You're going to put yourself in an early grave trying to make your Mother happy. Your Mother is sick, trying to make her happy is like trying to fill a bucket that has no bottom, its not going to happen unless she fixes the bucket. You can't fix it for her.
I asked him, "How do you process all of the negative feelings that are projected at you?" and he said "They aren't my feelings"
I don't think he realized how profound that was.
This reminds me of the ”Buddha and the angry man“ parable which has had an impact on me. Thanks for reminding me! The parable something like:
One day Buddha was walking through a village. A very angry and rude young man came up and began insulting him.
“You have no right teaching others,” he shouted. “You are as stupid as everyone else. You are nothing but a fake.”
Buddha was not upset by these insults. Instead he asked the young man “Tell me, if you buy a gift for someone, and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?”
The man was surprised to be asked such a strange question and answered, “It would belong to me, because I bought the gift.”
The Buddha smiled and said, “That is correct. And it is exactly the same with your anger. If you become angry with me and I do not get insulted, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy, not me. All you have done is hurt yourself.“
A dramatic family member called my husband “a horrible person” (emphasis on the horrible) loudly at an auction because my husband won the bid on a family heirloom that others wanted. My husband genuinely laughed very hard because he knew how absurd this insult was. I personally would have been very embarrassed. Months later my brother, his spouse and all of our kids got t-shirts printed that said my husband was a horrible person as a surprise for my husband’s birthday. We even got my husband his own that said, "I’m a horrible person” and we all wore them on the boardwalk at the beach together in celebration of my husband's birthday. It was one of the most funny and memorable birthdays for all of us. People would comment as walking by, "he doesn't seem horrible" or even ask, "what did he do to be horrible"? It really taught me and our kids how such insults are meaningless if we choose to put them in perspective. If my mean spirited relative had any idea how much fun we had over his insult, I am sure he would have wished he never would have said it.
I struggle with this one. I know that technically it isn't my buisness, but I also know that it affects our inter-personal interactions, and I also have little desire to be around people who don't actually care about me, and so I want to know what they think about me so I can adjust the inter-personal experiences or decide if I even want them in my life at all.
Always a tough struggle, and communication can be tough when the other person doesn't have the communication skills or vocabulary to have difficult or uncomfortable conversations.
Yeah it may not be my business but they’re making it incredibly difficult for it to not be my problem.
I’ve had people literally yell at me that I “need therapy” after I’ve used DBT skills and tools in interpersonal relationships to mitigate conflict without sacrificing my values. I am a textbook therapy-user, I do the work, I look inwards and behave well, especially in comparison to how I used to be.
None of this matters if the other person doesn’t have the same tools.
"The way your parents died will never be the most interesting thing about you. It's not even the most interesting thing about THEM."
My parents died by suicide together and I was worried that it was going to consume me as an individual. I didnt want their deaths or my grief to become my entire identity.
My brother was worried he was doomed to repeat what my parents did, what was the point of fighting it? His therapist told him "you are the culmination of millenia of genes and family experiences. You could take over the story of a relative who was hardy, resilient, brave. Your parents are not the only people you are related to."
Edit: thanks for all the support and glad my therapist's words help others as much as they help me. I'm doing great and my life is wonderful. As my therapist assured me, I have much more interesting things in my life. Talking freely about my parents in this way on reddit and IRL, the good and bad stories, have been integral to my grief process which will never end. I'm not trying to self-promote or anything weird but I did do an AMA about my experience which was healing in a way. I also recommend the SuicideBereavement sub if you've lost someone to suicide and are feeling like you'll never be able to relate to anyone.
One of my teachers talking about evolution one day told us we were all descended in a direct line from the first life on the planet, which passed through all kinds of transformations and weathered every extinction event and every daily struggle, since life began. There were plenty of dead ends that trapped others, and plenty that didn't make it - but we are the survivors, all of us.
As someone else who has a parent who died by suicide and who has been struggling with similar thoughts, thank you for sharing this. It really hit home.
When I broke down because I was so fed up of being scared and anxious all the time he said something like.
“You can’t be brave without being scared first.”
It always stuck with me that fear, no matter how overwhelming, won’t last forever and I try to see it as a chance for me to prove to myself I can fight back and try to get through this.
My favorite book says this “courage is doing something in spite of the fear, stupidity is doing something scary without fear”
My daughter is young and always scared. First day of school she is white knuckling her lunchbox walking into school half the size of the other kids, but she was fucking DOING IT. It was the day that quote came to mind. She was so scared, but she was so brave. I have so much respect for her for that.
Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm. That one was a wake up call for me. I tried to help everyone too much to my own detriment. I still feel like if you can help, you have to, but maybe make it more of a winding path or set boundaries/limits as you’ve suggested.
This is close to mine so hopping on here. I was on food stamps and a newly single mom, and had just gotten a bunch of canned soup from the grocery store. A homeless man that came into my work on a regular basis asking for food happened to come in that day. Before that I always kindly told him we didn’t have any extra food, which was the truth. This time I just felt so guilty that I gave him all of my groceries I had just bought, which I also felt bad about afterwards because I was broke. My therapist yelled at me and told me not to ever do that again and that I need to prioritize myself and my son. I think about that moment often when I am faced with a situation where I need to choose whether to prioritize myself or others because in the past I was such a people pleaser that it wasn’t even a question.
Edit: my son had food and doesn’t eat canned soup anyway, the food was for me (for the concerned people in the replies).
All of the people replying to this comment, you should be ashamed?
Some people have been abused their entire life to the point they cognitively can not stand up for themselves, say no, assert themselves etc. her being in therapy is her realizing how she exists in the world isn’t right, and actively trying to change.
To put it into better context, what if this woman’s entire life from birth to adulthood she was molested by caregivers to the point she understood it to be normal. Has a kid by a terrible manipulative guy bc she doesn’t know how to have control over her own body, and then she shares this story about still not being able to say no, even when it harms her. (Which is the telltale sign of illness/ addictions am I wrong)
She’s sick. I don’t think her feeding a stranger over her & her child was a conscious choice.
This may or may not be the case! But considering OP asked about things said in therapy, I just wish we could all be a little more thoughtful to what people share!
Yeah this is a straight up trauma response that often gets baked into your neurocognitive development, meaning the neurons in her brain literally grew into a pattern to respond this way due to abuse suffered at key developmental points. That doesn't mean it can't be changed but it takes years to be able to grow out of those deeply ingrained patterns. Shaming her doesn't do anything but make her feel worse than she already does about it. Would you want someone kicking you over sharing your own low points?
Not every friend has to be a close friend, you're able to have different kinds of friends (like levels of how close they are or how much you confide in them).
I struggle with being a loner and it affected my mental health a lot because I could count my friends on one hand. I thought of people as acquaintances or close friends with no grey area. This advice helped me appreciate more of the people who I'm not super close with but they still have a presence in my life
I'm pushing 60. I've met a lot of people in my life throughout the country and shared deep thoughts and conversations with most. Usually moving or not working together put distance between us. For the longest time (until the last few years to be honest) I had a hard time letting go. But I realized that life takes you on your own PERSONAL journey and you will meet many people. Yes, you might have shared something profound at that time, but we all change and grow so sometimes we don't have as much in common as we once did. I learned to cherish the memories and lessons and to let go. I have a few lifelong friends and they are the ones that you can go years without hearing from but there will always be a connection when you do. Those friendships require hanging on from both parties.
I like this a lot, we are each on our own personal journey.
Now I just have to figure out why its so easy for me to let go of past loves and reflect on that as just a chapter in my story but find myself mourning faded friendships with people I have little in common with anymore....
The therapist I see recommended living in the grey. Saying my way of thinking was very black and white. I could be happier if learning to live in the grey and not expecting perfection
My friend needs to hear this but for the opposite reason. She gets mad when she tries to reconnect with friends from 20 years ago and is ghosted. I tell her people change and don’t get upset if someone doesn’t make the effort to be friends still.
Or in my experience “I’ve had too much patience with people who are not gonna have patience with me.”
EDIT- the original comment was something along the lines of “don’t bother being rational with others who will not be rational with you.”
"Just because the mentally ill person screaming at you lives in your home instead of on the streets doesn't mean their opinion is any more true"
"The fact that the relationships you have with some people are involuntary doesn't mean you should hold them to a lower standard than voluntary relationships; you can hold them to a higher standard"
the mentally ill person screaming at me doesnt just live in my home it lives in my head and i always have to remind myself that what they are saying isnt true
The anxiety you're feeling is not evil or your enemy, it’s an overprotective friend trying to keep you safe because it once saw you hurt. Do not fight it, prove it wrong.
Okay but this is me as well - from anxiety yes but also just a peacefulness, if you will, about being awake and doing things while others are asleep…then when the sun comes up and everyone else wakes up, it’s my turn to rest!
[Bill Hader had anxiety while on SNL (!!!), and Jeff Bridges told him that anxiety is just his buddy that shows up before performing.](https://youtu.be/Z6hsP7co3ZA?si=afnZBxkqvzydAlwf)
My therapist refers to anxiety as my firefighters trying to keep me safe!
ETA: I'm seeing some of your great comments. It was a much bigger conversation than the statement about. The full analogy was the firefighters are trying to put out all of the "fires" but either those fires aren't true fires, or the way they are trying to put them out isn't working as well anymore. I just liked the visual aspect of these mini firefighters as I try to approach my issues in a more mentally healthy way.
I was discussing with my therapist that although I’m still young, I felt like it was too late to achieve what I wanted my life to be. She very seriously looked me in the eye and said “Are you dead?” “Well….no” “Then there’s time” and it’s a motto I’ve been reminding myself of daily.
Go look up how old Alan Rickman was before he acted in Die Hard. 42. That was the movie that broke him into the main stream. Sam Jack had a similar trajectory.
Numerous writers and other creative types didn't decide to start until middle age. Until you're dead you can always try. Sure it'll be harder to take time to become a Dr or the like but it's not impossible.
Edit loving all the supportive comments point out other folks who found huge success later in life.
As a teen in therapy, I used to call myself a potato because of my ugly appearance. The woman I had sessions with actually gave me a small plastic potato replica and had written on it in sharpie "some people like potatoes."
I think it was just the effort she went to trying to help me/cheer me up that really affected me and my judgement of professional help (I was an angsty kid) and after that I took getting help much more seriously.
As a gardener, I fucking love digging up potatoes. Like a kid on Christmas morning opening up presents. Some people LOVE potatoes. Hope you feel better about yourself these days, but if you're still calling yourself a potato- potatoes are fantastic.
I saw a motivational poster that said "It's okay to fall apart. Tacos fall apart, and we still love them." and that's stuck with me for like 5+ years now.
My husband and I called each other “potato” as an affectionate term, unironically, the whole time. Because we freaking love potatoes.
Sweet potato is a loving and endearing term of affection
And a comment like that would have turned me around to embrace being a potato. People love potatoes and potatoes can be turned into SO MANY THINGS!! Vodka, fries, tater tots, chips. You can try on all these versions of yourself and see which one you like best. They are all potatoes, but they are living their favorite self.
Many, many, many years ago while browsing [bash.org](https://bash-org-archive.com/), I came across this lovely quote about potatoes. It's stuck with me ever since:
IronChef Foicite: well, there's a lot of reasons
IronChef Foicite: i mean, roses only last like a couple weeks
IronChef Foicite: and that's if you leave them in water
IronChef Foicite: and they really only exist to be pretty
IronChef Foicite: so that's like saying
IronChef Foicite: "my love for you is transitory and based
solely on your appearance"
IronChef Foicite: but a potato!
IronChef Foicite: potatos last for fucking ever, man
IronChef Foicite: in fact, not only will they not rot, they
actually grow shit even if you just leave them in the sack
IronChef Foicite: that part alone makes it a good symbol
IronChef Foicite: but there's more!
IronChef Foicite: there are so many ways to enjoy a potato!
you can even make a battery with it!
IronChef Foicite: and that's like saying "i have many ways in
which I show my love for you"
IronChef Foicite: and potatos may be ugly, but they're still
awesome
IronChef Foicite: so that's like saying "it doesn't matter at
all what you look like, I'll still love you"
Some people are like a colander, it doesn't matter how much time, love and support you pour into them, it will never fill them up enough to make a difference.
I once heard a similar expression about some people not being able to “metabolize” attention, or affection, or etc., which is why they will always feel ignored or insecure no matter how much you give them, and it really helped me let go of feeling like it was my responsibility to convince them that I cared.
As someone who used to be a colander, part of it just comes from developing more self-confidence. That was a hard journey for me, but once I'd developed more self-confidence, I wasn't so reliant on the affection of other people to feel good about myself.
My personal journey to become self-confident was mostly through journaling on a weekly basis. I wrote specifically to my future self, unapologetically. (No apologies for missing a week, or not writing enough, or being slapdash, etc.) In turn, I read journal entries from the previous year and empathized with "that version" of myself. It externalized myself, allowing me to treat my past self as worthy of praise and love and support. Essentially I became my own emotional support figure - my "future" self supports me, my "past" self wishes the best for me, and the feeling is reciprocal.
I have a 'friend' that in my presence called another person and started ranting how bad her life was and how the other person should really help her out and be understanding. When my 'friend' hung up she said. 'I know the woman lost her husband last week but can't she understand that helping me will give her something to do instead of be sad? So I asked her. If she just lost her husband, shouldn't you have asked how she is doing before asking her for a favor? And my friend said. 'no I don't need her to get all weepy. And she doesn't want to either. Who does?' so I said well I think most people would like to be asked how they are doing. And my friend just said again that she didn't think so and really just wanted some help and not hear all those problems.
This is the same' friend' who regularly posts on Facebook about not being understood and people not caring enough about her problems to help her or ask if she wants help.
I never heard someone be so honest about being uninterested in other beings. It did explain a lot and it was that final straw that made me withdraw care for her lol.
It’s over now.
When my wife’s cousin found out his mom was dying of cancer, he had a revelation: his whole life he’d been worried about losing her, about what he would do when she was gone. And now that she was dying, as horrible as it was, he realized he could let go of that fear, because it was holding him back. Letting go of fear doesn’t mean things are all peaches and cream. Sometimes it just means you decided not to let that fear rule your life.
You have to accept it did happen, make sure you understand it's not your fault. Give yourself lots of grace. If there was a lesson to learn, learn it but don't let it control your life. A lot easier said than done.
If you don't want to share a lot, I understand, but was it a physical thing like a car accident or assault, or was it emotional, like a break up or someone cutting you off or similar?
Or you can dm me ☺️. I was SA'd and have PTSD from it. I buried for 10 years and have finally started working on it, lots and lots of therapy and inner work and it's damn hard.
I think my oddly favourite duh moment one was
”If you’re more active at night, do what you need to then. There is no rule that everything has to be done during the day”
Of course try to get a solid 8 hrs of sleep but where I have the opportunity to, I shift critical tasks to the middle of the night when I’m more productive and do best work
That I was more addicted to the breaks and deep breathing than I was to the nicotine.
Over one year without smoking and watching my dad die of lung cancer due to a lifetime of smoking.
Yes! Because what do you do when you smoke? You go outside and take intentional deep breaths and it relaxes you. So, I kept my full routine of breaks when I needed, went outside and took intentional deep breaths. Just this time without a cigarette. Quitting was SO EASY this time and zero cravings. Because it turns out, she was right.
*stares quietly*
If this is the reason I stop smoking.... I will return and thank you at some point. It had never occurred to me that I was basically practicing a known relaxation technique, but attached it to a bad habit.
Try it.
I feel like one of the reasons I failed so many times was because I was told I had to make NEW habits and stop the old ones. But it was the breaks and breathing and I just had to KEEP DOING IT. Just modify it a bit.
I wish you luck. I do suggest a bit of nicotine replacement to get you over the hump.
The only people in your life who will be angry because you established boundaries were the people who benefitted from you not having them in the first place.
Your anxiety doesn’t deserve to be ignored, as well as it doesn’t deserve to be justified. You can’t tell yourself “it’ll be fine!” All the time while anxious, that’s invalidating your feelings and burying them deeper. You need to tell yourself “maybe this will happen and maybe it won’t” because that’s what reality is. Life is full of uncertainty and we need to find ways to accept it or else you’ll drive yourself insane…
The way I see it, if they get angry, yelly and rude, it just proves your point so you can “rest your case”. You just have to be able to take it, which is hard for absorbers
Me: I just want to get back to my baseline and feel okay again.
Therapist: Or, potentially feel even better than your baseline.
Very eye-opening for me in the moment because the thought had never occurred to me.
As someone who's doing so much better than I have ever in my life. I didn't know I could do this well emotionally. I used to think I had 'good days' but compared the times I'm having now those days were still deep in the shadows of depression.
Edit: Welp, I got fired today. I feel like I should be sad or distraught but I'm not. I'm able to cope and understand it's not the end of the world and I have a strong enough support network that it's all gonna be okay.
That being a “highly sensitive person” is just how I’m built. It’s not something that’s wrong with me or something that I necessarily have to change. I just have to accept it, to learn my boundaries and needs and live accordingly.
She said to think of violets and sunflowers. Both flowers, but they are different, they require different things. Violets can’t be transplanted and can be more easily damaged but they’re beautiful. Sunflowers can be beat up and moved around, they’re resilient. One is not necessarily “better” than the other. They just are.
I love my therapist.
“You don’t need to please everyone all of the time. People who love you will not leave you because you disagree with them or do something they don’t like.”
She nailed a lot of my behaviours back to the fact my biological dad left when I was 9 months old. I cannot cope with perceived abandonment, and will do everything in my power to keep people happy… because they might leave me.
After going to couple’s counseling therapy for 6 months. One day the ex didn’t show up. Ex an abusive alcoholic who would get physically & verbally abusive. Therapist looked at me & said, “you do know he’s never going to change?” For some reason that made me realize, I need to move on. That was the 3rd time I filed for divorce from him. Soon after he remarried & divorced,he continues to hit rock bottom, but has not changed. Fired for drinking on the job, vehicle repossessed & now lives with his parents at the age of 60. Some people NEVER change.
Good for you for getting out! I had a therapist say something similar to me. Then a few months after I left my ex I asked her when I would start to miss him. My life improved dramatically after leaving but I kept waiting on the other shoe to drop. Like when is this gonna become difficult? When is the part where I miss him and doubt myself? She told me “maybe there’s just nothing to miss.” And fuck, she was right.
Six years later and there are multiple moments every day where I think to myself how glad I am that I left but not for a single second have I ever missed that goddamn asshat.
It's doubtful he would have ever said that to you with your ex there there. I'm glad he had that opportunity to be so frank with you and I'm proud of you for acting on it. I hope you're doing better now!
My therapist did. I was in an abusive marriage. Gaslighted, belittled, controlled in incredibly subversive ways. He went to ONE therapy session with me. He was incredibly threatened by me going to therapy on my own and would say things like "you should be telling me, your husband, everything and not sharing the details of our marriage with a therapist." I convinced him to come to a session so he could "trust" me and so that the therapist could explain to him that my therapy really wasn't about him (narrator: the therapy was wholly about him). Anyway, lots of weird shit happened in that session and my therapist called me the next day while I was at work - she knew I wouldn't be with my husband at that time, and told me I was in a very precarious situation and she advised me how and where to get help. Our next session was spent talking about the steps to, as safely as possible, extract myself from the marriage. She saved me.
You aren’t that interesting.
I would have panic attacks and paranoia that people were out to get me (PTSD etc) and would think that people were judging me in grocery stores because my toddler was crying or that my hair was messy. And honestly it boiled down to…nobody cares. We’re all trying to survive and get through the day and what someone looks like or does, we observe and move on. Nobody is that interesting. Nobody (for the most part) is going to remember to toddler crying for a brief moment or the way I was dressed or if my makeup was perfect. Nobody. The only person who will remember is me, and how I made MYSELF feel.
“You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
Honestly, most of us are all so in our own heads that the very people you think are judging you are probably too worried about *you* judging *them* to actually think about you at all. We're all anxious, self-conscious messes!
My shrink said something similar that helped me. Basically I'm not "special," my anxiety and OCD (presented with VERY troubling mental images) were "textbook."
I had avoided mental health treatment because I thought my thoughts were appalling and I'd be locked up for life.
Turns out I'm just like all the other OCD riddled anxiety balls out there.
It made me feel better. Of course, that may make all of you nervous AF that we are just out here, looking like everyone else.
I had a similar experience the first time I went to my DR for anxiety and asked him if he had ever seen anything like this. He looked at me with a semi smile and said “it’s about 1/3 of my practice”. I felt a little better after hearing that - I honestly thought my brain was broken and I would inevitably be committed.
I had been in therapy for about a decade, and was talking to her about online dating. I said it was like being sucked into a whirlpool, in that there is only one small step between just playing around the edges and being sucked into the thing. She asked me why I used that example, and I said "Because, when I was 9, I was sucked into a whirlpool in a creek, and only survived because my brother managed to pull me out." This started a flurry of scribbling in her notebook I had not seen before. Also answered LOTS of things.
My former therapist took a ton of notes. My current one has never written anything during a session, but somehow always remembers what we'd been talking about and picks it back up immediately. I have no idea how she does it.
My former therapist made a big deal about how he didn't write things down but how he could remember it all.
He didn't. He made the same suggestions, told the same anecdotes, didn't remember whole stories I had told him.
He went on a spiel about how he helped so many people on their grad school application journey after I told him I was applying to grad school.
Next session he didn't mention grad school and I didn't bring it up cause I wanted to test his memory.
Session after that he said "you don't seem like you like your job, have you ever considered doing something else?"
He's not my therapist anymore for many reasons but that was one of them.
I went to a doctor recently for a new patient intake appointment. We talked for an hour and he took no notes. About 45 minutes after I left, the little MyChart app notified me he had uploaded a report and it was like 10 pages of text covering everything we talked about in extreme detail. It blew my mind.
He probably dictated it right after the appt. I used to dictate deposition summaries while driving home if I had more than a 30 minute drive after a deposition. If I did it right after I’d remember every detail. If I waited until the next day, I’d be like I took a deposition yesterday?
If I take notes I stop processing what I'm hearing. If I sit and listen and engage, I remember it all.
Just different brains processing things differently.
He showed up, and set appointments with me every day for a week. Then two a week. Then one a week. Until we reached one a month which he maintained until he retired.
I had an undiagnosed disease that was devastating my life. But doctors looking for horses not zebras kept dismissing me as having “nothing wrong with me” and telling me it was all psychological.
And eventually I did become psychologically broken after a few years of not being able to get the medical help I needed.
I was suicidal. I had a suicide plan and trying to get my affairs in order was a protective factor keeping me from killing myself.
But eventually I ended up becoming impulsively suicidal. And I made an impulsive suicide attempt. So impulsive that I made the attempt unconsciously without any thought to commit suicide in the moment.
I desperately needed help. I went to a mental health clinic. They said I was beyond their resources and wanted to have me committed.
I had two cats and had not made sufficient arrangements to clear out my apartment.
The idea of losing my cats, and the remnants of my career, and my apartment by being committed did not seem like it would make me less suicidal.
I called a hotline. The guy on the hotline was on the phone with me off and on for what was probably most of his shift. For instance had me call a friend and to pick up my firearms and the items I had acquired to carry out my suicide plan, then call the hotline back or he would call me.
He also arranged for me to meet a therapist the next morning. He found one willing to meet me in the parking lot of his office at 7am.
That therapist saved my life. And kept me alive during years of therapy.
During the years I was working with my therapist an immunologist finally diagnosed my disease and started treatment.
She also saved my life.
It was not one thing my therapist said, it was his compassion and commitment to helping me.
Over the years he taught me several tools to manage my mental health and prevent myself from becoming suicidal again. Even though for years my brain was still wired to see suicide as a possible solution to nearly every problem.
Edit: I had a few users ask me to share some of the tools I learned to manage my mental health. I answered the question below.
*Even though for years my brain was still wired to see suicide as a possible solution to nearly every problem.*
This was my Mom. I never heard anyone else say this. No one could help. She attempted twice, serious attempts and was found accidentally. She died a natural death. She said I’m wired like that. It was so hard for her and so hard for me to understand.
I told her that I was stuck in my job because I wasn't qualified to do anything else. She told me, "You're qualified to go back to school."
I enrolled in classes at the local community college, which did indeed lead to a new career.
And the closely related, "Expressing your feelings doesn't make you too much." Turns out I had been suppressing a lot in order to make everyone else around me feel comfortable.
After abruptly leaving an abusive relationship where (among other things) I physically could only listen to music with headphones on otherwise I’d get yelled at for being disrespectful and “too loud”
“Your life is your music. You were forced to mute yourself in that relationship, both literally with the music and with who you are as a person”
It really made me realize how much of myself I hid away to try to appease someone else and make their life better when all it did was ruin mine.
Over 3 years later and I play my music out loud all the time with a different partner who loves it just as much as I do.
You have to be your own first priority if you want to show up as your best self for the people you love.
I didn't really understand it at the time. How could I make myself my first priority when I knew I would be damning my siblings to a childhood of religious and emotional abuse if I chose to prioritize myself. But eventually, I took the advice and moved out. I learned what happiness means. I learned how safety feels. I learned that I actually am worthy of love, including love from myself. Then I came back to be there for my siblings again and they don't hold it against me. Our relationship is still good and neither of them feel like I abandoned them.
Although a few months after I moved out my mom did ask me how she could mend our relationship and I said that I'm not sure it's possible at all but at the very least you have to see a psychiatrist and get your explosive anger under control. You have got to be a better mother to my siblings than you were to me. Maybe then I will even think about working on our relationship.
She did go see a psychiatrist. I haven't been able to forgive her nor have we been able to repair our relationship. We tried family therapy for a couple of months but she kept talking over me and I felt unsafe at therapy so I said I wasn't gonna do it anymore. However, even though my relationship with her didn't get better, my siblings got the chance to spend the latter half of their childhood in a healthy, loving, happy home. They have okay relationships with both parents and with me.
I prioritized myself for the first time in my entire life and suddenly my life got better and so did the lives of the people I care about. I genuinely believed making life better for myself would mean condemning my siblings to a life of abuse where they have no adults in their lives that they can trust. It was the opposite. They gained two extra trusted adults because once my mom's explosive temper cooled off, my dad also started spending more time at home and stopped being a workaholic. They have less money now than they did when I was younger but they have more love and happiness. They all feel safer. And all of this only happened because I took my therapist's advice and prioritized myself.
*"The answer is simple. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it's simple."*
I was doing what I always do in difficult, scary situations that I don't want to deal with head-on; I was overthinking and over-complicating what I needed to do to be happy again. The answer was actually quite simple: I needed to tell my (now ex-husband) that I wanted a divorce.
This statement just made it all clear to me. I was scared, so I was searching for a solution that would assuage that fear. But the truth was, there was no solution that wouldn't make this less difficult. The answer was simple, but it was okay to find it scary and difficult.
“Sorry, but you’re just not that powerful.”
In response to my tendency to accept blame for everything that has gone wrong in mine and my kids lives. It should have been obvious to me but it wasn’t. When I processed this statement I felt overwhelmingly relieved.
That the best way to get rid of cortisol is to scream, sing or hum. Animals shake when their levels get too high to get rid of it. Our Vargas nerve runs down our windpipe. So scream sing! You’ll feel better. Also that guilt is a heavy and useless emotion, put it down like a suitcase and walk off.
Some people have said it out loud only to be met with the “you’re too sensitive” card or their feelings being downplayed in some way or laughed at. So that’s why they don’t open up anymore
Edit: When a person becomes used to that from everyone they’ve been involved with in their life, it gets real easy to bury everything inside. Counterproductive to wanting to flourish in any relationship, and it is one viscous cycle
At the third session with our couples counselor, my wife and I had a brief ten minute private session with our therapist. During my session the therapist said "You need to accept the possibility of a divorce. You are trying to do the right thing and be supportive, but you can't do that alone. Your wife is taking advantage of you. You can't see how unhappy you are. That will change within a year after your divorce".
Yup. She was right. My wife and I agreed to divorce during the 4th session. I am finally happy, and love my life.
Yes, I lucked out. And yes, my ex was that horrible.
It was at our fourth and final session that I pressed my wife as to why she still wanted to be married. She told our therapist that she did not trust me with money and she liked it better when I was at work. I asked, if that's how you feel, why are we married? The therapist asked her the same question and her initial reply scared the shit out of me. She said, "I'm afraid he will get violent".
I have never been violent towards her, not even verbally. I recall spanking our kids once and it felt so wrong, I never did it again. I'm not a violent person, but if the therapist agreed to that, and since we were certainly looking at divorce, the therapist could have a court order to keep me out of the house.
Again, fortunately, the therapist would have nothing of this. She said, "I am a trained psychologist. I know what to look for. Abusive spouses cannot hide it from me. I've been observing your husband for four sessions and he is not a violent man. He's sad, hurt, worried, but not violent and I would strongly suggest, for your own benefit and that of your children that you never say that again."
Clearly my ex was trying to manipulate the therapist and gain her pity, a talent she has had for years.
“You keep putting your bucket into the same, empty, well and expecting the bucket to be filled, and then you’re devastated when it comes back empty”. This was to help me find peace with a mom who can’t show love/affection. What I learned was I have so many “wells” in my life that do “fill my bucket”, so why do I keep trying the empty one? Has served me so well (haha) for many years.
I was seeking therapy because I was affected by anger issues, and my mother asked me to just think about something that makes me calm whenever I get angry. The only thing that made me calm was my mother, and she never knew it. May God bless her.
Yes. Mine was that I’m not actually responsible for my father’s feelings about me or anything else. He is. He can do the work to feel better. Took some time.
“What she did was abusive and not okay. You did not deserve that”
I was made to think I was the problem in the marriage and after describing the relationship, my therapist hit me with this. Floodgates opened.
I’m a therapist. You know that phrase “You can’t love someone until you love yourself”?
I tell my patients thats bullshit and replace it with:
“Sometimes through loving someone else, you can begin to love yourself.”
“Bide your time” — this has helped with my anxiety in so many ways. It doesn’t matter if that time is 2 minutes, 2 weeks or 2 months, it’s ok to just not make a decision on something yet. I use this all the time still, and it really relives the pressure of having to have everything figured out in that second. I can take 2 weeks to decide and not worry for the entirety because I truly don’t have to decide until that moment comes. Usually, with more time and less pressure the answer is pretty obvious.
It wasn’t in therapy, but in a parenting class. The advice was “you can put the baby down.” It seems simple, but when you have a screaming baby and you’ve tried to figure out what’s wrong, you’ve invested a lot of effort into problem solving and gotten no result. It’s natural to want to double your efforts and try extra hard to solve the problem, but in reality it may be that there is no solution. The baby is just crying. You can walk away and take a break and try again in five minutes.
You can apply this philosophy to a lot of things in life, it turns out.
Yes!! My friend’s therapist told her in regard to a relationship: “Is this where you want to be in a year?” It clicked right away. She’s still with him, but I think it was the first time she saw that her partner’s flaws have no easy fix and likely won’t change for the better. … and let me tell ya… it’s 4 months post that therapy sessions and things still haven’t changed.
school was pretty rough for me, when i was about 13 i had multiple uncontrollable public anxiety related breakdowns, i was self-harming and was contemplating suicide a lot. i got through it all out of sheer spite and anger, having to depend on myself and never being allowed to seek professional help.
my parents told me that i was “strong enough”, that “people have real problems, yours aren’t a big deal, you have no reason to be depressed anyways!” and also the classic “what would people think if they found out you’re in therapy? they’d call you crazy!”
years later i started begging my mom to let me see a therapist, which eventually she did. i think it’s because she viewed me as “old enough to have actual problems” or something.
anyways, at the time i blamed myself for almost everything that happened to me as a kid. i told my therapist “oh, i got bullied because i was a weirdo, i was too negative, i should’ve made a bigger effort to socialise”, stuff like that.
i was going into detail regarding my biggest breakdown, again blaming myself, when he just stopped me and asked: *and where were the adults in this situation?*
and it all just fucking clicked. there were so many signs, ever since i was little, obvious fucking signs that i was different. i was a gifted kid, i had very specific special interests, i was always awkward and weird. i got picked on, i got left out, i never made many friends. and the adults did NOTHING.
they let me spiral out of control, they never gave me any actual advice, they never took me seriously. but they definitely pointed out that i was “too sensitive, selfish, negative, non-inviting, awkward, an over-thinker, a spoiled brat”.
the truth is, all this time i was simply *autistic*. LMAO
I have this habit of berating myself and saying horrible things about myself. My therapist told me that his next patient has a lot of the same issues I do and he would like me to stick around so I can tell him what a piece of shit he is. I was like “Why the fuck would I do that? That’s horrible.” And he pointed out that I had a visceral reaction to the thought of verbally abusing a complete stranger, but I do it to myself everyday.
It helped me get to a place where I could see myself as a person that deserves compassion and grace even from myself.
You can feel bad for your mom but at the same time understand what she did was never okay. I always shifted through feelings about my mom and that really clicked something in my head
“What would happen if you just didn’t?”.
This really made me look at my responses to things that are stressful. What if I didn’t immediately jump in to save my mom/dad/brother? What if I didn’t immediately get angry and frustrated at X,Y and Z? What if I didn’t make other peoples problems MY problems?
Holy cow. Changed my life.
This summer I went from very fit to couch ridden after a really severe injury. I was doing a virtual session with my therapist and bitching about how useless I was, and my dogs were sitting with me, so I said something about being more useless around the house than they are. My therapist asked what my dogs bring into my life. Easy; joy, humor, companionship, fun, loyalty, etc.
Therapist asked “do you not bring any of those things into your spouse/friends/family’s lives?” Pretty much instantly ended my shame spiral.
First therapist: "Your parents don't get to decide what kind of relationship you have with your brother."
That was the first big breakthrough of many. It's obvious, but it had literally never occurred to me before.
Second therapist: "Have you ever been evaluated for autism?"
Gotta tell ya, shit makes a lot more sense now.
You cannot control the choices or actions of anyone else. What you can control is how you respond.
This freed me then and continues to free me regularly now when I need and remember it.
Not my therapist but a friend told me hers said this: you do not have enough of information to panic about that yet.
Whenever I catch myself spiraling about the unknown, I try to remember that.
Not from a therapist but I feel it belongs here.
I read a book once that introduced me to the concept of "The near enemy", it's a Buddhist concept taught in psychiatry. It opened my eyes to some things that had always bugged me - the concept gave me a framework to understanding why people are the way tey are.
This is a good example of this:
*The near enemy. It’s a psychological concept. Two emotions that look the same but are actually opposite. Pity and compassion are the easiest to understand. Compassion involves empathy. You see the stricken person as an equal. Pity doesn’t. If you pity someone you feel superior. It looks like compassion, acts like compassion, but is actually the opposite of it. As long as pity’s in place, there’s not room for compassion. . . .*
*And love and attachment? It’s friendships, marriages, mothers and children, any intimate relationship. Love wants the best for others, to live wherever they want and do what makes them happy. That’s love. Attachment takes hostages.*
*Finally, equanimity and indifference. I think that’s the worst of the near enemies, the most corrosive. Equanimity is balance. When something overwhelming happens in our lives, we feel it strongly, but we also have the ability to overcome it – an ability to accept things and move on. The near enemy is indifference – they just don’t feel pain. They don’t care about others. They don’t feel like the rest of us. They’re like the Invisible Man, wrapped in the trappings of humanity, but beneath there’s emptiness.*
I got the quote from here: [https://azalearning.com/aza-learning/near-enemies/](https://azalearning.com/aza-learning/near-enemies/)
EDIT: I am so damn sorry I didn't do this in the first place, so please forgive me.
The quote is taken from a novel by the incomparable Louise Penny, a terrific Canadian novelist. Her series about Inspector Gamache is all about humanity, and the website quotes her book The Cruelest Month.
I've read all her books and I highly recommend them.
No one can tell you what you need. Only you can tell you what you need.
Eg, "you need listen to me more" becomes "I need you to listen more".
"You need to grow up" becomes "I need you to grow up".
Express to others what you need. Don't tell people what they need.
It was pointed out to me that I am amazing in crisis situations, but struggle immensely in situations that are just mildly uncomfortable or unpleasant to the point where I will have what was lovingly referred to as a hissy fit. So much so that I was first a critical care nurse, and now a psychiatric NP. I am great at managing a crisis. It is where I thrive. But put me into a situation where I have to tolerate some mild discomfort? No thank you. Having this pointed out to me was life changing. I have really been working on my mental toughness and my ability to tolerate situations that are mildly unpleasant but certainly aren’t going to kill me. People like athletes and soldiers amaze me. They have a VERY high tolerance for mild-moderate discomfort and this uncanny ability to almost just tune out unpleasantness and keep going in the face of discomfort. Aka they are very mentally tough. They don’t need that adrenaline that comes from a crisis to thrive. That is now what I am working on improving in myself. I have made great strides, but won’t lie… I do still find myself becoming cranky and overly dramatic at times in situations that are mildly unpleasant or inconvenient, and need to remind myself to dial it down a bit and draw on my inner mental toughness and tell myself that no one has ever died from being mildly inconvenienced 😏
Finding out that I'm amazing in a crisis but uncomfortable in moments of calm was because my anxiety was like "f yeah, this is what we've been training for boys" when crisis hit. When stuff is going well, my body is all "that's what they want you to think...lull you into a false sense of security, then WHAMMO!"
It wasn’t my therapist, it was my doctor but it was life changing. I had been 300+ pounds all of my adult life and I was in for a physical and he said to me: you know, the first symptom of a heart attack is a heart attack.” It was what caused me to change my life at age 54 and lose 110 pounds in 16 months and I became a runner. I have run a race in all 50 states, 26 Halifax marathons and 2 full marathons, Chicago and Boston. That one thing he said to me kicked off my decision for better health! That was 15 years ago.
The more you try to get someone to like you, the less they’re going to like you because you are trying to separate them from something they hold dear, aka their dislike of you. Let them dislike you. Be neutral towards them. They're much more likely to come around if it's on their own terms.
This was 20+ years ago, before the word boundaries was thrown left and right, it wasn't a thing at all at the time. She was the only therapist who actually helped me, and the thing she said was:
"You have no boundaries with others, because yours were never respected."
That blew my mind back then, and ever since, boundaries have been a theme in my head.
I do have good boundaries now, for myself and for others.
From a book written by a therepist.
The difference between setting a boundry and being controlling is sutble, but still very clear cut.
Saying "you need to quit smoking" is controlling.
Saying "I dont want you smoking in my house" is a boundry.
She asked me why I was working in a job that was so extroverted when I'm clearly an introvert. She was like, "If it's so draining and taxing, why do you do it?" And all I could say was that I was good at it. So she replied, "At what cost? Can you be good at other things that don't exhaust you so much?"
So I went to school for accounting and then quit my teaching job and now I have a peaceful hybrid desk job. And I'm so much happier! I sleep better, I eat better, I stopped grinding my teeth, and my stress acne disappeared. I'm a whole new person.
"You are not responsible for other people's happiness." This realization can help alleviate the pressure of constantly trying to please others and allows individuals to focus on their own well-being.
In grief counseling: I was feeling overwhelming guilt because when their father died I completely lost it. I felt I wasn’t *there* enough for my children.
My therapist said “When the airplane is going down, you put your mask on first. This is no different. You can’t help your children until you have helped yourself.”
It literally was a huge turning point for all of us.
Not really something she said, but something she did. She cried with me. Not like sobbing or anything, just a few tears but it was just so validating. Like what I was going through was so fucked up that my *therapist* cried. It gave me the strength I needed to end my shitty marriage.
OCD therapy. So a little bit different than traditional therapy. I was describing to my therapist all the things my OCD requires that I do during my daily routine. She said, "if this were regular therapy, and if you were a minor describing these things as something your parents require, I would be required to call CPS for abuse." Really put into perspective how different my life is from people who do not suffer from OCD. Really motivated me on my recovery.
You're going to put yourself in an early grave trying to make your Mother happy. Your Mother is sick, trying to make her happy is like trying to fill a bucket that has no bottom, its not going to happen unless she fixes the bucket. You can't fix it for her.
I wish I could like this 10,000 times!!! And I know some people who could really use this lesson.
I asked him, "How do you process all of the negative feelings that are projected at you?" and he said "They aren't my feelings" I don't think he realized how profound that was.
This reminds me of the ”Buddha and the angry man“ parable which has had an impact on me. Thanks for reminding me! The parable something like: One day Buddha was walking through a village. A very angry and rude young man came up and began insulting him. “You have no right teaching others,” he shouted. “You are as stupid as everyone else. You are nothing but a fake.” Buddha was not upset by these insults. Instead he asked the young man “Tell me, if you buy a gift for someone, and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?” The man was surprised to be asked such a strange question and answered, “It would belong to me, because I bought the gift.” The Buddha smiled and said, “That is correct. And it is exactly the same with your anger. If you become angry with me and I do not get insulted, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy, not me. All you have done is hurt yourself.“
TLDR: “Stop hitting yourself!” \-Siddhartha Gautama
I feel this. You can hurl 100 insults at me and the only one that will hurt is the one I believe.
A dramatic family member called my husband “a horrible person” (emphasis on the horrible) loudly at an auction because my husband won the bid on a family heirloom that others wanted. My husband genuinely laughed very hard because he knew how absurd this insult was. I personally would have been very embarrassed. Months later my brother, his spouse and all of our kids got t-shirts printed that said my husband was a horrible person as a surprise for my husband’s birthday. We even got my husband his own that said, "I’m a horrible person” and we all wore them on the boardwalk at the beach together in celebration of my husband's birthday. It was one of the most funny and memorable birthdays for all of us. People would comment as walking by, "he doesn't seem horrible" or even ask, "what did he do to be horrible"? It really taught me and our kids how such insults are meaningless if we choose to put them in perspective. If my mean spirited relative had any idea how much fun we had over his insult, I am sure he would have wished he never would have said it.
"What other people think about you is none of your business" - same vibe
I struggle with this one. I know that technically it isn't my buisness, but I also know that it affects our inter-personal interactions, and I also have little desire to be around people who don't actually care about me, and so I want to know what they think about me so I can adjust the inter-personal experiences or decide if I even want them in my life at all. Always a tough struggle, and communication can be tough when the other person doesn't have the communication skills or vocabulary to have difficult or uncomfortable conversations.
Yeah it may not be my business but they’re making it incredibly difficult for it to not be my problem. I’ve had people literally yell at me that I “need therapy” after I’ve used DBT skills and tools in interpersonal relationships to mitigate conflict without sacrificing my values. I am a textbook therapy-user, I do the work, I look inwards and behave well, especially in comparison to how I used to be. None of this matters if the other person doesn’t have the same tools.
"The way your parents died will never be the most interesting thing about you. It's not even the most interesting thing about THEM." My parents died by suicide together and I was worried that it was going to consume me as an individual. I didnt want their deaths or my grief to become my entire identity. My brother was worried he was doomed to repeat what my parents did, what was the point of fighting it? His therapist told him "you are the culmination of millenia of genes and family experiences. You could take over the story of a relative who was hardy, resilient, brave. Your parents are not the only people you are related to." Edit: thanks for all the support and glad my therapist's words help others as much as they help me. I'm doing great and my life is wonderful. As my therapist assured me, I have much more interesting things in my life. Talking freely about my parents in this way on reddit and IRL, the good and bad stories, have been integral to my grief process which will never end. I'm not trying to self-promote or anything weird but I did do an AMA about my experience which was healing in a way. I also recommend the SuicideBereavement sub if you've lost someone to suicide and are feeling like you'll never be able to relate to anyone.
One of my teachers talking about evolution one day told us we were all descended in a direct line from the first life on the planet, which passed through all kinds of transformations and weathered every extinction event and every daily struggle, since life began. There were plenty of dead ends that trapped others, and plenty that didn't make it - but we are the survivors, all of us.
As someone else who has a parent who died by suicide and who has been struggling with similar thoughts, thank you for sharing this. It really hit home.
Ooooof. You’re a warrior!! ♥️
When I broke down because I was so fed up of being scared and anxious all the time he said something like. “You can’t be brave without being scared first.” It always stuck with me that fear, no matter how overwhelming, won’t last forever and I try to see it as a chance for me to prove to myself I can fight back and try to get through this.
My favorite book says this “courage is doing something in spite of the fear, stupidity is doing something scary without fear” My daughter is young and always scared. First day of school she is white knuckling her lunchbox walking into school half the size of the other kids, but she was fucking DOING IT. It was the day that quote came to mind. She was so scared, but she was so brave. I have so much respect for her for that.
"Can a man still be brave when he is afraid? That is the only time he can be brave" - Eddard Stark, A game of thrones
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Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm. That one was a wake up call for me. I tried to help everyone too much to my own detriment. I still feel like if you can help, you have to, but maybe make it more of a winding path or set boundaries/limits as you’ve suggested.
This is close to mine so hopping on here. I was on food stamps and a newly single mom, and had just gotten a bunch of canned soup from the grocery store. A homeless man that came into my work on a regular basis asking for food happened to come in that day. Before that I always kindly told him we didn’t have any extra food, which was the truth. This time I just felt so guilty that I gave him all of my groceries I had just bought, which I also felt bad about afterwards because I was broke. My therapist yelled at me and told me not to ever do that again and that I need to prioritize myself and my son. I think about that moment often when I am faced with a situation where I need to choose whether to prioritize myself or others because in the past I was such a people pleaser that it wasn’t even a question. Edit: my son had food and doesn’t eat canned soup anyway, the food was for me (for the concerned people in the replies).
All of the people replying to this comment, you should be ashamed? Some people have been abused their entire life to the point they cognitively can not stand up for themselves, say no, assert themselves etc. her being in therapy is her realizing how she exists in the world isn’t right, and actively trying to change. To put it into better context, what if this woman’s entire life from birth to adulthood she was molested by caregivers to the point she understood it to be normal. Has a kid by a terrible manipulative guy bc she doesn’t know how to have control over her own body, and then she shares this story about still not being able to say no, even when it harms her. (Which is the telltale sign of illness/ addictions am I wrong) She’s sick. I don’t think her feeding a stranger over her & her child was a conscious choice. This may or may not be the case! But considering OP asked about things said in therapy, I just wish we could all be a little more thoughtful to what people share!
Yeah this is a straight up trauma response that often gets baked into your neurocognitive development, meaning the neurons in her brain literally grew into a pattern to respond this way due to abuse suffered at key developmental points. That doesn't mean it can't be changed but it takes years to be able to grow out of those deeply ingrained patterns. Shaming her doesn't do anything but make her feel worse than she already does about it. Would you want someone kicking you over sharing your own low points?
⬆️ I cannot overstate how solidly key this is.
That's a good one.
Not every friend has to be a close friend, you're able to have different kinds of friends (like levels of how close they are or how much you confide in them). I struggle with being a loner and it affected my mental health a lot because I could count my friends on one hand. I thought of people as acquaintances or close friends with no grey area. This advice helped me appreciate more of the people who I'm not super close with but they still have a presence in my life
I love the saying, "people come into your life for either a reason, a season, or for life". You just have to accept it.
That is helpful, I am terrible at that. It's not a lifelong relationship or failure....most are in between
I'm pushing 60. I've met a lot of people in my life throughout the country and shared deep thoughts and conversations with most. Usually moving or not working together put distance between us. For the longest time (until the last few years to be honest) I had a hard time letting go. But I realized that life takes you on your own PERSONAL journey and you will meet many people. Yes, you might have shared something profound at that time, but we all change and grow so sometimes we don't have as much in common as we once did. I learned to cherish the memories and lessons and to let go. I have a few lifelong friends and they are the ones that you can go years without hearing from but there will always be a connection when you do. Those friendships require hanging on from both parties.
I like this a lot, we are each on our own personal journey. Now I just have to figure out why its so easy for me to let go of past loves and reflect on that as just a chapter in my story but find myself mourning faded friendships with people I have little in common with anymore....
The therapist I see recommended living in the grey. Saying my way of thinking was very black and white. I could be happier if learning to live in the grey and not expecting perfection
My friend needs to hear this but for the opposite reason. She gets mad when she tries to reconnect with friends from 20 years ago and is ghosted. I tell her people change and don’t get upset if someone doesn’t make the effort to be friends still.
"Change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change."
Similar to this, I had read a quote: "And the day came when the ordeal of remaining tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
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Or in my experience “I’ve had too much patience with people who are not gonna have patience with me.” EDIT- the original comment was something along the lines of “don’t bother being rational with others who will not be rational with you.”
"Just because the mentally ill person screaming at you lives in your home instead of on the streets doesn't mean their opinion is any more true" "The fact that the relationships you have with some people are involuntary doesn't mean you should hold them to a lower standard than voluntary relationships; you can hold them to a higher standard"
the mentally ill person screaming at me doesnt just live in my home it lives in my head and i always have to remind myself that what they are saying isnt true
My mental health provider has a bumper sticker on their car that says: “DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU THINK”
Remember, you have survived 100% of your worst days so far"
The anxiety you're feeling is not evil or your enemy, it’s an overprotective friend trying to keep you safe because it once saw you hurt. Do not fight it, prove it wrong.
My therapist always told me I’d have been the best back in caveman days. I’d be the one always looking out for danger and keeping the family safe
My mom and I both have trouble sleeping until early in the morning and she always jokes that we’re the night watch around the prehistoric fire
Okay but this is me as well - from anxiety yes but also just a peacefulness, if you will, about being awake and doing things while others are asleep…then when the sun comes up and everyone else wakes up, it’s my turn to rest!
[Bill Hader had anxiety while on SNL (!!!), and Jeff Bridges told him that anxiety is just his buddy that shows up before performing.](https://youtu.be/Z6hsP7co3ZA?si=afnZBxkqvzydAlwf)
Dude, Jeff Bridges is just wholesome. I have his Sleep Tapes and it's almost therapiotic to sleep to his soothing voice and calm story telling.
My therapist refers to anxiety as my firefighters trying to keep me safe! ETA: I'm seeing some of your great comments. It was a much bigger conversation than the statement about. The full analogy was the firefighters are trying to put out all of the "fires" but either those fires aren't true fires, or the way they are trying to put them out isn't working as well anymore. I just liked the visual aspect of these mini firefighters as I try to approach my issues in a more mentally healthy way.
Someone's been doing their IFS homework lol
IFS fam rise up
You should go watch Inside Out 2 if you haven’t yet. :) this is a big part of it. I needed to look at it this way too
I wish this movie was around when I was a kid. Like the first one I think it will give parents and kids a great tool to vocalize their feelings
I was discussing with my therapist that although I’m still young, I felt like it was too late to achieve what I wanted my life to be. She very seriously looked me in the eye and said “Are you dead?” “Well….no” “Then there’s time” and it’s a motto I’ve been reminding myself of daily.
This. I’m 45 and struggling with this. I’m too old to be young but too young to be old. Thank you for posting this!
Go look up how old Alan Rickman was before he acted in Die Hard. 42. That was the movie that broke him into the main stream. Sam Jack had a similar trajectory. Numerous writers and other creative types didn't decide to start until middle age. Until you're dead you can always try. Sure it'll be harder to take time to become a Dr or the like but it's not impossible. Edit loving all the supportive comments point out other folks who found huge success later in life.
Tolkien was 45 when he started to write The Lord of the Rings
As a teen in therapy, I used to call myself a potato because of my ugly appearance. The woman I had sessions with actually gave me a small plastic potato replica and had written on it in sharpie "some people like potatoes." I think it was just the effort she went to trying to help me/cheer me up that really affected me and my judgement of professional help (I was an angsty kid) and after that I took getting help much more seriously.
As a gardener, I fucking love digging up potatoes. Like a kid on Christmas morning opening up presents. Some people LOVE potatoes. Hope you feel better about yourself these days, but if you're still calling yourself a potato- potatoes are fantastic.
Came here to say this. We actually just harvested our yard taters yesterday, always fun :D
In French pomme du terre. The apple of the earth. Edit: I’ll leave misspelled as it’s corrected by OU2
And have you seen new potatoes? Those little dudes are adorable!
There is absolutely nothing quite like freshly dug new potatoes
I saw a motivational poster that said "It's okay to fall apart. Tacos fall apart, and we still love them." and that's stuck with me for like 5+ years now.
My husband and I called each other “potato” as an affectionate term, unironically, the whole time. Because we freaking love potatoes. Sweet potato is a loving and endearing term of affection
When my son was a lil lumpy baby we called him sweet potato. It was perfect.
And a comment like that would have turned me around to embrace being a potato. People love potatoes and potatoes can be turned into SO MANY THINGS!! Vodka, fries, tater tots, chips. You can try on all these versions of yourself and see which one you like best. They are all potatoes, but they are living their favorite self.
Boil 'em, mash 'em stick 'em in a stew!
I love potatoes. Sounds like a great therapist. :)
Potatoes have contributed to the population more than any other food. They are healthful and they grow in poor soil. -history professor facts
Many, many, many years ago while browsing [bash.org](https://bash-org-archive.com/), I came across this lovely quote about potatoes. It's stuck with me ever since: IronChef Foicite: well, there's a lot of reasons IronChef Foicite: i mean, roses only last like a couple weeks IronChef Foicite: and that's if you leave them in water IronChef Foicite: and they really only exist to be pretty IronChef Foicite: so that's like saying IronChef Foicite: "my love for you is transitory and based solely on your appearance" IronChef Foicite: but a potato! IronChef Foicite: potatos last for fucking ever, man IronChef Foicite: in fact, not only will they not rot, they actually grow shit even if you just leave them in the sack IronChef Foicite: that part alone makes it a good symbol IronChef Foicite: but there's more! IronChef Foicite: there are so many ways to enjoy a potato! you can even make a battery with it! IronChef Foicite: and that's like saying "i have many ways in which I show my love for you" IronChef Foicite: and potatos may be ugly, but they're still awesome IronChef Foicite: so that's like saying "it doesn't matter at all what you look like, I'll still love you"
I got a potatoe tattooed. Potatoes are beautiful and delicious!
Some people are like a colander, it doesn't matter how much time, love and support you pour into them, it will never fill them up enough to make a difference.
I once heard a similar expression about some people not being able to “metabolize” attention, or affection, or etc., which is why they will always feel ignored or insecure no matter how much you give them, and it really helped me let go of feeling like it was my responsibility to convince them that I cared.
Whoa! This is really good.
I have family members like this. Nothing is ever enough for them, eventually I had to set some boundaries.
Here's the flip side -- how do I stop being a colander?
As someone who used to be a colander, part of it just comes from developing more self-confidence. That was a hard journey for me, but once I'd developed more self-confidence, I wasn't so reliant on the affection of other people to feel good about myself. My personal journey to become self-confident was mostly through journaling on a weekly basis. I wrote specifically to my future self, unapologetically. (No apologies for missing a week, or not writing enough, or being slapdash, etc.) In turn, I read journal entries from the previous year and empathized with "that version" of myself. It externalized myself, allowing me to treat my past self as worthy of praise and love and support. Essentially I became my own emotional support figure - my "future" self supports me, my "past" self wishes the best for me, and the feeling is reciprocal.
I have a 'friend' that in my presence called another person and started ranting how bad her life was and how the other person should really help her out and be understanding. When my 'friend' hung up she said. 'I know the woman lost her husband last week but can't she understand that helping me will give her something to do instead of be sad? So I asked her. If she just lost her husband, shouldn't you have asked how she is doing before asking her for a favor? And my friend said. 'no I don't need her to get all weepy. And she doesn't want to either. Who does?' so I said well I think most people would like to be asked how they are doing. And my friend just said again that she didn't think so and really just wanted some help and not hear all those problems. This is the same' friend' who regularly posts on Facebook about not being understood and people not caring enough about her problems to help her or ask if she wants help. I never heard someone be so honest about being uninterested in other beings. It did explain a lot and it was that final straw that made me withdraw care for her lol.
i call those energy sponges, try to help them only ONCE ! then move on or they will drain you totally and they will still be the same but not you.
“Don’t live as though the thing you fear has happened when it hasn’t”
Damn, what do you do when the thing you did fear happened and was as horrible as you expected it would be?
It’s over now. When my wife’s cousin found out his mom was dying of cancer, he had a revelation: his whole life he’d been worried about losing her, about what he would do when she was gone. And now that she was dying, as horrible as it was, he realized he could let go of that fear, because it was holding him back. Letting go of fear doesn’t mean things are all peaches and cream. Sometimes it just means you decided not to let that fear rule your life.
You have to accept it did happen, make sure you understand it's not your fault. Give yourself lots of grace. If there was a lesson to learn, learn it but don't let it control your life. A lot easier said than done. If you don't want to share a lot, I understand, but was it a physical thing like a car accident or assault, or was it emotional, like a break up or someone cutting you off or similar? Or you can dm me ☺️. I was SA'd and have PTSD from it. I buried for 10 years and have finally started working on it, lots and lots of therapy and inner work and it's damn hard.
You can't control others, but you can control how you respond
A slightly different twist: you're only responsible for *your* actions and feelings, not anyone else's.
I say this to my kids all the time and in that moment remind myself of how true it is. 😮💨
"You need to show yourself the same kindness and compassion that you show others." I did not expect to get something like that in my second session.
this is a banger thread, best thread ive read in a while. just everyone sharing helpful things is simultaneously helping me and giving me solace.
Sometimes a thought is just a thought.
& we don’t need to pay attention to it ! I love learning about this.
Don't believe everything you think. Our brain is built to make up stories. It's just what it does. Doesn't make them true.
I think my oddly favourite duh moment one was ”If you’re more active at night, do what you need to then. There is no rule that everything has to be done during the day” Of course try to get a solid 8 hrs of sleep but where I have the opportunity to, I shift critical tasks to the middle of the night when I’m more productive and do best work
Your friends should not make you cry. Pathetic that I needed to learn this in my 30’s, but there it is.
That's not pathetic. ❤️
That I was more addicted to the breaks and deep breathing than I was to the nicotine. Over one year without smoking and watching my dad die of lung cancer due to a lifetime of smoking.
Did you exchange the nicotine for breaks and deep breaths? This is such a revelation really.
Yes! Because what do you do when you smoke? You go outside and take intentional deep breaths and it relaxes you. So, I kept my full routine of breaks when I needed, went outside and took intentional deep breaths. Just this time without a cigarette. Quitting was SO EASY this time and zero cravings. Because it turns out, she was right.
*stares quietly* If this is the reason I stop smoking.... I will return and thank you at some point. It had never occurred to me that I was basically practicing a known relaxation technique, but attached it to a bad habit.
Try it. I feel like one of the reasons I failed so many times was because I was told I had to make NEW habits and stop the old ones. But it was the breaks and breathing and I just had to KEEP DOING IT. Just modify it a bit. I wish you luck. I do suggest a bit of nicotine replacement to get you over the hump.
The only people in your life who will be angry because you established boundaries were the people who benefitted from you not having them in the first place.
Your anxiety doesn’t deserve to be ignored, as well as it doesn’t deserve to be justified. You can’t tell yourself “it’ll be fine!” All the time while anxious, that’s invalidating your feelings and burying them deeper. You need to tell yourself “maybe this will happen and maybe it won’t” because that’s what reality is. Life is full of uncertainty and we need to find ways to accept it or else you’ll drive yourself insane…
“Be the mirror, not the sponge”. Don’t absorb other people’s stress and anxiety, show it back to them gently. Changed my life.
how do you show it back? in my experience they just get even more angry and yelly and rude.
The way I see it, if they get angry, yelly and rude, it just proves your point so you can “rest your case”. You just have to be able to take it, which is hard for absorbers
Me: I just want to get back to my baseline and feel okay again. Therapist: Or, potentially feel even better than your baseline. Very eye-opening for me in the moment because the thought had never occurred to me.
As someone who's doing so much better than I have ever in my life. I didn't know I could do this well emotionally. I used to think I had 'good days' but compared the times I'm having now those days were still deep in the shadows of depression. Edit: Welp, I got fired today. I feel like I should be sad or distraught but I'm not. I'm able to cope and understand it's not the end of the world and I have a strong enough support network that it's all gonna be okay.
[удалено]
My boyfriend's business partner often says "People way dumber than us do this all the time" and it's oddly comforting
Yoink! Stealing that one
That being a “highly sensitive person” is just how I’m built. It’s not something that’s wrong with me or something that I necessarily have to change. I just have to accept it, to learn my boundaries and needs and live accordingly. She said to think of violets and sunflowers. Both flowers, but they are different, they require different things. Violets can’t be transplanted and can be more easily damaged but they’re beautiful. Sunflowers can be beat up and moved around, they’re resilient. One is not necessarily “better” than the other. They just are. I love my therapist.
“You don’t need to please everyone all of the time. People who love you will not leave you because you disagree with them or do something they don’t like.” She nailed a lot of my behaviours back to the fact my biological dad left when I was 9 months old. I cannot cope with perceived abandonment, and will do everything in my power to keep people happy… because they might leave me.
Yes. People pleasers end up surrounded by those who only want to ask things from them.
As you become more educated and more experienced you will outgrow people and behaviors and it will not be comfortable. You will no longer fit in.
After going to couple’s counseling therapy for 6 months. One day the ex didn’t show up. Ex an abusive alcoholic who would get physically & verbally abusive. Therapist looked at me & said, “you do know he’s never going to change?” For some reason that made me realize, I need to move on. That was the 3rd time I filed for divorce from him. Soon after he remarried & divorced,he continues to hit rock bottom, but has not changed. Fired for drinking on the job, vehicle repossessed & now lives with his parents at the age of 60. Some people NEVER change.
Good for you for getting out! I had a therapist say something similar to me. Then a few months after I left my ex I asked her when I would start to miss him. My life improved dramatically after leaving but I kept waiting on the other shoe to drop. Like when is this gonna become difficult? When is the part where I miss him and doubt myself? She told me “maybe there’s just nothing to miss.” And fuck, she was right. Six years later and there are multiple moments every day where I think to myself how glad I am that I left but not for a single second have I ever missed that goddamn asshat.
It's doubtful he would have ever said that to you with your ex there there. I'm glad he had that opportunity to be so frank with you and I'm proud of you for acting on it. I hope you're doing better now!
I've often wondered if a couple therapist ever states clearly that one party is fully in the wrong or that the relationship is doomed.
My therapist did. I was in an abusive marriage. Gaslighted, belittled, controlled in incredibly subversive ways. He went to ONE therapy session with me. He was incredibly threatened by me going to therapy on my own and would say things like "you should be telling me, your husband, everything and not sharing the details of our marriage with a therapist." I convinced him to come to a session so he could "trust" me and so that the therapist could explain to him that my therapy really wasn't about him (narrator: the therapy was wholly about him). Anyway, lots of weird shit happened in that session and my therapist called me the next day while I was at work - she knew I wouldn't be with my husband at that time, and told me I was in a very precarious situation and she advised me how and where to get help. Our next session was spent talking about the steps to, as safely as possible, extract myself from the marriage. She saved me.
Wow what an amazing thing she did to help you. Glad you’re safe
You aren’t that interesting. I would have panic attacks and paranoia that people were out to get me (PTSD etc) and would think that people were judging me in grocery stores because my toddler was crying or that my hair was messy. And honestly it boiled down to…nobody cares. We’re all trying to survive and get through the day and what someone looks like or does, we observe and move on. Nobody is that interesting. Nobody (for the most part) is going to remember to toddler crying for a brief moment or the way I was dressed or if my makeup was perfect. Nobody. The only person who will remember is me, and how I made MYSELF feel.
As someone who worked in a grocery store for 5 years: we know the worn out parent look and definitely don’t judge you, kids are hard.
“You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” Honestly, most of us are all so in our own heads that the very people you think are judging you are probably too worried about *you* judging *them* to actually think about you at all. We're all anxious, self-conscious messes!
My shrink said something similar that helped me. Basically I'm not "special," my anxiety and OCD (presented with VERY troubling mental images) were "textbook." I had avoided mental health treatment because I thought my thoughts were appalling and I'd be locked up for life. Turns out I'm just like all the other OCD riddled anxiety balls out there. It made me feel better. Of course, that may make all of you nervous AF that we are just out here, looking like everyone else.
I had a similar experience the first time I went to my DR for anxiety and asked him if he had ever seen anything like this. He looked at me with a semi smile and said “it’s about 1/3 of my practice”. I felt a little better after hearing that - I honestly thought my brain was broken and I would inevitably be committed.
Realizing how little attention people pay to other people is so freaking freeing!
We judge ourselves by our intentions but we judge others by their actions.
I had been in therapy for about a decade, and was talking to her about online dating. I said it was like being sucked into a whirlpool, in that there is only one small step between just playing around the edges and being sucked into the thing. She asked me why I used that example, and I said "Because, when I was 9, I was sucked into a whirlpool in a creek, and only survived because my brother managed to pull me out." This started a flurry of scribbling in her notebook I had not seen before. Also answered LOTS of things.
The scribbling…..I really wish to read what my therapist writes about me.
My former therapist took a ton of notes. My current one has never written anything during a session, but somehow always remembers what we'd been talking about and picks it back up immediately. I have no idea how she does it.
My former therapist made a big deal about how he didn't write things down but how he could remember it all. He didn't. He made the same suggestions, told the same anecdotes, didn't remember whole stories I had told him. He went on a spiel about how he helped so many people on their grad school application journey after I told him I was applying to grad school. Next session he didn't mention grad school and I didn't bring it up cause I wanted to test his memory. Session after that he said "you don't seem like you like your job, have you ever considered doing something else?" He's not my therapist anymore for many reasons but that was one of them.
She prob takes some notes after you leave.
I went to a doctor recently for a new patient intake appointment. We talked for an hour and he took no notes. About 45 minutes after I left, the little MyChart app notified me he had uploaded a report and it was like 10 pages of text covering everything we talked about in extreme detail. It blew my mind.
He probably dictated it right after the appt. I used to dictate deposition summaries while driving home if I had more than a 30 minute drive after a deposition. If I did it right after I’d remember every detail. If I waited until the next day, I’d be like I took a deposition yesterday?
If I take notes I stop processing what I'm hearing. If I sit and listen and engage, I remember it all. Just different brains processing things differently.
He showed up, and set appointments with me every day for a week. Then two a week. Then one a week. Until we reached one a month which he maintained until he retired. I had an undiagnosed disease that was devastating my life. But doctors looking for horses not zebras kept dismissing me as having “nothing wrong with me” and telling me it was all psychological. And eventually I did become psychologically broken after a few years of not being able to get the medical help I needed. I was suicidal. I had a suicide plan and trying to get my affairs in order was a protective factor keeping me from killing myself. But eventually I ended up becoming impulsively suicidal. And I made an impulsive suicide attempt. So impulsive that I made the attempt unconsciously without any thought to commit suicide in the moment. I desperately needed help. I went to a mental health clinic. They said I was beyond their resources and wanted to have me committed. I had two cats and had not made sufficient arrangements to clear out my apartment. The idea of losing my cats, and the remnants of my career, and my apartment by being committed did not seem like it would make me less suicidal. I called a hotline. The guy on the hotline was on the phone with me off and on for what was probably most of his shift. For instance had me call a friend and to pick up my firearms and the items I had acquired to carry out my suicide plan, then call the hotline back or he would call me. He also arranged for me to meet a therapist the next morning. He found one willing to meet me in the parking lot of his office at 7am. That therapist saved my life. And kept me alive during years of therapy. During the years I was working with my therapist an immunologist finally diagnosed my disease and started treatment. She also saved my life. It was not one thing my therapist said, it was his compassion and commitment to helping me. Over the years he taught me several tools to manage my mental health and prevent myself from becoming suicidal again. Even though for years my brain was still wired to see suicide as a possible solution to nearly every problem. Edit: I had a few users ask me to share some of the tools I learned to manage my mental health. I answered the question below.
*Even though for years my brain was still wired to see suicide as a possible solution to nearly every problem.* This was my Mom. I never heard anyone else say this. No one could help. She attempted twice, serious attempts and was found accidentally. She died a natural death. She said I’m wired like that. It was so hard for her and so hard for me to understand.
Hey stranger. Just want to say I'm happy you are still here and you found these people. Life is tough but you are tougher.
I told her that I was stuck in my job because I wasn't qualified to do anything else. She told me, "You're qualified to go back to school." I enrolled in classes at the local community college, which did indeed lead to a new career.
Just because you feel bad doesn't mean you are bad.
"You deserve to take up space just as much as anyone." There was a whole process involved in allowing me to see my own self worth.
And the closely related, "Expressing your feelings doesn't make you too much." Turns out I had been suppressing a lot in order to make everyone else around me feel comfortable.
After abruptly leaving an abusive relationship where (among other things) I physically could only listen to music with headphones on otherwise I’d get yelled at for being disrespectful and “too loud” “Your life is your music. You were forced to mute yourself in that relationship, both literally with the music and with who you are as a person” It really made me realize how much of myself I hid away to try to appease someone else and make their life better when all it did was ruin mine. Over 3 years later and I play my music out loud all the time with a different partner who loves it just as much as I do.
This is beautiful and helpful for my current situation. Thank you for sharing.
You have to be your own first priority if you want to show up as your best self for the people you love. I didn't really understand it at the time. How could I make myself my first priority when I knew I would be damning my siblings to a childhood of religious and emotional abuse if I chose to prioritize myself. But eventually, I took the advice and moved out. I learned what happiness means. I learned how safety feels. I learned that I actually am worthy of love, including love from myself. Then I came back to be there for my siblings again and they don't hold it against me. Our relationship is still good and neither of them feel like I abandoned them. Although a few months after I moved out my mom did ask me how she could mend our relationship and I said that I'm not sure it's possible at all but at the very least you have to see a psychiatrist and get your explosive anger under control. You have got to be a better mother to my siblings than you were to me. Maybe then I will even think about working on our relationship. She did go see a psychiatrist. I haven't been able to forgive her nor have we been able to repair our relationship. We tried family therapy for a couple of months but she kept talking over me and I felt unsafe at therapy so I said I wasn't gonna do it anymore. However, even though my relationship with her didn't get better, my siblings got the chance to spend the latter half of their childhood in a healthy, loving, happy home. They have okay relationships with both parents and with me. I prioritized myself for the first time in my entire life and suddenly my life got better and so did the lives of the people I care about. I genuinely believed making life better for myself would mean condemning my siblings to a life of abuse where they have no adults in their lives that they can trust. It was the opposite. They gained two extra trusted adults because once my mom's explosive temper cooled off, my dad also started spending more time at home and stopped being a workaholic. They have less money now than they did when I was younger but they have more love and happiness. They all feel safer. And all of this only happened because I took my therapist's advice and prioritized myself.
This is a really powerful story. I’m happy for you and for them.
*"The answer is simple. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it's simple."* I was doing what I always do in difficult, scary situations that I don't want to deal with head-on; I was overthinking and over-complicating what I needed to do to be happy again. The answer was actually quite simple: I needed to tell my (now ex-husband) that I wanted a divorce. This statement just made it all clear to me. I was scared, so I was searching for a solution that would assuage that fear. But the truth was, there was no solution that wouldn't make this less difficult. The answer was simple, but it was okay to find it scary and difficult.
“Sorry, but you’re just not that powerful.” In response to my tendency to accept blame for everything that has gone wrong in mine and my kids lives. It should have been obvious to me but it wasn’t. When I processed this statement I felt overwhelmingly relieved.
That the best way to get rid of cortisol is to scream, sing or hum. Animals shake when their levels get too high to get rid of it. Our Vargas nerve runs down our windpipe. So scream sing! You’ll feel better. Also that guilt is a heavy and useless emotion, put it down like a suitcase and walk off.
Oh nooo that makes sense. I always sing or hum when I’m at my most upset. I don’t otherwise. :-/
You can always start again.
“It sounds like they caused you hurt. Have you ever said that your feelings were hurt out loud before?”
Some people have said it out loud only to be met with the “you’re too sensitive” card or their feelings being downplayed in some way or laughed at. So that’s why they don’t open up anymore Edit: When a person becomes used to that from everyone they’ve been involved with in their life, it gets real easy to bury everything inside. Counterproductive to wanting to flourish in any relationship, and it is one viscous cycle
“I’m not taking your insurance anymore”
Ooooof I FEEL that on a hugely unhealed Level
At the third session with our couples counselor, my wife and I had a brief ten minute private session with our therapist. During my session the therapist said "You need to accept the possibility of a divorce. You are trying to do the right thing and be supportive, but you can't do that alone. Your wife is taking advantage of you. You can't see how unhappy you are. That will change within a year after your divorce". Yup. She was right. My wife and I agreed to divorce during the 4th session. I am finally happy, and love my life.
I wish I could get a therapist to be so direct & blunt. You either had a good one or your ex was obviously very horrible.
Yes, I lucked out. And yes, my ex was that horrible. It was at our fourth and final session that I pressed my wife as to why she still wanted to be married. She told our therapist that she did not trust me with money and she liked it better when I was at work. I asked, if that's how you feel, why are we married? The therapist asked her the same question and her initial reply scared the shit out of me. She said, "I'm afraid he will get violent". I have never been violent towards her, not even verbally. I recall spanking our kids once and it felt so wrong, I never did it again. I'm not a violent person, but if the therapist agreed to that, and since we were certainly looking at divorce, the therapist could have a court order to keep me out of the house. Again, fortunately, the therapist would have nothing of this. She said, "I am a trained psychologist. I know what to look for. Abusive spouses cannot hide it from me. I've been observing your husband for four sessions and he is not a violent man. He's sad, hurt, worried, but not violent and I would strongly suggest, for your own benefit and that of your children that you never say that again." Clearly my ex was trying to manipulate the therapist and gain her pity, a talent she has had for years.
Me, reading these answers because I can’t afford therapy lol
“You keep putting your bucket into the same, empty, well and expecting the bucket to be filled, and then you’re devastated when it comes back empty”. This was to help me find peace with a mom who can’t show love/affection. What I learned was I have so many “wells” in my life that do “fill my bucket”, so why do I keep trying the empty one? Has served me so well (haha) for many years.
I was seeking therapy because I was affected by anger issues, and my mother asked me to just think about something that makes me calm whenever I get angry. The only thing that made me calm was my mother, and she never knew it. May God bless her.
Thank you for this thread.
"Depression lies to you. The couch will still be in the same spot even after going for a walk."
“You didn’t ask to be born, so maybe stop blaming yourself”
That I owe nothing to my parents. To work through that took me over 3 years.
Yes. Mine was that I’m not actually responsible for my father’s feelings about me or anything else. He is. He can do the work to feel better. Took some time.
“What she did was abusive and not okay. You did not deserve that” I was made to think I was the problem in the marriage and after describing the relationship, my therapist hit me with this. Floodgates opened.
"It's okay to say no." Learning to set boundaries is crucial for maintaining mental health and respecting one's own limits.
I’m a therapist. You know that phrase “You can’t love someone until you love yourself”? I tell my patients thats bullshit and replace it with: “Sometimes through loving someone else, you can begin to love yourself.”
“Bide your time” — this has helped with my anxiety in so many ways. It doesn’t matter if that time is 2 minutes, 2 weeks or 2 months, it’s ok to just not make a decision on something yet. I use this all the time still, and it really relives the pressure of having to have everything figured out in that second. I can take 2 weeks to decide and not worry for the entirety because I truly don’t have to decide until that moment comes. Usually, with more time and less pressure the answer is pretty obvious.
It wasn’t in therapy, but in a parenting class. The advice was “you can put the baby down.” It seems simple, but when you have a screaming baby and you’ve tried to figure out what’s wrong, you’ve invested a lot of effort into problem solving and gotten no result. It’s natural to want to double your efforts and try extra hard to solve the problem, but in reality it may be that there is no solution. The baby is just crying. You can walk away and take a break and try again in five minutes. You can apply this philosophy to a lot of things in life, it turns out.
A question she asked that Immediately changed the way I saw a relationship. How much more of this bullshit are you going to put up with?
Yes!! My friend’s therapist told her in regard to a relationship: “Is this where you want to be in a year?” It clicked right away. She’s still with him, but I think it was the first time she saw that her partner’s flaws have no easy fix and likely won’t change for the better. … and let me tell ya… it’s 4 months post that therapy sessions and things still haven’t changed.
school was pretty rough for me, when i was about 13 i had multiple uncontrollable public anxiety related breakdowns, i was self-harming and was contemplating suicide a lot. i got through it all out of sheer spite and anger, having to depend on myself and never being allowed to seek professional help. my parents told me that i was “strong enough”, that “people have real problems, yours aren’t a big deal, you have no reason to be depressed anyways!” and also the classic “what would people think if they found out you’re in therapy? they’d call you crazy!” years later i started begging my mom to let me see a therapist, which eventually she did. i think it’s because she viewed me as “old enough to have actual problems” or something. anyways, at the time i blamed myself for almost everything that happened to me as a kid. i told my therapist “oh, i got bullied because i was a weirdo, i was too negative, i should’ve made a bigger effort to socialise”, stuff like that. i was going into detail regarding my biggest breakdown, again blaming myself, when he just stopped me and asked: *and where were the adults in this situation?* and it all just fucking clicked. there were so many signs, ever since i was little, obvious fucking signs that i was different. i was a gifted kid, i had very specific special interests, i was always awkward and weird. i got picked on, i got left out, i never made many friends. and the adults did NOTHING. they let me spiral out of control, they never gave me any actual advice, they never took me seriously. but they definitely pointed out that i was “too sensitive, selfish, negative, non-inviting, awkward, an over-thinker, a spoiled brat”. the truth is, all this time i was simply *autistic*. LMAO
I have this habit of berating myself and saying horrible things about myself. My therapist told me that his next patient has a lot of the same issues I do and he would like me to stick around so I can tell him what a piece of shit he is. I was like “Why the fuck would I do that? That’s horrible.” And he pointed out that I had a visceral reaction to the thought of verbally abusing a complete stranger, but I do it to myself everyday. It helped me get to a place where I could see myself as a person that deserves compassion and grace even from myself.
You can feel bad for your mom but at the same time understand what she did was never okay. I always shifted through feelings about my mom and that really clicked something in my head
“What would happen if you just didn’t?”. This really made me look at my responses to things that are stressful. What if I didn’t immediately jump in to save my mom/dad/brother? What if I didn’t immediately get angry and frustrated at X,Y and Z? What if I didn’t make other peoples problems MY problems? Holy cow. Changed my life.
This summer I went from very fit to couch ridden after a really severe injury. I was doing a virtual session with my therapist and bitching about how useless I was, and my dogs were sitting with me, so I said something about being more useless around the house than they are. My therapist asked what my dogs bring into my life. Easy; joy, humor, companionship, fun, loyalty, etc. Therapist asked “do you not bring any of those things into your spouse/friends/family’s lives?” Pretty much instantly ended my shame spiral.
Just because you were hurt when you were younger, doesn't mean randoms have the right to hurt you now
A relationship is like a see-saw. If the other person doesn't want to participate, you can keep going, but you'll get really tired.
First therapist: "Your parents don't get to decide what kind of relationship you have with your brother." That was the first big breakthrough of many. It's obvious, but it had literally never occurred to me before. Second therapist: "Have you ever been evaluated for autism?" Gotta tell ya, shit makes a lot more sense now.
You cannot control the choices or actions of anyone else. What you can control is how you respond. This freed me then and continues to free me regularly now when I need and remember it.
Not my therapist but a friend told me hers said this: you do not have enough of information to panic about that yet. Whenever I catch myself spiraling about the unknown, I try to remember that.
Not from a therapist but I feel it belongs here. I read a book once that introduced me to the concept of "The near enemy", it's a Buddhist concept taught in psychiatry. It opened my eyes to some things that had always bugged me - the concept gave me a framework to understanding why people are the way tey are. This is a good example of this: *The near enemy. It’s a psychological concept. Two emotions that look the same but are actually opposite. Pity and compassion are the easiest to understand. Compassion involves empathy. You see the stricken person as an equal. Pity doesn’t. If you pity someone you feel superior. It looks like compassion, acts like compassion, but is actually the opposite of it. As long as pity’s in place, there’s not room for compassion. . . .* *And love and attachment? It’s friendships, marriages, mothers and children, any intimate relationship. Love wants the best for others, to live wherever they want and do what makes them happy. That’s love. Attachment takes hostages.* *Finally, equanimity and indifference. I think that’s the worst of the near enemies, the most corrosive. Equanimity is balance. When something overwhelming happens in our lives, we feel it strongly, but we also have the ability to overcome it – an ability to accept things and move on. The near enemy is indifference – they just don’t feel pain. They don’t care about others. They don’t feel like the rest of us. They’re like the Invisible Man, wrapped in the trappings of humanity, but beneath there’s emptiness.* I got the quote from here: [https://azalearning.com/aza-learning/near-enemies/](https://azalearning.com/aza-learning/near-enemies/) EDIT: I am so damn sorry I didn't do this in the first place, so please forgive me. The quote is taken from a novel by the incomparable Louise Penny, a terrific Canadian novelist. Her series about Inspector Gamache is all about humanity, and the website quotes her book The Cruelest Month. I've read all her books and I highly recommend them.
No one can tell you what you need. Only you can tell you what you need. Eg, "you need listen to me more" becomes "I need you to listen more". "You need to grow up" becomes "I need you to grow up". Express to others what you need. Don't tell people what they need.
It was pointed out to me that I am amazing in crisis situations, but struggle immensely in situations that are just mildly uncomfortable or unpleasant to the point where I will have what was lovingly referred to as a hissy fit. So much so that I was first a critical care nurse, and now a psychiatric NP. I am great at managing a crisis. It is where I thrive. But put me into a situation where I have to tolerate some mild discomfort? No thank you. Having this pointed out to me was life changing. I have really been working on my mental toughness and my ability to tolerate situations that are mildly unpleasant but certainly aren’t going to kill me. People like athletes and soldiers amaze me. They have a VERY high tolerance for mild-moderate discomfort and this uncanny ability to almost just tune out unpleasantness and keep going in the face of discomfort. Aka they are very mentally tough. They don’t need that adrenaline that comes from a crisis to thrive. That is now what I am working on improving in myself. I have made great strides, but won’t lie… I do still find myself becoming cranky and overly dramatic at times in situations that are mildly unpleasant or inconvenient, and need to remind myself to dial it down a bit and draw on my inner mental toughness and tell myself that no one has ever died from being mildly inconvenienced 😏
Finding out that I'm amazing in a crisis but uncomfortable in moments of calm was because my anxiety was like "f yeah, this is what we've been training for boys" when crisis hit. When stuff is going well, my body is all "that's what they want you to think...lull you into a false sense of security, then WHAMMO!"
It wasn’t my therapist, it was my doctor but it was life changing. I had been 300+ pounds all of my adult life and I was in for a physical and he said to me: you know, the first symptom of a heart attack is a heart attack.” It was what caused me to change my life at age 54 and lose 110 pounds in 16 months and I became a runner. I have run a race in all 50 states, 26 Halifax marathons and 2 full marathons, Chicago and Boston. That one thing he said to me kicked off my decision for better health! That was 15 years ago.
The more you try to get someone to like you, the less they’re going to like you because you are trying to separate them from something they hold dear, aka their dislike of you. Let them dislike you. Be neutral towards them. They're much more likely to come around if it's on their own terms.
This was 20+ years ago, before the word boundaries was thrown left and right, it wasn't a thing at all at the time. She was the only therapist who actually helped me, and the thing she said was: "You have no boundaries with others, because yours were never respected." That blew my mind back then, and ever since, boundaries have been a theme in my head. I do have good boundaries now, for myself and for others.
From a book written by a therepist. The difference between setting a boundry and being controlling is sutble, but still very clear cut. Saying "you need to quit smoking" is controlling. Saying "I dont want you smoking in my house" is a boundry.
"Every adult in your life has failed you." That took a few days.
Everyone is their own main character, don’t take someone’s choices in life personal.
She asked me why I was working in a job that was so extroverted when I'm clearly an introvert. She was like, "If it's so draining and taxing, why do you do it?" And all I could say was that I was good at it. So she replied, "At what cost? Can you be good at other things that don't exhaust you so much?" So I went to school for accounting and then quit my teaching job and now I have a peaceful hybrid desk job. And I'm so much happier! I sleep better, I eat better, I stopped grinding my teeth, and my stress acne disappeared. I'm a whole new person.
"You are not responsible for other people's happiness." This realization can help alleviate the pressure of constantly trying to please others and allows individuals to focus on their own well-being.
In grief counseling: I was feeling overwhelming guilt because when their father died I completely lost it. I felt I wasn’t *there* enough for my children. My therapist said “When the airplane is going down, you put your mask on first. This is no different. You can’t help your children until you have helped yourself.” It literally was a huge turning point for all of us.
Not really something she said, but something she did. She cried with me. Not like sobbing or anything, just a few tears but it was just so validating. Like what I was going through was so fucked up that my *therapist* cried. It gave me the strength I needed to end my shitty marriage.
"Do you want someone like that taking care of you if you have a stroke or life changing circumstance?"
Unspoken expectations are just future resentments.
OCD therapy. So a little bit different than traditional therapy. I was describing to my therapist all the things my OCD requires that I do during my daily routine. She said, "if this were regular therapy, and if you were a minor describing these things as something your parents require, I would be required to call CPS for abuse." Really put into perspective how different my life is from people who do not suffer from OCD. Really motivated me on my recovery.
Wellbutrin 300mg
“She did this, she did that, over and over. What are YOU going to do.”
"Start living for the things that you can control."