on therapy

(expanded from a comment elseweb)

I have a theory that I've been meaning for months now to post about, because on a fairly regular basis I find myself in conversation with someone and saying "wait, i haven't told you this?" and having to explain it. And now seems like as good a time as any. You know, now that I'm pretty sure I've told it to everyone who I might possibly need to.

Anyway, my theory: by its very nature, therapy, or counseling, or what have you, makes life a lot more difficult for you in the short term.

You (the nonspecific 'you') have had these patterns of behavior, defence mechanisms, coping mechanisms, whatever you want to call them, and they've kept you alive but keep you from living. So you go into therapy with the express purpose of replacing them with mechanisms and patterns that will serve you better, that can allow you to live. To do this, you first have to disable the old mechanisms. Then you can take a long close look at how they work and what exactly they're defending against.

This has the unfortunate side effect of opening you up to all the emotions those mechanisms had been defending you against. And you can't just pull up the old way of dealing with it, because you've just gone to an awful lot of trouble to turn that off. So you're extremely fragile, and trying to hold yourself together when every single thing you encounter seems designed to make you fall apart.

The good news is that it does get better. You learn how to take care of yourself, in ways that aren't harmful to your long-term mental health. But for awhile, everything really is worse.

(okay, so the part about how it gets better isn't one I've really gotten to myself except in small doses and brief flashes. I have to believe it does, though. The alternatives are to either keep feeling this crappy and broken, or keep feeling as crappy and broken as I did before I started.)

hey look! links!

Mistakes I've Made: Drinking Four Loko: "Four Loko Blue Raspberry is abhorrent and I can only imagine that these cans are filled by a long assembly line of Smurfs vomiting."

An Experiment in Accurate But Misleading Movie Descriptions: "Back to the Future: A bewildered teenage boy fends off his mother's disturbing and unnatural attraction to him."

Inventor's 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world's poorest see better: "Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device's tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles."

Geek Luddites: "The concept of computer has radically changed in that vision [of 'ubiquitous computing'] in a way which is much more than giving the navigation system the pleasant voice of Majel Barrett. We know this because if it hadn’t, a quarter of the fucking Enterprise crew would be the IT department."

Henge Docks: "Henge Docks has created the first truly comprehensive docking station solution for Apple's line of notebook computers." Mine's on preorder and will, I hope, be here by the end of the month. Not that I'll really be able to use it that soon, since as far as I know my desk chair hasn't miraculously gotten any less painful to use, but hey. Maybe I can figure out how to use it, with appropriate incentive.

I have never had a bad experience having lunch (or dinner, for that matter) at La Sandia, no matter the company. I should remember this more often. Meanwhile, thoughts on "friends" continue to bounce around my head and not settle out in any coherent fashion, as they're wont to do. The short version being that I'm not used to having "friends" anymore, if I ever was. Acquaintances and very-close-friends / sigoths / partners I can do, it's that middle ground where I'm uncertain. This has been a good year for fumbling through that uncertainty.