Need reassurance yet again

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I seem to have developed a need to be constantly reassured that everything will be ok.Any better ideas or strategies? I actually end up having to be reassured 2 or 3 times a week or more when things in this world look bad.I can't stand to see people in as much anguish as alot of people are showing right now.I wish there was something that I could do but my best intentioned attempts to help too often fail.People are thinking quarantine won't end and that there will be a new civil war.

I forgot to mention there is now rampant rioting and looting now.I'm scared!

One of the special skills that I picked up along the way of life was the ability to separate the emotional part of my brain from the analytical part of my brain and completely turn it OFF. It is almost a quintessential skill for an Aspie. I do not know if it has a name so I will give it one. I will call it the Spock Anomaly, because this state reminds me of Mr. Spock in the series Star Trek. Essentially I have learned to harness stress energy, even fear itself, in real time and this has set me free.

When I was young I daydreamed a lot. Most of this occurred during a very stressful time in Junior High School. It is quite natural for a child to look out the window and daydream, or talk to themselves, or develop imaginary friends and evolve imaginary worlds when they are getting the crap beat out of them each and every day; when their bodies are physically changing because of puberty; and when their peer group was abandoning them in a street gutter along the side of the road. Daydreaming is a coping mechanism. Luckily for me, they had not developed the term ADD or ADHD when I was growing up and the variety of prescription drugs to treat this so- called condition. In Junior High School as a male, I was experiencing strange new sensations that I didn’t even know existed before. Daydreaming in the classroom is not the problem – child abuse by the student’s peer group is the problem.

Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one's immediate surroundings, during which a person's contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake. Amongst psychologists daydreaming meets the criteria for mild dissociation. Research with fMRI shows that brain areas associated with complex problem solving becomes activated during daydreaming episodes.

Now listen up! This is really an important lesson for an Aspie. Daydreaming is a coping mechanism. It is a form of disassociation. And it is a very useful tool for an Aspie. As I became an adult I learned to harness and control disassociation and turn it into a skill. It has become my friend. By harnessing disassociation one can learn the key to ending meltdowns, panic attacks and total shutdowns forever.

One of the attributes of an Aspie is they are calm under crisis. I have found that one of my skills was that under extreme stress, I can disassociate my thinking brain from my emotional brain. I completely turn off my emotional brain and direct all the chemical energy derived from stress to power the analytical side of my mind and set my mind in overdrive. I capture stress chemicals and divert it towards my mind. It is like adding coals to a fire and stoking the coals. It ramps up my analytical brain supercharging it and then I direct it at the problem at hand.

Paul Ekman relates one of his experiences:

Sometimes there is nothing we can do when faced with great harm. However, something very interesting happens when we are able to cope with an immediate, severe threat. The unpleasant sensations and thoughts that characterize fear may not be experienced, but instead consciousness may focus us on the task at hand, coping with the threat.

For example, when I first went to Papua New Guinea in 1967, I had to charter a single-engine airplane to take me on the last leg of my journey to a missionary landing strip, from which I would walk to the village where I would be living. Although by then I had taken many flights to many different parts of the world, I remained a bit afraid of flying, enough not to be able to relax, let alone sleep, even on a long journey. I worried about having to take a single-engine plane, but there was no choice; there were no roads to where I was going. Once we were up in the air, the eighteen-year-old bush pilot, next to whom I was sitting in the two- seater plane, informed me that the ground people had radioed him that the wheels had fallen off the airplane on takeoff. We had to return, he said, and slide into the dirt on the side of the runway. Because the plane might catch fire on impact, he told me I should be prepared to jump. He instructed me to open the door slightly to prevent it from jamming on impact when we crash-landed, which might prevent me from getting out. He told me to be careful not to let the door swing completely open, for then I might be thrown out. Needless to say, there were no seat belts.

As we circled the airfield preparing to land, I felt no unpleasant sensations and had no frightening thoughts about my possible doom. Instead, I thought about how amazing it was to have come so far, to have traveled for more than two days, and now less than an hour from my destination not make it. It seemed ludicrous, not frightening, in the minutes before we crash-landed. I watched as the fire brigade pulled onto the landing strip to greet our return; as we tore into the dirt, I gripped the door handle tightly, keeping the door ajar but not fully open. Then it was over. No fire; death and injury were avoided. Within fifteen minutes we had unloaded my gear from the badly damaged plane, put it into another plane, and taken off. Suddenly, I felt worried that this scene would be replayed, literally, and this time I wouldn't make it.

Since my crash-landing experience, I have interviewed others who, though in extreme danger, did not experience unpleasant sensations and thoughts. What distinguishes their experiences and mine from dangerous situations in which fear was felt is whether or not anything could be done to cope with the danger. If so, then fear may not have been felt. If not, if there is nothing to do but wait to see if one survives, then people are likely to feel terror. If I had not had to concentrate on holding that airplane door slightly ajar, tensed, ready to jump, I think I would have been terrified during the crash landing. It is when we can't do anything that we are most likely to experience the most overwhelming fear, not when we are focused on dealing with an immediate threat.

When I encounter a threat, a stressor, I can sense the build up of emotions internally such as fear, anger, and rage; I allow myself to become disassociated. I control the process. I turn off my emotional side of my brain. Under great stress I become an analytical thinking machine devoid of all emotion. I insert a pause. I ramp up my brain speed until the world becomes a very slow crawl. Then I look at the situation from a thousand different angles, different perspectives and then arrive at a course of action to direct the expenditure of this emotional energy. Then I implement this best choice among thousands of choices converting the stored stress energy into concrete action. So I rarely come upon a situation where I am trapped and shutdown in panic and terror, where I am immobilized and unable to move. A choice always seems to exist.

Being an INTJ allows a person to access all their experiences, all their interconnects at the same time. It is like adapting a parallel configuration rather than a typical serial configuration in data retrieval. It allows one to look at a problem from a million different perspectives or viewpoints simultaneously. One can process thousands of different “What if’s?” all at once.

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What is the Spock Anomaly? To put simplistically, it is the following 4 steps:
1. Under great stress, press the pause button.
2. Consider the array of potential solutions to the dilemma.
3. Pick the best one.
4. And then (most importantly) implement that best solution.

what jimmy wrote is almost profound explaination of almost automatic ability which is most unique. but when a mind is exposed to ongoing traumatic input of varying kinds . That leaves
person in a almost trapped situation they feel , whereas the media is feeding on the worst fears
that the media can muster .In order to increase program ratings , without using any social concious
in pursuit of the almighty dollar .It maybe hard to see your immediate reality around you is not what
the media is broadcasting . But exaggerations of persons worst fears .
It maybe important to center yourself in your immediate surroundings .
There will be no civil war .. there is media hype . The immediate governments locally are trying to be sounding boards and stress relief for the immediate civil unrest.
The timing of this corona virus ad the death of a black civilian , are enough to cause worryin the best of us . Especially if the media is compoundng the situations . In efforts to get thier stations ratings high.
Things will slowly down regulate , It is a time or patience.