Therapists are treated like they’re supposed to be miracle workers. You’re experiencing some sort of mental health struggle? Just go see a therapist, because they know how to make your mind magically better. If it doesn’t work, it’s because you aren’t trying hard enough.
I spent years and thousands on therapy to realize that my problem is that I have zero support system, and have been always viewed as disposable by my family. I’m awkward, probably autistic, but was born female so never got diagnosed - just tortured in the “troubled teen industry.” I’m queer, so I’m not really a human being where I live.
well… therapy absolutely helps you figure out your needs as an autistic person (complete with a real diagnosis) and helps you develop safe coping strategies for this and being queer in a hostile place.
A good should help you build a real support system and protect your self-identity from harmful family, including forming a plan to leave them. And learning to love yourself, awkward as you may think you are.
I guess I see a lot of things in your post that a therapist could and should help with. I’m wondering if you had good ones, and what they were doing with you in that time.
Just as you wouldn’t go to a surgeon or dentist and let them work without a treatment plan, you should agree on your goals and the modalities a therapist intends to use to get you there, at the beginning. And you can refer back to this to see if you’re making progress or not.
Unfortunately like all healthcare now, you often have to research and become your own self advocate first. You should fire a therapist long before you spend thousands and years doing nothing. Bad therapists are out there, a lot of them. But good therapists can move mountains.
good/fitting therapy. Not all therapy is created equal. e.g. in my country there’s a huge shortage of therapists qualified for adult autism diagnosis and treatment (well you can’t really “treat” autism like you can treat depression, but y’know), and that’s on top of the shortage of regular therapists.
But I guess that just moves the issue from the individual therapists to the general healthcare systems - therapy can deal with most mental issues in theory, it’s just that real world healthcare systems often don’t allow it to actually do that.
I spent years in Therapy to no effect, the lessons on mindfulness and cognitive exercises did nothing for me.
It took finally connecting with someone who better realized what my issues were to accurately gauge where the problem was, and he didn’t pull punches. He explained that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works profoundly well for so many people because largely, most people don’t exercise cognitive thought.
The human brain is so amazing and has so many layers of operation, and our society so tuned for our survival, that you can go through your whole goddamn life on autopilot, never forming an internal dialogue, never using language inside your head to analyze and compare things, never exploring the source of your own feelings and the narrative that spring from them. Most people do this, just surf through their days reacting appropriately to whatever they experience.
My problem was the opposite, I spent every waking moment in conscious dissection of every facet of my existence, always forming stories and ruminations with narration and comparisons, even when I just need to sleep and stop feeling and thinking.
Yah so anyway, that’s how I got diagnosed as being on the spectrum.
FYI, I don’t know if it helps further, but I DID learn to beat my worst rumination cycles, and therapy did help with it.
It doesn’t cure your depression and anxiety, but learning to find when your emotions begin to drop and then taking tight control over the narratives spinning in your head can give you back hours, days, weeks or even months of your life. You still feel waves of despair, you still feel profound moments of terror, but they’re not directed at anything as long as you’re not letting your brain do what it’s designed to do: which is create narratives to explain your feelings.
Your brain rebels and rejects this notion because it feels “fake” to not think about why you feel bad, it feels like self-delusion, but your brain was never designed to be rational or reasonable, it was just designed to explain why you feel fear when you see saber-tooth cat paw prints by your tent.
I’m not new to Lemmy anymore… but this place remains something of a mystery to me. At Reddit we met mostly A-holes… but here some how there are genuinely intelligent, kind, empathic individuals who share valuably and vulnerably from their experience with, I believe, the sole intention of helping perfect strangers.
Your comment here stood out to me so much that I did something I almost never do… I mosied into your contributions. I’ll share why: when certain folks here are so intelligent and spot on, I worry it’s AI. Forgive me. Why someone should be trying to run AI bots in the Fediverse is beyond me, but there, now you have peeked at a little of my own toxic narrative. I confess that I noticed you do not create original posts… choosing to drop insightful comments when interested. If I may, and I hope you will pardon my curiosity about an interesting person, how do you find yourself un compelled to ever make a post? Or do you have a lessermeancow account where you drop a meme every so often?
It’s more important than ever to check into the things you see on the internet that make you feel things, both good and bad. AI and bots have been poking around Lemmy a little, I expect it will get worse, it’s a spreading infection. For now though, it’s still a place with a lot of humans looking for connection.
Reddit is beyond help, I had a 12-year account there, I did make a lot of posts, in the early days I actually had contests with other “power users” to see how many gold awards we could collect, I was a moderator of several communities, some quite large. All that got flushed when an admin flipped a switch because they sided with some toxic child over someone without a single mark or warning, and honestly I didn’t care that much, I was just puzzled why they are purging their most dedicated users so indiscriminately, that’s when I peeled back the surface and saw how bad the AI/bot problem was, as well as the credible conspiracy that the site is being developed in association with some government agencies as a psy-op to control or at least steer social narratives. (Check out the rabbit-hole of Eglin Air Force Base sometime.)
I still have accounts there, I have accounts all over every social media platform for the purpose of pushing back on toxic, hateful narratives, for antagonizing users to break narrative controls, and to have my finger on the pulse of both sides of the major issues.
Part of what I do on Lemmy is antagonize the “sheltered” users here who are creating their own bubble worlds, which are incredibly damaging to society. I don’t post memes or posts because I don’t care about attention or points anymore, I fully expect I’ll be banned at some point because that seems to be our default coping strategy in the 2020’s for dealing with people who make you uncomfortable.
But I often get stuck just trying to share emotional and social pointers with people. A lot of people need a lot of help in life, and I’ve been through so much shit for so long, I feel like I have to DO something with it all before all my experiences return to entropy.
Don’t let this go to your head, but as I read the first comment you left me and others I read from your profile, I thought, this person was a star at Reddit and left when everyone else did. I’m glad you’ve embraced your mission.
I’ll say, I don’t share stuff for popularity — I share it because I want others to know about it or I want to know if they agree or disagree with it.
I’m a big fan of typewriters and I think sometimes about starting an r/typewriters here… that and r/idiocracy are what i miss most from Reddit.
I swear there’s three standard ways of being diagnosed with autism introspective madness, my family has autists, and I had a meltdown at 2 then threw a chair (this one’s mine).
I once had to sit in the back of a 1991 Jeep Cherokee with nothing to do because it was so cold it sapped the power of everything but the car battery and the roads were all iced. I looked into the void and realized that I was simply staring at myself.
Yeah, the modern society teaches us that if we have any problems, be it health, financial or anything else, it’s all fixable and we are supposed to fix it. Yet there is so much we don’t have control over. Mental health problems are especially hard to tackle, as there are so few options, they are expensive, time consuming and often don’t really help.
For over 4 thousand years, the most functional weirdos got pushed to the periphery and they sometimes used the freedom that ostracism gave them to discover self-directed cognitive/behavioral methods that profoundly changed their perspectives.
They might take a risk now and then, wander down to town and interact a bit. It sometimes resulted in a social interaction in which a well-placed individual was able to understand a bit of what the weirdo had learned. The weirdo would then experience a bit of social acceptance and some townsfolks might actually come visit the weirdo later.
Not usually though. Most often the weirdo would re-experience the initial rejection and they would go back to counting their breaths while sitting on a rock.
I have just recounted the most brief history of the study of yoga that is possible.
Therapists are treated like they’re supposed to be miracle workers. You’re experiencing some sort of mental health struggle? Just go see a therapist, because they know how to make your mind magically better. If it doesn’t work, it’s because you aren’t trying hard enough.
I spent years and thousands on therapy to realize that my problem is that I have zero support system, and have been always viewed as disposable by my family. I’m awkward, probably autistic, but was born female so never got diagnosed - just tortured in the “troubled teen industry.” I’m queer, so I’m not really a human being where I live.
Therapy doesn’t fix those things.
well… therapy absolutely helps you figure out your needs as an autistic person (complete with a real diagnosis) and helps you develop safe coping strategies for this and being queer in a hostile place.
A good should help you build a real support system and protect your self-identity from harmful family, including forming a plan to leave them. And learning to love yourself, awkward as you may think you are.
I guess I see a lot of things in your post that a therapist could and should help with. I’m wondering if you had good ones, and what they were doing with you in that time.
Just as you wouldn’t go to a surgeon or dentist and let them work without a treatment plan, you should agree on your goals and the modalities a therapist intends to use to get you there, at the beginning. And you can refer back to this to see if you’re making progress or not.
Unfortunately like all healthcare now, you often have to research and become your own self advocate first. You should fire a therapist long before you spend thousands and years doing nothing. Bad therapists are out there, a lot of them. But good therapists can move mountains.
good/fitting therapy. Not all therapy is created equal. e.g. in my country there’s a huge shortage of therapists qualified for adult autism diagnosis and treatment (well you can’t really “treat” autism like you can treat depression, but y’know), and that’s on top of the shortage of regular therapists.
But I guess that just moves the issue from the individual therapists to the general healthcare systems - therapy can deal with most mental issues in theory, it’s just that real world healthcare systems often don’t allow it to actually do that.
I spent years in Therapy to no effect, the lessons on mindfulness and cognitive exercises did nothing for me.
It took finally connecting with someone who better realized what my issues were to accurately gauge where the problem was, and he didn’t pull punches. He explained that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works profoundly well for so many people because largely, most people don’t exercise cognitive thought.
The human brain is so amazing and has so many layers of operation, and our society so tuned for our survival, that you can go through your whole goddamn life on autopilot, never forming an internal dialogue, never using language inside your head to analyze and compare things, never exploring the source of your own feelings and the narrative that spring from them. Most people do this, just surf through their days reacting appropriately to whatever they experience.
My problem was the opposite, I spent every waking moment in conscious dissection of every facet of my existence, always forming stories and ruminations with narration and comparisons, even when I just need to sleep and stop feeling and thinking.
Yah so anyway, that’s how I got diagnosed as being on the spectrum.
Yours was the very thoughtful contribution here that I needed today. I screenshotted one of the paragraphs.
Thank you. I needed that.
FYI, I don’t know if it helps further, but I DID learn to beat my worst rumination cycles, and therapy did help with it.
It doesn’t cure your depression and anxiety, but learning to find when your emotions begin to drop and then taking tight control over the narratives spinning in your head can give you back hours, days, weeks or even months of your life. You still feel waves of despair, you still feel profound moments of terror, but they’re not directed at anything as long as you’re not letting your brain do what it’s designed to do: which is create narratives to explain your feelings.
Your brain rebels and rejects this notion because it feels “fake” to not think about why you feel bad, it feels like self-delusion, but your brain was never designed to be rational or reasonable, it was just designed to explain why you feel fear when you see saber-tooth cat paw prints by your tent.
I’m not new to Lemmy anymore… but this place remains something of a mystery to me. At Reddit we met mostly A-holes… but here some how there are genuinely intelligent, kind, empathic individuals who share valuably and vulnerably from their experience with, I believe, the sole intention of helping perfect strangers.
Your comment here stood out to me so much that I did something I almost never do… I mosied into your contributions. I’ll share why: when certain folks here are so intelligent and spot on, I worry it’s AI. Forgive me. Why someone should be trying to run AI bots in the Fediverse is beyond me, but there, now you have peeked at a little of my own toxic narrative. I confess that I noticed you do not create original posts… choosing to drop insightful comments when interested. If I may, and I hope you will pardon my curiosity about an interesting person, how do you find yourself un compelled to ever make a post? Or do you have a lessermeancow account where you drop a meme every so often?
It’s more important than ever to check into the things you see on the internet that make you feel things, both good and bad. AI and bots have been poking around Lemmy a little, I expect it will get worse, it’s a spreading infection. For now though, it’s still a place with a lot of humans looking for connection.
Reddit is beyond help, I had a 12-year account there, I did make a lot of posts, in the early days I actually had contests with other “power users” to see how many gold awards we could collect, I was a moderator of several communities, some quite large. All that got flushed when an admin flipped a switch because they sided with some toxic child over someone without a single mark or warning, and honestly I didn’t care that much, I was just puzzled why they are purging their most dedicated users so indiscriminately, that’s when I peeled back the surface and saw how bad the AI/bot problem was, as well as the credible conspiracy that the site is being developed in association with some government agencies as a psy-op to control or at least steer social narratives. (Check out the rabbit-hole of Eglin Air Force Base sometime.)
I still have accounts there, I have accounts all over every social media platform for the purpose of pushing back on toxic, hateful narratives, for antagonizing users to break narrative controls, and to have my finger on the pulse of both sides of the major issues.
Part of what I do on Lemmy is antagonize the “sheltered” users here who are creating their own bubble worlds, which are incredibly damaging to society. I don’t post memes or posts because I don’t care about attention or points anymore, I fully expect I’ll be banned at some point because that seems to be our default coping strategy in the 2020’s for dealing with people who make you uncomfortable.
But I often get stuck just trying to share emotional and social pointers with people. A lot of people need a lot of help in life, and I’ve been through so much shit for so long, I feel like I have to DO something with it all before all my experiences return to entropy.
Don’t let this go to your head, but as I read the first comment you left me and others I read from your profile, I thought, this person was a star at Reddit and left when everyone else did. I’m glad you’ve embraced your mission.
I’ll say, I don’t share stuff for popularity — I share it because I want others to know about it or I want to know if they agree or disagree with it.
I’m a big fan of typewriters and I think sometimes about starting an r/typewriters here… that and r/idiocracy are what i miss most from Reddit.
I swear there’s three standard ways of being diagnosed with autism introspective madness, my family has autists, and I had a meltdown at 2 then threw a chair (this one’s mine).
I’ve never seen this put into words so perfectly, thank you
I once had to sit in the back of a 1991 Jeep Cherokee with nothing to do because it was so cold it sapped the power of everything but the car battery and the roads were all iced. I looked into the void and realized that I was simply staring at myself.
Yeah, the modern society teaches us that if we have any problems, be it health, financial or anything else, it’s all fixable and we are supposed to fix it. Yet there is so much we don’t have control over. Mental health problems are especially hard to tackle, as there are so few options, they are expensive, time consuming and often don’t really help.
For over 4 thousand years, the most functional weirdos got pushed to the periphery and they sometimes used the freedom that ostracism gave them to discover self-directed cognitive/behavioral methods that profoundly changed their perspectives.
They might take a risk now and then, wander down to town and interact a bit. It sometimes resulted in a social interaction in which a well-placed individual was able to understand a bit of what the weirdo had learned. The weirdo would then experience a bit of social acceptance and some townsfolks might actually come visit the weirdo later.
Not usually though. Most often the weirdo would re-experience the initial rejection and they would go back to counting their breaths while sitting on a rock.
I have just recounted the most brief history of the study of yoga that is possible.
Also, mental health problems make it hard to actually get on that chair in the therapist’s office even if there are opportunities!