Hope it gets better soon. Really, really hope you stick around because you are a very positive presence and what you’ve done in the arts and entertainment category should be an example to us on how to properly moderate and grow our off topic sections.
13 Likes
Whatever you decide just make sure you look after yourself. You’re a very special person.
7 Likes
Therapy is pretty helpful. I’m only going once a week and am trying to change how I perceive myself and others.
The one thing I’ve been told is to be more forgiving of myself when I make mistakes. Apparently, I’m far more forgiving of others than I am of myself. It doesn’t stop the anxiety but it keeps it under control to a degree.
4 Likes
I’m going twice a month and my therapist thinks that’s a lot
1 Like
It’s a pity it’s so expensive to get therapy. I would definitely go if I was more flush with cash. Mental health should be better covered by the government. Even here in Australia it’s only really emergency mental healthcare that’s covered totally, which obviously isn’t ideal.
1 Like
Thank you for sharing this. Your statement about being forgiving of yourself reminded me of a meme that I saw earlier this week & a conversation that I had with my GF regarding the feeling of guilt.
Most everyone knows who Freud was, but not as many know Max Stirner, a 19th century German philosopher known for his work on nihilism and existentialism among other things.
Anyway, MsConwoman and I were talking about how one of the mini-breakthroughs that she had was in re-framing the memories she has that are associated with guilt. For example, when she was a child she had broken some item at a store, and had attached a feeling to the memory that was not only laden with guilt but also with a sense of being a bad person who did a bad thing. That sense of guilt, that leads to shame, that leads to [insert negative self-perception here] gets repeated and internalized, becoming a part of who we are.
Every time we recall a memory we are rewriting it–essentially creating a new memory. Now, quite often the rewritten memory is so similar to the previous iteration that there is very little difference. But there is no limit to how differently we can rewrite the memory. We can push it. We can shape it. It’s size and characteristics are not defined by the laws of physics. To me at least, it can seem a little scary to acknowledge having that kind of power.
It’s interesting that in German the word for guilt is the same as the word for debt(schuld). We don’t necessarily associate those two words as easily if we are mono-linguist English speakers. Although, anyone raised in the Christian faith may recall saying the Lord’s Prayer, and asking to “forgive us our sins/debts/trespasses”.
The feeling of guilt and/or debt has played a key role in human sociology. The tit-for-tat, I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine, the sense whether it’s reciprocity or revenge. It underlies how we function and interact with other humans. How we cooperate with them, and how we hold grudges. Humanity as we know it does not exist without the sense of guilt. There is no ignoring it. There is only dealing with it as part of the condition of life.
So, how do we harness that feeling of guilt? What is the counter move? If it’s a left jab, then what is our head feint and counter? Forgiveness. That’s it. Forgiving ourselves and others. But that is easier said than done.
So, I was reflecting this week on how to approach the challenge of gaining more power over my sense of guilt and why it can be such a struggle to be as kind and forgiving to myself as I strive to be to others. What if I failed? What if I pushed a negative memory so far into a positive re-framing that it reverse judo flipped me into being some kind of self-assured asshole? As I was walking down the sidewalk thinking about all of this, I saw a black spray-painted stenciled message on the pavement: “Your anxiety is lying to you.” Yeah, it sure was. Thanks random person in my neighborhood. Thanks random meme. Thanks superuberbob. Thanks MsConwoman.
9 Likes
You can barter in selfishness, or unselfishness; imo.
Unselfishly selfish is the only way. Selfishly unselfish is works alone (and you don’t leave anything for yourself — cue the politician whose son killed himself despite numerous great works). Selfish with little (to no) unselfish catches up with you.
Gotta ask for others’ forgiveness with no expectation and no quid pro quo on that one.
1 Like
TRUTH
Nothing to fear but fear itself is an axiom.
3 Likes
My therapist’s recent feedback was that I need allies. Not people who will merely protect me like their possession but people who are my ally in the process of exploring and manifesting my existence in the ways that matter to me.
Her advice was to stop thinking of how to change the people who are not my allies and instead seek out people who already are my allies. To distinguish between people I won’t feel safe with unless they change and people who don’t need to be changed for my needs. We’re compatible in ways that go beyond intention and mindfulness. It’s a dynamic from who we already are. We only need time and experience together.
That’s a tough one. I want to change the two people I live with. I’ve been waiting for their permission to stop acting like an extension of who they want me to be.
I think I’ve been waiting for the same thing here.
And the therapist said that just because these people aren’t your ally in every way doesn’t mean they aren’t your ally in other ways.
So to me, her advice to find allies means that I can’t just wait to see who is or isn’t. I need to put myself out there and see who is or is not and in what ways they are an ally and in what ways they are not and what ways they could be in time but are not today and may never be. There’s no need to force anyone to be anything that is not already who they are.
Thanks, just thinking out loud about why I’ll keep posting here and see how it goes 
21 Likes
On Sunday, I woke up with this feeling like I was the last person on earth. It was a physical sensation of separateness, of being totally alone. In some ways the physical sensation was the oddest thing. How can I physically “feel” alone? … I didn’t panic and the feeling subsided within a couple of days.
Has anyone else experienced this? Of an emotion that feels distinctly physical? I often describe my anxiety as feeling like a “hole” or a “pit” in my chest, but this recent experience went beyond that.
Also, in a seeming non sequiter: How have folks made the decision to stop seeing their therapist? I’ve been working with her for about a year now, and in Q4 cut back to appointments once every two weeks. Starting to think it may be time to move on–much progress and healing has been occured, and my situation is markedly different from the low point of about a year ago when I started seeing her. That said, I am not sure I want to let go of what has obviously been a helpful resource.
1 Like
Thanks to you (and SUB) for sharing this.
I’ve been doing some work with a therapist lately on childhood memories. One that I have is of being in grade 1 at school and doing something innocuous that I wasn’t supposed to. I don’t even remember what it was, or if it was actually any bad behaviour.
Anyway, the memory is of the teacher asking me why I did it, and I was crying and all I could respond with is “because I’m bad” or “because I’m naughty”. She said she wasn’t angry with me, she just wanted to know why I did it, but I wasn’t emotionally able to reason beyond the above.
My therapist found that quite sad, and for various reasons it seems like a pretty good indicator of how I had decided to process or internalize any mistakes I made by that early point in my life. It’s been with me ever since, though of course we develop coping mechanisms.
Anyway, I think part of the healing I am meant to do is to empathize with myself more, including empathizing with myself as a child and some things I found traumatic. I readily empathize with other people, but doing that for myself is like trying to see through a brick wall. I just have an immediate reaction/compulsion to stop trying to do that. I think maybe its my brains way of saying “don’t look behind that curtain, it’s only going to hurt”. It almost feels illogical to fight that coping mechanism. How much of that is what helps me function?
Anyway, I know therapists (at least good ones) are trained in how to help with this sort of thing. Ive wrote this post a few times and just deleted it thinking “why would anybody want to read that post seities”. So posting this is me taking a swing at that brick wall.
10 Likes
This is really well put. Thanks
1 Like
I’ve learned the very hard way that stopping medication and/or therapy leads me down a path that is very difficult to recover from. But everyone is different. I have gone every 2 weeks for 4 years now.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell what you’re actually getting out of therapy. For me it’s really at this point a feedback mechanism for my thoughts and ideas. I don’t have anyone neutral enough in my life to give me feedback I trust to be objective - so my therapist provides that. That’s really valuable even if it’s not really helping me “get better” it allows me the space to work things out on my own, which I prefer to do, but with a safety net.
4 Likes
To me therapy is a gym for your brain. In the beginning, you make crazy huge gains but eventually the gains start to slow up and it’s hard to see short-term results. You sort of have to think long-term and trust the process.
I’ve only been going weekly for a few months and I can feel the session-by-session results tapering off. I’m considering going to once every other week but I’m not sure if I feel comfortable with that.
5 Likes
Thanks, @JohnnyTruant … I definitely have a sense that I have regained my footing over the past year. I started seeing my therapist in the midst of a painful breakup, and a lot has happened since then.
The therapist has been a huge help, and I am reluctant to give up that resource, as I mentioned. A piece of me remembers the intense loneliness and pain, and doesn’t want to abandon something that helped.
On the other hand, I often talk with her now and find myself struggling for topics. It is a marked shift from the content-dense sessions and emails of not so long ago. I am not in a hurry to make the decision, but in recent sessions I often find the time goes slowly and I am sometimes wanting to be done.
Semi-unrelated, I recently have gotten a window into my ex’s life and some problems and relationship issues they have had. It seems that our breakup fits squarely into their pattern, and that they were never so stable or grounded as I thought. In many ways, this information is reassuring–the problem wasn’t me. I mean, I’m a flawed individual of course but the pattern which played out between us fits ongoing events.
Of course, this is in some ways just as confusing–I overlooked so many red flags, and allowed myself to be mis-treated. It really feels like I was in a cult of 1. And because this person is actuallty a kind of spiritual teacher or resource, it makes sense.
So, that remains the piece I can’t quite figure out. Or am uncomfortable with. What got triggered, early in the relationship, to make me so oblivious to what was happening? To give up agency, in a way. To commit to someone who did not return that? And why, once I knew I was being treated poorly, did I struggle to end things?
I experienced some things with my ex that were new to me, and I gave them a lot of weight and significance. My ex didn’t give them meaning, having had more of these experiences before. So, maybe that’s part of it.
4 Likes
Yeah, I suspect a few things overlapped that made it difficult for me to extract myself.
First, she had kids. Not only did I really start to attach to them and help her in running her household with them around more (this was early pandemic), but I suspect there was a piece of me that latched on to the the idea of Sapo in a new role.
I also have struggled with codependency and fears of abandonment, so this hit a whole bunch of the right keys. And yes, I think her role as “teacher,” and feeling like I was absorbing a lot of new information, probably played a part here.
So … yeah, I look back and think “Who WAS that guy.” It kind of feels like a perfect storm though. A bunch of factors wholly disrupted my attachment system, to the point where I felt like losing the relationship meant losing a family, a home, a belief system, feeling unworthy … It’s good to see.
6 Likes
Rexx <3 <3 <3
I have started doing this more often. Instead of seizing those good days (or hours or minutes or seconds) as a chance to indulge in fun–I’ve started using those good periods to really do the things for myself that I can’t do when the pain is too much for me to do more than survive until I can function again.
But the reason my options so quickly become limited to little more than “survive when in pain” is because I don’t have systems, people, resources in place beyond shallow indulgences and deep pain.
I still take those moments sometimes to just relax though. I can’t treat every second like I’m looking at a ticking time bomb.
4 Likes
Weird, I think I avoided answering this question for a couple of days. … I don’t know if there is a reason, or if once a month is sometihng they would want. I also don’t think I’m giving up seeing my therapist right now. Just wondering how others approached this. I think the time may be close, but it doesn’t feel quite right yet.
Have to say that therapy is helping me a lot. Been 3 months and I’ve made some considerable gains over such a short period.
I guess that’s how CBT is. You make solid gains early and then it progresses a bit slower where you’re mostly reinforcing your new thought patterns rather than learning new things.
The thing that makes me feel sad is that I wish I did this earlier. I mean I would’ve been better off doing this 20 years ago. Thankfully, an hour of light therapy per day has been working wonders on my seasonal affective disorder.
6 Likes