221–230 of 321 posts
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What disgusts you about its tone? I found it informative and probably from honest experience. It's superficial chearful embrace towards problems people create for themselves is instructive towards correcting those habits.
Sarcasm is simply obnoxious.
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Those things never really scared me. Do they also meditate on being sick, in constant crippling pain and come to the same conclusion? I get a stomachache and recognize a bad personality change in myself. I dont imagine id be able to draw on the same mental skills while in that state for prolonged periods.
I think this is a better exercise. I stole it from Seneca. Look at the back of your wrists: see those fragile greenish-blue veins? What if tomorrow - while thinking about some problem with money or love - you trip and fall, and a particularly sharp rock on the ground or a shard of glass on the street cuts one of those thin exposed blue-green veins open?
If that's the thing I'm supposed to feel then so be it, but I feel Seneca intended for some greater profundity, or he would dispense with the mental theatrics. What am I missing? Does it need to be more visceral?
Give 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…
"when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity." On the contrary, Tribe by sebastian junger has me fairly convinced me that the irony here is that people band together, find a sense of belonging and often p…
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How is that about mental illness? I genuinely don't get it. People can be unhappy without being mentally ill.
> People can be unhappy without being mentally ill. Sure. But some people feel unhappy all the time. Sometimes for years, sometimes for their entire life. In their case, it is a mental health issue. It's not something they can just shake off when they hear the age-old "you're depressed because you choose to be" argument by a smug author. This approach is outdated and it doesn't work.
Sometimes it is, not always. When I went through long periods of unhappiness it was because of my circumstances and life choices.
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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).
Umm... seeing how the homeless live, it really would be as bad as I think. Probably even worse, since I don't see all of it.
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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…
I didn't have a bad therapy experience. I had remarkably excellent support. I have no idea why you are framing it that way, other than the tendency being discussed in this very thread for the entire world to unhelpfully heap pity upon survivors. Edit: The obit for my first therapist, a truly remarkable man: http://www.seracpe.org/Library/Remembrance/B_of_R_for_Turley...
I think it's because you said:
> [Regarding therapy:] spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past [...] was keeping me miserable.
That sounds like at least the later portions were a bad experience. Also, I suspect a lot of people here have a default assumption that any therapy experience is bad unless otherwise noted, but the above quote is probably the main factor.
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I didn't have a bad therapy experience. I had remarkably excellent support. I have no idea why you are framing it that way, other than the tendency being discussed in this very thread for the entire world to unhelpfully heap pity upon survivors. Edit: The obit for my first therapist, a truly remarkable man: http://www.seracpe.org/Library/Remembrance/B_of_R_for_Turley...
> I have no idea why you are framing it that way I think it's because you said: > [Regarding therapy:] spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past [...] was keeping me miserable. That sounds like at least the later portions were a bad experience. Also, I suspect a lot of people here have a default assumption that any therapy experience is bad unless otherwise noted, but the above quote i…
Long experience suggests that it won't matter how positively I frame it or how carefully I say it, some people will insist on viewing my statements and me negatively -- as has been discussed elsewhere in this very thread.
And I don't plan to discuss this detail further.
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There’s a line that gets crossed between “oh well that sucks but that’s life” and legitimate traumatic experiences. When that line is crossed your suffering goes from whining to legitimate in the eyes of society, so a lot of people realize this and maximize their victimhood in order to gain any sympathy.
Yes, there's a weird way that when we label people, it changes the legitimacy of their condition. It's broader than just how acceptable it is to complain. Other examples are depression and autism. If you're diagnosed with one of those, it transforms you from an unpleasant person that nobody wants to be friends with to someone deserving pity, support and/or respect. I think there's some kind of value in this. Everyone…
Implicit in this is the idea that behavior originates from an identity, from some independent center.
You have to believe in the notion of free will to assign blame.