[ci5er]

At one point (maybe 15~20 years ago?), I had two sessions/week with a therapist for about a year. 3 therapists in a row.

I must be crap at finding therapists. The ones I found were really against being "interventionists" and didn't want to share with me what they were seeing from our very lightly guided conversation (where I didn't even know what I should be talking about).

"A little intervention and a little guidance would be cool folks! Otherwise, why am I not talking to a tape recorder?"

[vorpalhex]

Please don't interpret this comment as against therapy in any way because therapy is an important and useful tool.

But the tape recorder kind of conversations (and you can just do these yourself) is actually a really effective tool when you are feeling overwhelmed. I use a journal instead of a tape recorder but it lets me establish how I am feeling at that moment, and then I can revisit later and evaluate what was going on.

If you're able to do this consistently, it becomes a really valuable tool because you can start to find correlations. "I notice I get depressed when I spend too much time just playing games". Correlations aren't necessarily causation, but even just that simple correlative analysis can be a meaningful tool.

[ci5er]

Thanks for that.

Also I need to find a way to find better therapists! :-)

EDIT: Or maybe just realize that I get more depressed (and anxious) when I drink massive amounts of depressants, and, you know, stop? :-)

[vorpalhex]

For me, and this is entirely anecdotal, I was typically overindulging in alcohol when I was upset about something and wanted to get my mind off of it. Which is great in theory except of course you end up stewing instead, but stopping the drinking didn't actually fix the root problem either, just a particular expression of it.

Ultimately I ended up adjusting my environment by both accepting it was OK to end some relationships with some angry people in my life (not angry at me, but angry generally) and adjusting how I approach work.

[ci5er]

Fair enough. That makes sense. And Thank you for that.

In my case, I had a couple of back-to-back life-events that I just couldn't process/accept, (and frankly using alcohol to deal with the first probably lead to the second), but, then, hey! I was an addict! It probably took me 15~20 years to stop using that as my go-to avoidance technique (even though I knew how unhealthy/unuseful it was, I didn't really have another. Shame on me)

[ashtonkem]

Finding a good therapist is both hard, and a very trial & error process.

[ci5er]

The founders of NLP used to joke that there are many paths to mental health, but none so lucrative as Freudian psychotherapy.

I tend to try to seek out CBT people, but I found that a lot of them started out as classicists themselves, and then we find our way back into being "non-interventionists".

My mental model now is that the cycle of life goes something like this: Born -> WTF is Going on Here? -> Death

Maybe that's cynical, but it helps me believe that I'm not the only one who is fucked up between the ears .

[dpoochieni]

Hmmm curiously, just read a book about how Freud brought about modernity and was conscious of how people would keep looking for some life guidance even though he had basically got rid of Tradition/Culture.

That said, keep looking, it has been terribly helpful for me to have someone who can analytically call on any bullshit I tell myself. I've learned to catch a lot of my patterns myself, but this guy simply catches the ones I miss or helps me understand why something is troubling me. I'd say our conversations are pretty balanced in who is speaking.