Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their health is not improved by having everyone they meet tell them they are unfixable and utterly ruined for life.
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You're replying to a victim of sexual abuse
Habits of Highly Miserable People
151–160 of 321 posts
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#152Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their health is not improved by having everyone they meet tell them they are unfixable and utterly ruined for life.
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Kindly do yourself a favor and re-read Zeller's last words in its entirety. While yes, his attacker's actions are utterly despicable, and the experience in no doubt has been more traumatizing to him than we could imagine. At the same time, Zeller also goes into great details about how nobody has really been able to support and help him recover from that trauma.
On his relationships, he discusses how he was never really able to open up to his significant others about what he was going through: "So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to talk about with anyone."
On the doctors he has seen: "I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was."
On his family: "I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead—one with less hatred and intolerance.
If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week."
"I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me."
And there's plenty more. The vast struggles that Zeller faced and described are not inconsistent with the points that @DoreenMichele is discussing.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#154Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
p { max-width: 48rem; } Is that really so awful? I love ultralight formatting, but once you start pushing 60rem text width it becomes very difficult to read.
So shrink your browser window, tilt your phone to the side, or switch to reader mode
Alternately, you could make a website that has a good user experience by default for people using some of the most popular platforms instead of sticking with arbitrary standards from decades ago
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the idea behind the exercise, from a Stoicism standpoint, is to mentally expose yourself to the fear of being homeless (or whatever about the exercise creates anxiety for you). Eventually you desensitize yourself to that feeling and begin to realize it wouldn't be as bad as you think. This is also an aspect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Parodied on TV sketch comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNx_gU57gQ4 Occasionally there is a moment where the character extrapolates from some minor failure to dying "homeless, penniless, and alone" and then recovers.
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Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#157Take from this what you will:
If you don't have a serious mental illness, you can't even imagine the excruciating agony.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#158Give yourself a negative identity I was sexually abused as a child. I spent a total of about 3.5 years in therapy, a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties. Therapy was valuable, but I quit in large part for the above reason: I was at a point where spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past was just keeping alive an identity as a victim. It was keeping me stuck. It was keeping me…
I know this is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I always felt that society's reaction to sexual assault give victims a reason to feel even worse about their situation. Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were str…
I would seriously hope that modern therapists would do their utmost to push back on any idea of virginity as an indicator of human value - an idea that comes from the idea of women as property and successor machines.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#159> 5. Attribute bad intentions. Me and my SO have serendipitously discovered a great way to defuse arguments: it's the question "Are you accusing me of foulness?" (any sufficiently Victorian synonym works here) For some reason most people reflexively deny this in reply and realise that they've been attributing bad intentions groundlessly. Unfortunately this doesn't work on people who have a mindset which requires ther…
This is great. Another wonderful piece of advice I had read somewhere for similar situations is: "remember that an argument between you and your partner is you two against the issue rather than against one another " I think it is a great way to refocus the conversation and work toward a solution.
My personal solution to defuse an argument with the wife is to stick out my tongue and say something stupid. Gets a laugh unless I'm REALLY in trouble, and then it's on to plan B.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#160Give yourself a negative identity I was sexually abused as a child. I spent a total of about 3.5 years in therapy, a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties. Therapy was valuable, but I quit in large part for the above reason: I was at a point where spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past was just keeping alive an identity as a victim. It was keeping me stuck. It was keeping me…
I'm sorry you had a bad therapy experience. I hope that the therapy strategy your therapist used is not universal, and that other therapists are open to trying other strategies (for other survivors, if your need for therapy has passed) -- "Getting A Life" and "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" are good strategies that a therapist ought to be able to help with.
I honestly can't understand what value a therapist expects to find in rehashing past experience that's already been discussed. (If the patient is in denial about something, investigating it could lead to a breakthrough. But "something happened, I feel awful about it" doesn't seem to lend itself to a solution that involves dwelling on what happened)