[Broken_Hippo]

But you have a choice in most of these sorts of things.

For example, you can decide that by simply being human, one deserves to be treated well as a standard, taking that away when someone earns the right to be treated lesser.

You can decide that you earn someone's affection simply by being yourself around the person. That's more work than folks let onto.

You can decide that sure, the past was shitty - but you've worked and persevered nonetheless and earned the things you have. You can choose to see that while those folks were shitty, others around you haven't been. You can choose to not be a victim to the past. People do it all the time.

You can choose to be a bit easier on yourself. This isn't easy and takes a bit of detachment and reminding yourself that you tend to be hard on yourself so that you can set more obtainable goals.

You can choose to get therapy to help you with these things. You've already the self-awareness of much of this, which puts you steps ahead of others.

[temp246810]

Look, I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to reply, but this advice is a prime example of how some people just don't understand mental health.

This sounds an awful lot like the "happiness is a choice" speech. If self improvement and changing deep seated thought patterns were as easy as just choosing and deciding to act and think a certain way, the world would be a much better place.

The truth is it is a lot more complicated than that - it takes effort, practice, and guidance over a long period of time to actually enact these choices and decisions.

I do choose to fix this, I do decide to be easier on myself, this is why I've been seeing a therapist weekly for almost a year.

[Broken_Hippo]

That is exactly why I wrote the last line, as there are lots of choices and not everyone can just snap out of it. This is my own fault, as I probably should have written more. It isn't that I've not suffered from depression - I've taken medicine for it for a while after my ex's suicide attempt because it got bad - normally, mine is just a depressive bend on life (dysrhythmia as some call it). But in the end, I had to decide these things for myself. I had to change my life, and it took years. This doesn't make any of this untrue. No other thing has worked. Yes, it takes reminding myself that perhaps, maybe, I'm expecting too much of myself. Yes, it takes practice. But it sure as hell beats expecting folks to act like my ex, who on top of being schizo-affective also turned out to be fairly abusive. I left him about 10 years ago, which kicked off a bunch of choices that vastly improved my life, then started looking at the general outlook.

To be fair, though, I'd have said many of the same things in your response 6-7 years ago. One day, it just clicked.

On a different note, happy to hear that you are getting help. I hope things have eased up over the last year for you and that they continue to do so.