This is where I'm supposed to sell myself and what I'm doing here, but it's not really that complicated. My name is Dorian, and I started btrmt. over a decade ago as a way of sharing the psychology I was studying with people who weren't, or couldn't. We each live such peculiarly turbulent lives, "the halt, lame, half-made creatures that we are". Psychology seemed an incredible way of applying rules of thumb to transform some of the chaos of this human experience into meaning. Why, then, should these rules be accessible only for people with the right degree?
I've since continued to study the sciences of mind, culminating in a PhD in brain science at the University of Cambridge and a role as Associate Professor at RMA Sandhurst. In between, I've practiced this stuff in clinical contexts, taught it at schools, Universities, and businesses, and even found it to have surprising utility during a six-year military career.
Sadly, I found no neat instruction manual for this device in our head that seems to hold such potential to smooth the rough edges of our lives. Anyone who tells you that they did is lying to you. But I did discover something else along the way. The primary role of the brain is to map the predictable structure of the world to predictable patterns of thinking and behaving. These habits of thought, feeling, and action are protective—graceful solutions to an impossibly complex world. But rituals of thought and behaviour by any other name, are ideologies. We are each riddled with our own ways of filtering the world; transforming some of the chaos into meaning.
Ideologies, though, are things we are gifted---absorbed from those around us. Rarely do we examine them. How could we, when what little attention we have is routinely directed towards the economy of shame, outrage, yearning, and terror that floods our media streams and away from any form of real connection or meaningful pursuit. And so, we are left "half awake. Our fires are damped, our rafts are checked… the human individual lives usually far within his limits".
So this is what btrmt. is about. I gather these ideologies of ours and examine them, so that you can choose the ones that are right for you.
