themselves as knowing everything, knowing more than anyone else and are willing to admit they don't "know" something, but usually, "not knowing" gets their own curiosity going and they may offer to look into a question and collaborate in finding answers or information. Often, too, "serendipity" lends a hand ... but serendipity also involves paying attention to previous facts and discoveries ... often, "intuition" helping to make connections or highlight an aspect of something that "anyone else" would see and not realize the significance of (when I was taking classes, intuition wasn't well-defined. I believe it is the below consciousness system of logic used by the mind; I also believe that the more accurate the facts and knowledge are in the mind AND/OR the less the mind is "distorted" by incorrect assumptions, the more accurate a person's intuition is).
Anyway, that led me to googling about the matter to see what I could find to make the point that it's not necessarily education or credentials or even IQ that "make the proof", although all of those things may be an advantage.
I learned: (from http://www.cracked.com/article_19248_6-uneducated-amateurs-whose-genius-changed-world.html)
Michael Faraday, who revolutionized the thinking about electricity, had virtually no formal education. Born to a poor family, he got a job in a bookbinder's at 14, and started reading some of the books he worked on during the 7 years he worked there ....
"Now, having read up on a bunch of science stuff and finding himself fascinated with it, he asked London's best scientist, Humphrey Davy, for an assistant job. Humphrey declined. To be honest, Faraday was a guy with absolutely no scientific experience or education who had just asked the best chemist in the business for a job.
He did get a job in the next year though, and then sh8t went down. In short time, Faraday invented the electric motor, the electric generator, the Bunsen burner, electrolysis and electroplating. He discovered electro-magnetic induction, he discovered benzene, he figured out the shape of magnetic fields, discovered metallic nano-particles (thought to be the birth of nano-science) and something complicated about chlorine. Basically, he was a science machine."
Anyway, that led me to googling about the matter to see what I could find to make the point that it's not necessarily education or credentials or even IQ that "make the proof", although all of those things may be an advantage.
I learned: (from http://www.cracked.com/article_19248_6-uneducated-amateurs-whose-genius-changed-world.html)
Michael Faraday, who revolutionized the thinking about electricity, had virtually no formal education. Born to a poor family, he got a job in a bookbinder's at 14, and started reading some of the books he worked on during the 7 years he worked there ....
"Now, having read up on a bunch of science stuff and finding himself fascinated with it, he asked London's best scientist, Humphrey Davy, for an assistant job. Humphrey declined. To be honest, Faraday was a guy with absolutely no scientific experience or education who had just asked the best chemist in the business for a job.
He did get a job in the next year though, and then sh8t went down. In short time, Faraday invented the electric motor, the electric generator, the Bunsen burner, electrolysis and electroplating. He discovered electro-magnetic induction, he discovered benzene, he figured out the shape of magnetic fields, discovered metallic nano-particles (thought to be the birth of nano-science) and something complicated about chlorine. Basically, he was a science machine."
"German native William Herschel dreamed about outer space, but in his day-to-day life found himself about as far away from the stars as one can get; namely, England in the 18th century. He was a talented musician and by his late 20s, was taking prominent jobs in the exciting world of professional organ playing, and all the professional organ player groupies that presumably came with a gig like that.
Oh, and Herschel also happened to be a certified genius. Though being seriously interested in all things extra-terrestrial, he didn't have a telescope. Obviously, the most sensible solution was to spend 16 hours a day grinding up mirrors and lenses to make his own. To fill out the underdog shape of this story arc, we like to think this happened after the rich, popular scientists made fun of him for not having a telescope at a dance."
Ramanujan was insanely good at math, and it wasn't due to any education, either -- he was entirely self taught. His parents gave him a math textbook on advanced trigonometry around age 11. He decided to learn the hell out of that book, and then because advanced trigonometry was so piss easy, he derived his own sophisticated theorems all by himself.
At age 13.
He did go to college later, but failed out of school because it was hard to focus on classes about art history and fungus biology when he was inventing new math in his spare time.
Still living in abject poverty, he started sending his theorems off to various important math people -- some in India, some in England. Almost every time his work was dismissed as a hoax, or returned without comment, presumably unread. Other times the mathematicians on the receiving end had no idea what they were looking at, because these were equations no human had ever created.
Finally, when a professor at Cambridge University saw the theorems, he recognized the work of a genius and invited Ramanujan to England. Ramanujan refused to leave India "to go to a foreign land," despite Professor Hardy offering possibly his only chance at recognition ...
Today, his formulas have found uses in everything from string theory to crystallography. Hardy said that his mathematical genius was comparable to guys like Isaac Newton and Archimedes. Yeah, that's going back more than 2,000 years to find somebody in his class.
"Anning always liked doing a bit of fossil collecting, a hobby that her dad taught to her (he'd sell the weird rocks he dug up to beach tourists). She'd walk along the beach with her dad collecting, cleaning and then selling them at one of those things they had before eBay.
Anning relentlessly continued with her fossil hunting and soon it began to pay off. One fine day in 1811, her brother noticed a skull sticking out of the cliff near her house. Rather than running and screaming like we might, he went and told Anning who then excavated the hell out of that skull to find an entire "crocodile" skeleton. But it was no crocodile -- it was a dinosaur that was later named Ichthyosaurus.
Did we mention she was just 10-years old?
Soon, Anning was discovering skeletons like there was no tomorrow. She found a Plesiosaurus, a Pterodactylus and a Squaloraja at which point the official "dinosaur namer" gave up and just wanted to see what the most ridiculous name she could get away with was.
Anning's discoveries helped to completely revolutionize the 19th century view of history at a time when most people refused to believe in the existence of dinosaurs. To many, she is the founder of modern day geology -- which is ironic because the London Geological Society didn't even admit women until more than 50 years after her death."
"He sent in some encrypted letters to three California newspapers. For such a nutcase, the Zodiac Killer knew how to write in code. All the top FBI cryptographers worked on it night and day to try and solve the mystery of the zodiac code, and to potentially crack his identity. Try as they might, they couldn't break it. The zodiac had been clever: He used 14 different symbols for the letter "E" and had used a backwards "Q" 16 times to trick everyone into thinking that was an "E." Of course it never crossed his mind to save all his effort and just not write the letter, but that just comes under the whole mental illness aspect of his character.
With the country's top experts on the case, but failing dismally, it was time for the greatest hero of them all -- and the one with the most heroic name -- to step up: Donald G. Harden. A high school teacher from Salinas, California, who managed to crack the zodiac code in his spare time to reveal his intensely creepy message:
I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE EBEORIETEMETHHPITI.
He probably just gave up at the end so he didn't embarrass them too much. The police would go on to ... not catch the zodiac killer. But you can hardly blame Harden for that. What, now he has to take up being a detective in his spare time, too? Does he have to do everything?"
"Meet Gregor Mendel, monk extraordinaire. Born in 1822 in the Czech Republic, he couldn't afford to go to college. Apparently figuring that joining a monastery was at least 90 percent similar to being in a fraternity, he joined up with the Augustinian monastery at Brunn.
When he was gardening, he noticed some interesting things about his pea plants -- namely that certain traits such as color, pea size (heh) and a few other things were passed down from pea plant to baby pea plant. A couple of experiments and a "scientist hard at work" montage later and he'd accidentally walked into the discovery of modern genetics.
And this is no exaggeration: Mendel's experiments and results are the basis for everything we know about DNA and inheritance today. And as we said, no one believed him -- he was just a monk with a penchant for gardens. His work went unnoticed for decades. It wasn't until the turn of the 20th century that Mendel's works were rediscovered.
It happened because a couple of other scientists were confused by the results of their own similar experiments and couldn't make sense of any of it. Supposedly, Hugo de Vries only finally came to grips with his findings once he'd read Mendel's work -- the work of a simple gardener and beekeeper, written nearly 50 years earlier."
Believe in yourself.