I feel like “hating yourself” is becoming the new… idk, Stress, or Overweight, or whatever everyone assumes your real problem is, no matter how clearly you describe the actual problem you’re having
I act self-deprecating? “Oh you have low self-esteem.” I act confident? “Oh you have low self-esteem and are overcompensating”
I see a therapist about a bad habit i want to unlearn? “You need to learn to be kind to yourself about it and not blame yourself” yes, i was already not blaming myself for it and i was already focused on being kind to myself… that is why I’m going to a therapist instead of, idk, just hiding in a room hitting myself on the head for not being able to willpower myself magically into perfection. I don’t know why you (a therapist) automatically assume that me seeking therapy is a symptom of self-loathing, but that is fucking concerning
I mention a thing about me that is not even a bad habit and is perfectly fine, but I’m worried about how there’s lots of bigoted assholes in the world who might still treat me badly for it? “Don’t worry, that absolutely doesn’t make you a bad person (according to some objective moral code that shall remain unspecified)” THANKS BUT THAT WASN’T MY DAMN CONCERN. now I’m gonna dump my entire soda over your head and tell you that you don’t get to be upset about it because it was my bad decision and not yours. Fuck this.
I have difficulty with therapy for a lot of interconnected reasons.
Partly this.
And partly that
And partly just because… no therapist has ever suggested anything to me that I haven’t already given a lot of thought.
(and therefore either am already doing, or have already concluded it wouldn’t work for me).
And so, the ability for them to be helpful has always been limited to things like “sympathetic ear to listen to me talk,” or “sounding board to help brainstorm decisions on which of the things I’ve already considered might be worth focusing on more”
Both of which could actually help a lot!
But… it is very hard for me to get any accurate sense of how much it’s helping.
In my interactions with people, I’m always hyperaware of – and concerned about – how they view me, and how that’s going to influence their treatment of me
Which means it’s very hard to even let myself consider the possibility that an interaction with someone else might be “unhelpful for me” and “a waste of my time.”
Because then I might have to tell them that. Which is one of the things I have the most social difficulty with.
So I end up in these… mental gymnastics, in the space between “this interaction is challenging but ultimately beneficial” and “this is useless and I need to cut it off.”
Which can be very hard things to tell apart, even at the best of times!
And it only gets harder, when my conflict-aversion automatically skews me towards the former instead of the latter.
Being aware of this does nothing to help. It just puts me at risk of overcorrecting in the other direction. The times I overstep lines and hurt people are always times when I think I’m beginning to overcome my conflict-aversion and stand up for what I actually feel.
….Sometimes I think I never actually learned how to tell where boundaries are…. only learned how to gauge a general area, and stay as far on the safe side of it as possible.
Which is definitely one of the things I have tried therapy to help myself work on!
But… this problem itself makes it pretty much impossible for me to know whether therapy is helping or not.
I mean, that’s not a thing I can do some kind of double-blind study on. I know when I’m in therapy. And I know that therapy isn’t a thing you can automatically feel working while it happens.
And “whether life is improving overall, and whether improvements are caused by the therapy or something else,” is a fuzzy question– very much influenced by my aforementioned internal biases (and overcorrections for those biases).
Now, if therapy had no risk of making life worse, there would still be nothing to lose.
But unfortunately, “monthly appointment with copay in the hundreds of dollars, impossible to schedule during a time that is convenient with my work hours,” is a point towards “making life worse” that would require a lot of improvement just to break even.