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Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#651

Post by throw1234651234 »

enneff wrote: post #613
mancerayder wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"See a Therapist" being the first, top-voted comment is to me a sign of a sick society, where loneliness reigns. In a world where in middle-age your closest friends are married with kids, and most people prefer to be 'remote-first' in friendships (you chat online with even friends you know), the answer "see a therapist" is for most people instead just a proxy for the gap: the gap of close friends and family to be abl…

Why so hostile to therapy? I have a great supportive network of friends and family, but even so a few times in my life I have seen a psychologist that gave me actionable advice that really helped me deal with personal hardships. An impartial trained professional can often see much more clearly what you’re blind to; friends mean well but sometimes their intuitive advice is actually the opposite of what you need to hea…

An impartial, trained professional...in what exactly? Therapists / psychologists are glorified life coaches. "Psychology" is a mess. All therapists can do is act as a programming rubber duck equivalent.

What makes the psychologist more qualified to give advice to you than yourself?

Maybe the misconception comes from this "training" idea - people think there is some magical solution in psychology and it's not all a pseudo-science. P.S. if you are a trained psychologists, try to summarize psychology to me. Tell me what's left after you take away the failed theories of Freud, aversion therapy, Jung, etc?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#652

Post by billypilgrim »

bravura wrote: post #478
sveme wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given OP's user name, I suppose he is in Germany right now. If you want to find a therapist, there's several ways: 1. Talk to your health insurance; they often have scheduling services 2. Talk to the Kassenärztlicher Bereitschaftsdienst of your state, e.g., Bavaria has this on offer: https://www.kvb.de/service/patienten/terminservicestelle/ter... If you don't know where to head to, call 116117. Easiest way. 3. Go to…

In Germany, if you have public insurance and your GP prescribe therapy to you, but all public therapists are fully booked, you can take sessions with a private therapist and the public insurance is obligated to cover you. Here is a good (long) guide in English: https://www.bptk.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-09_bptk_...

This is true, that's how I'm getting therapy right now. I was scared this was too much paperwork for me at first, but my therapist explained that I basically needed to only do three things:

  (1) go to a GP (Hausarzt) and explain my situation so they fill up a report and confirm that the issue is indeed psychological and not physical,  

  (2) go to a therapist that works with public insurance so they can write another report, your therapist might refer you to one of his/her colleagues, and  

  (3) email five therapists that work with public insurance and ask them how long their waiting list is. They likely will all tell you it's longer than 3 months, which is what you need to hear.
You basically send this stuff to your insurance company and they deal with the rest.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#653

Post by abnercoimbre »

docmars wrote: post #587
rrgok wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me, this is me. Ahah. But, I'm not sure I'm looking for a wife though. it is draining having a partner/relationship for me. After a while, I just go silent and kinda avoid communication. I'm in my 30s, sometime I'm scared to be old and alone. I can't make my mind up. The fact is that I mostly like doing my hobbies alone. This makes difficult for me to have companionship. Even eating, I prefer to do it alone.…

Ah yes! Sorry, I should have mentioned that. I am in my early 30's, dated a few women in my late 20's after a long break from dating, and was ultimately not successful. I am reasonably attractive/average, and can strike up a fun conversation, though I struggle with my longer-term relationships because I don't often have a lot new to share in life, and I love listening to other people's lives, as much as they're willi…

I never thought I'd say these words but -- I feel seen, I feel heard. I'm more into going to parties but I guard my alone time as a sacred duty.

To add my own twist to both of your stories: I just had an amazing date yesterday with someone who thinks like us. Of course it's only been one date so I could be misunderstanding them.

If both parties value their alone time it means scheduling time together is drastically simplified; you both do it only after each other's batteries are recharged, and you won't feel bad if you say no to a meetup :)

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#654

Post by gwd »

Eisenstein wrote: post #555
gwd wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At 43, having kids is harder for women, but usually not for men (well, at least making babies: bringing up kids does get a bit harder as you age regardless of the gender). And regardless, do consider adoption, even as a single parent. There are loads of kids taken away from parents who for whatever reason can't really care for them. Often there's a generational component: the kid's grandparent abused or couldn't su…

> And regardless, do consider adoption, even as a single parent. I am struggling to think of any official agency which would pair a child with a single man. Is this really something that happens?

As I said, there was one man in my "cohort" -- the group of parents that went through the adoption training together. He was a tradesman -- single, self-employed, my guess in his early 40's; he passed the screening process and adopted a school-age boy. This is a "local authority" in the UK. I'm sure rules vary from place to place, depending on culture, experience, and need. I do know they look extensively at your support network, history, and so on; presumably the requirements for a support network are higher when you're going to be a single adoptive parent.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#655

Post by o_nate »

oblio wrote: post #622
gernb wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently looked into seeing a therapist for reasons similar to the OP's. I tried lyra. All the wording and questions ask screamed to me "these are not my type of people". I'm not going to go into specifics but imagine you walked into a help conference and every table had energy stones, power of pyramids, astrology books, etc... If you're anything like me you'd walk out. Once I made it past all that it recommended s…

> It just got me wondering how much of therapy is a white culture thing I assume non-white majority countries also have psychologists/therapists, though.

The WHO has data on mental health workers relative to population in various countries around the world. The median number of mental health workers per 100,000 population across 156 countries, is 8. In the US its about 100. China is at the median. India is one of the lowest, at around 1 mental health worker per 100,000 population.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#656

Post by theGnuMe »

ravenstine wrote: post #637
theGnuMe wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever man. Nobody is implying that therapy means you are broken. It’s about growth and self actualization. Lots of people use "therapy" for performance optimization for example: sports psychology.

That's really conflating two distinct things. Therapy is by definition the treatment of a pathology. A particular area of psychology doesn't necessarily have anything to do with pathology or malfunction. > It’s about growth and self actualization. I don't think the majority of people seeking therapy are doing so merely because they want to self actualize. Self actualization and growth may be a part of therapy, or be…

That’s a strange definition of therapy.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#657

Post by dejj »

cobbman wrote: post #450
cromwellian wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% to the above and I would look specifically for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which specializes in treating distorted thinking. It rescued me from my early thirties and I haven’t been depressed since. Our brains are wired to generate stories and narratives around everything, we can’t help it, and sometimes those narratives are distorted but cause damage and like a scab, we keep reinforcing and picking at them. Lea…

> Then other thing is, no matter how smart you are, you can’t debug yourself, you need other people. This is very true, and not always realized. Another way I heard it said which is easy to remember: "You can't read the label from inside the bottle."

“Dr. Rosen: You can't reason your way out of this!

John Forbes Nash: Why not? Why can't I?

Dr. Rosen: Because your mind is where your problem is in the first place!”

- 'A Beautiful Mind'.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#658

Post by svnt »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #608
svnt wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t. It only proves there are still people trying to continue their careers in a field they have deeply invested in, in training, education, clientele, and professional network.

Yes it does because it demonstrates its effectiveness. How can an effective discipline be scientifically discredited?

It does not demonstrate the effectiveness of psychiatric treatment by any reasonable standard.

The control group is corrupted, the control-treatment pairs for comparison were selected by the researchers, and the provided “psychiatric treatment” includes

> In addition to weekly individual sessions the inpatient program at both groups contained two 75 min group sessions each week. In addition, VITA had shorter group meetings each morning (15 minutes). Patients in both treatments participated in two physical exercise sessions per week, weekly psycho-educational lectures and art-therapy groups, and both groups finish each week with end of the week status groups. On average, patients in both treatments received seven sessions of therapeutic activity each week.

“Both treatments” here is not control and treatment but both intensive treatments.

You can get large effects in almost everything by completely changing a person’s experiential environment from their prior environment, which is what they did here. In addition to everything listed, their sleeping conditions, diet, daily routine, and social environment were probably dramatically changed, although the researchers didn’t record that so we can’t know.

It’s impossible to tell if the actual psychiatric interventions were effective. This fact, though, is particularly damning as to the efficacy of the actual treatments provided:

>The analysis also showed minimal differences between the two intensive inpatient treatments, suggesting that the differences in effect may not be due to the theoretical rationale within the inpatient treatment but rather the treatment context.

There were no significant differences between two very different treatment modalities. This essentially admits that “something else” and not the psychiatric treatments were responsible for the uptick. My guess is regular schedule, connecting with people (community formation) and mattering to someone, none of which do you get from psychiatric treatments.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#659

Post by ravenstine »

theGnuMe wrote: post #656
ravenstine wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really conflating two distinct things. Therapy is by definition the treatment of a pathology. A particular area of psychology doesn't necessarily have anything to do with pathology or malfunction. > It’s about growth and self actualization. I don't think the majority of people seeking therapy are doing so merely because they want to self actualize. Self actualization and growth may be a part of therapy, or be…

That’s a strange definition of therapy.

I have an idea. You do a cursory investigation on what "therapy" is and the come back here and tell us why my definition of therapy is strange.

When someone refers others to therapy in a generic sense, why do you think that's effectively the same as suggesting self actualization? Is the other party looking for self actualization, or are they probably looking to figure out the root of their problems?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

#660

Post by barry-cotter »

enneff wrote: post #613
mancerayder wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"See a Therapist" being the first, top-voted comment is to me a sign of a sick society, where loneliness reigns. In a world where in middle-age your closest friends are married with kids, and most people prefer to be 'remote-first' in friendships (you chat online with even friends you know), the answer "see a therapist" is for most people instead just a proxy for the gap: the gap of close friends and family to be abl…

Why so hostile to therapy? I have a great supportive network of friends and family, but even so a few times in my life I have seen a psychologist that gave me actionable advice that really helped me deal with personal hardships. An impartial trained professional can often see much more clearly what you’re blind to; friends mean well but sometimes their intuitive advice is actually the opposite of what you need to hea…

Why would you call a therapist an impartial, trained professional? They’re no more impartial than a priest or imam and their provisional training has no bearing on the effectiveness of their treatment. By far the most important predictor of a positive impact of sending a therapist is the feeling that you and they have similar values and are working together[1]. Much as with teachers training has no detectable impact on effectiveness while experience does[2]. A priest who vines with you is as good as counselling as a therapist. It’s the vibes that matter, not the trappings of professionalism.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_alliance#:~:text....

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul-Crits-Christoph/pu...

[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1971-10064-001

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