I volunteer at a nonprofit: fantastic people (haven’t met one I don’t like and respect), great facilities, shared purpose, and I enjoy the work. (Even the paperwork, a tangle of ad hoc policies tumble-weeded together over the years, became rewarding, once I got used to it)
I was well-accepted and popular in the group from the outset, ~6 months ago, but quickly settled on IG and oxytocin (LS’ Liquid Trust, which is not strictly a phero, but works for me because I suspect, based on decades of interesting incidents, that I have a unique and strong phero signature in certain respects, even at ~50) with some IS thrown in from time to time, due to the reactions of my direct supervisor on my primary shift, a 30-ish lady who is one of the volunteer organizations few paid staff, and who becomes a bit critical and standoffish when I use pheros, even though she is very friendly to others and is friendly to me when I’m not wearing or after a long post-shift when my pheros have worn off [e.g. after evening meetings]. I won’t blame it all on pheros: we think very differently and have different backgrounds, and I sometimes make decisions (e.g. prioritizing conflicting tasks) that she doesn’t understand. She’s not wrong: I accept her reasoning and am getting steadily better at doing things her way (I’m here for the group, and don’t WANT to push my own agenda), but it’d be a bit easier for both of us if she understood my reasons for my decisions “in the moment” (sometimes we can go for 4 hours without any significant activity, then have literally 10 unrelated major things happen in 4 minutes, so spot decisions matter)
To complicate things, she is in a very serious relationship with a good friend of mine. Is that relevant? I’ll leave that to you to discuss.
In any case, I’ve come to realize that she’s pretty much my best single barometer of how well a mix is working: the less well she reacts, the better the response of the heterogeneous mix of public and members I deal with. (Talk about turning negative to a positive!). I have noticed a similar but lesser reaction from a member in her late 60s (which doesn’t affect our friendship because we “equals” in that group) and noted different pattern of paradoxical response another volunteer (mid 20s) with whom I worked for a few months. (This ‘girl’ WANTED to be friends: we’re both friendly, and I drove her home late at night due to the bitter cold and a streak of local assaults, but we never really clicked due to few shared interests and cultural reference frames). Romance is not a problem for me, but I want improve social interactions all around.
For various random reasons, I decided to re-explore my mix. As a former researcher/clinician, I’d always meant to start a journal, but didn’t, because her responses to “effective” mixes dissuaded good experiments. I could have tried other settings, but my volunteer work seemed safest.
Today, I tried a mix of A314 1.34B and IS (1 spritz each per wrist, lightly rubbed together) primarily intended as a social mix. The response was dramatic enough that it reinvigorated my interest (which had never really flagged) in experimenting. I got uncharacteristically stand offish responses from 2-3 friends, but almost classic deer-in-the-headlights from a few male, heterosexual friends and a male and a female with whom I’ve always been friendly, but always slightly “on the wrong frequency”. If I’d videotaped our prior interactions vs. reactions today, it would’ve been the best Andriotics ad possible. There was simply no mistaking the change.
But that was just one day. The plural of “anecdote” isn’t “data”, and I didn’t get a chance to test against all the people I know best.
It simply made me feel that this would be a good time to revisit the classic “OD response”, and any experience/tips you might have. OD is, to my mind, one of the core questions of the phero users experience, and I don’t recall it being addressed as a standalone topic in a long time.