| I didn't take my reply down because I didn't mean it, or because I thought it was wrong. I took it down because I felt that I didn't know enough about your life. I was finding multiple aspects of your response grating making it difficult for me to remain non-judgemental. So, I decided it would be better to simply "apologize and move on". I find your comparison of me with your family to be extremely insulting, as you know nothing about my life. The mistake I made, which in your eyes makes me as good as a bunch of right-wing misers, was to 1) suggest a key aspect of what my own therapy was based around, and 2) share with you what _I_ found was something useful in improving my "suffering". However, you decided to take it as yet another sign of how people are judging you (Jon Kabat-Zinn has a lot to say about non-judgementalness too, and that was another key aspect of my therapy), missing the fact that you are judging others, and in particular in the course of this interaction, me. I do not have the resilience, capacity, or training to deal with such judgements. I think that you can read my first response in many different ways. You chose one perspective, and perhaps, in the future you may choose to read it in other ways. Apart from that response, in which I gave you what I felt were the most valuable things I had to offer to anyone, I have nothing else to give you. I'll leave you with a quote from J. Kabat-Zinn's "Full Catastrophe Living": > Acceptance does not mean that you have to like everything or that you have to take a passive attitude toward everything and abandon your principles and values. It does not mean that you are satisfied with things as they are or that you are resigned to tolerating things as they “have to be.” It does not mean that you should stop trying to break free of your own self-destructive habits or to give up on your desire to change and grow, or that you should tolerate injustice, for instance, or avoid getting involved in changing the world around you because it is the way it is and therefore hopeless. > Acceptance as we are speaking of it simply means that you have come around to a willingness to see things as they are. This attitude sets the stage for acting appropriately in your life, no matter what is happening. You are much more likely to know what to do and have the inner conviction to act when you have a clear picture of what is actually happening than when your vision is clouded by your mind’s self-serving judgments and desires or its fears and prejudices. |