Hello middle age.
That’ll be $1250 thanks.
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Really? Are you just kidding or this a real phenomenon?
I’ve never heard of anxiety being a middle aged thing. Interesting.
I’m pretty sure the trigger for me is Covid isolation and a new job where I am trying to build a practice from scratch in the middle of said Covid isolation. 
🤷🏼
It’s a real thing alright, as the threat of losing people dear to you and things you’ve worked for becomes more palpable and the mistakes you’ve made in the past collect in the rear view mirror.
Unless you haven’t made any mistakes of course, clovis 
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That makes total sense.
As for mistakes, that is a pretty long list I’m afraid to say!
Was able to schedule a video session with a therapist that we met with for marriage counseling a few years ago, its 2 weeks away but meh what can you do? She said requests for visits have skyrocketed since covid, not surprising. To be clear, this is for individual therapy but I felt like she was a good fit when we did marriage counseling and she will have some background on me.
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Nice. The one I booked yesterday is on the 24th so similar timeframe.
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My therapist still meets me in person. I guess I’m the only patient she does it with. She says it’s because I “probably need to get out of the house.”
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Good luck dude. I hope it helps you, whatever that ends up looking like.
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33/36 on the eyes test. I’m an empath and usually score well on those tests. I don’t think they mention it in that test, but women typically score better than men.
This is one of the ones I got wrong, apparently. I put irritated. It still looks like irritated to me. I suspected I was wrong when answering it though because “irritated” and “impatient” aren’t really distinguishable, so neither of them can be right.
I think I’m a bit better at reading male eyes than female.
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I almost posted this in the podcast thread but I think it might be more beneficial in this thread.
This episode hit me hard and even if you haven’t experienced trauma we all know people who have.
A few things that I took away from this:
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“There’s only one question that really matters. And that is: what are you unwilling to feel” - My whole adult life I have been been running away from feelings I don’t want to feel. All the working out, trying to succeed, traveling all the time. I’ve been running away. Apparently this is pretty common.
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I hate parts of myself that actually were coping mechanisms young thinslicing used to deal with what was going on around him. The way I avoid confrontation, the over eating. I hate these things about myself. I need to be kinder to myself. I need to thank these parts of me that helped me deal with things I wasn’t able to deal with at the time.
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I need to be kinder to myself overall. I get in these negative loops where my brain just keeps coming back to negative self talk. Even when someone I love compliments me I say “thanks” but in my head I feel like they don’t really know the real me. I don’t understand how anyone can love me, think that I am enough. I have to stop these loops.
I just told the GF that I am going back to therapy. It has probably been over 10 years since I have gone. I made excuses on why I didn’t have time or there was more important things to work on. I need to start taking care of myself again.
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Congrats. I have my first ever session on Monday. Should be interesting. Nice to see all this stuff getting destimatized.
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A year ago today, my (now ex) wife cheated on me.
It was the most painful and traumatic experience of my life by a mile. I still occasionally have flashbacks to the emotions, visual images, etc from that night. For example, in order to distract myself as it was getting later in the night, I had gone to 7-Eleven to buy some gatorades. Now the taste of gatorade can make me feel scared. Or another example: I recently started watching The Sopranos and there’s a scene where a guy pees himself right before being murdered. I actually had to pause because watching this transported me back to sitting on the toilet that night, feeling terrified and peeing over and over again.
For the next several months, I had PTSD-like symptoms. The one that was hardest for me was hypervigilance. I live in a city, and every time I would use the subway, I found myself scanning the crowd for my ex. One time I thought I saw her walking toward me on the sidewalk, and I was so frightened that I ended up on the other side of the street without knowing how I got there.
I started seeing a therapist shortly after the cheating and that, along with reading, has been critical to my recovery. I can not recommend it enough. My way of dealing with problems is to learn, and for a couple months I was really stuck on confusion about what my wife had done. I just couldn’t understand it, and I wanted to spend all of my time figuring it out. My therapist made me realize that, by doing this, I was avoiding my own feelings, and once I started to focus on myself I was able to start processing the emotions and moving forward.
The past year has been awful with cycles of confusion, bitterness, sadness, loneliness, humiliation, and anxiety. Divorce sucks. Being cheated on sucks. I will forever be sympathetic to anyone going through this.
I think the thing that bothered me the most was the loss of identity. There’s a sort of core, primal crisis that occurs when you are betrayed by the person you loved the most, who you trusted and lived with and shared your life with for so long. The stability that comes from a deep connection is gone. “We” is suddenly just “me”. I felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore, and, as someone who always had a strong sense of self, I hated it.
This summer, I finally started to feel like myself again, and my self-confidence returned as well. If you are going through something similar, please know it can get better.
I’m not sure if I should be giving advice, but if there’s one thing I’d recommend, it’s to find some ways to externalize your feelings. Reading is great for understanding but, for me at least, it’s not healing on its own. You need an outlet. Therapy is wonderful if you can afford it. Talk to a friend or family member, journal, write poetry, post here… whatever form you like, but get it out of your head and into the world. Trauma isn’t something you want to face alone.
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Glad to hear it’s getting better Jake.
I was able to squeeze in my first video appointment with my new therapist on Thursday. It was good. Was nice to get some things off my chest and she’s got my back to help me get into a better place. She did seem to have some lax views on covid and definitely thought my work from home, only see my parents and in-laws was too restrictive, and basically said if you didn’t have health conditions then you can be way more lax but when I was talking about my wife’s heart issues she said that makes more sense, whatever tho I can do video chat so it’s not a big deal.
Also she mentioned that plenty of people she’s seen are essentially treating it like the chickenpox lol. She said both her kids have had it I think.
She’s going to help me find out what I need to be happier essentially, what’s important to me etc, what changes I need to make, which is exactly what I need right now.
She also did confirm that she basically can’t keep up with the demand right now for individual and marriage counseling, due to covid. She had to hire someone to basically do her scheduling and take calls etc.
Setup another appointment for around 10/3. Also she recommended I get back on celexa which I had been on last couple of years but stopped back around start of 2020, so I will probably do that.
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This is familiar to me. I think it’s pretty natural. People close to us are so critical it’s essential we have some kind of model for how they work. Break that model and it threatens our model of ourselves. It feels like a matter of life and death. I wasn’t cheated on, but even years after one bad breakup, I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I did understand. The funny thing was, the answers I came up with in the end were pretty mundane, not some deep mystery.
This is familiar too. Different person, and 10 years after the situation I mentioned above, but here I am again. I want to see her but at the same time I’m afraid of running into her.
It’s rough. I’m glad you got through it.
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Man, I really like how you phrased this. Completely agree.
In my case, I was lucky that I did eventually learn something that (mostly) explained the behavior. So, while my therapist was obviously right that I needed to start considering my own feelings… honestly, figuring out my ex’s side helped a ton, too.
Thanks. It’s comforting to hear people describe similar experiences.
It was a turning point for me to accept that she terrorized me and that I’m still afraid of her. It feels like a weakness to acknowledge fear, particularly in the case of a break up where it might feel like the other person is “winning” or still has power over you. But eventually I realized that it’s perfectly rational – she caused the worst pain of my life – and there really isn’t any reason to judge the fear as being “bad”. It’s actually good that my brain wants to protect me from threats.
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I got 30 out of 36 and was shocked by that. I only felt sure about a few of them.
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I got 0 out of 36, but my vision was somewhat obscured by the words kill kill kill scrolling across the screen
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27/36 and I am despondent aghast seductive
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my Meds are noticeably working. it’s pretty amazing
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What else can you articulate about the experience??
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