Life

[Scrobbs]

I have managed to find a flat in London with near enough zero effort: Sent a text to everyone I knew (in London) a few weeks back, as luck would have it, someone knew someone, I saw the flat last night, and it's ace. Islington ('proper' Islington), gated car parking, 800 per month including bills. Sharing with two others, but hey, I'm only there in the week usually, so should be ok.

Job is a good one.

[Roderick]

Here's a fleeting thought: how would it be to immigrate to Singapore?

[Sleepdance]

I'm just watching Americans geting fucking raped.

[MrHoatzin]

Woo, Serbia-Germany, 1-0. Group D is getting messy.

[gdf]

Two all. Hope one of them grabs a winner now to make life difficult for England.

[DanJW]

Europe are getting panned. South America are pwning.

England match tonight. I will be watching a stage production of A Clockwork Orange instead. All the Droogs are female.

[Armchair General]

I'd rather watch that too Dan

[brkl]

That's great, gdf! You were wasting time hoping for self-catered accommodation, you could have just presumed self-catering

[Sombre]

I'm kind of watching, but also kind of playing words with friends.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I have managed to find a flat in London with near enough zero effort: Sent a text to everyone I knew (in London) a few weeks back, as luck would have it, someone knew someone, I saw the flat last night, and it's ace. Islington ('proper' Islington), gated car parking, 800 per month including bills. Sharing with two others, but hey, I'm only there in the week usually, so should be ok.

Job is a good one.

Congrats!

[Garple]

I have two moods that I must fight at all times: angry or tired.

Yeah, my default is self-loathing and depression. But I've been trying to actively replace those emotions with other ones. I think most people are constantly fighting their own minds in today's world. Maybe it's always been that way.

[Nachimir]

Sorry for the long post, but I have a very hefty 2 cents on solving unconscious conflict and negative emotional states:

Persistence is *the* thing that will help you fight them, and that's not a matter of grinding them down with opposing feelings, but of letting negative emotions repeatedly take their course, and as they do observing and gradually removing the mental structures that support them.

The unconscious can be very self-defeating, and at worst self-destructive. When we build automatic behavioural defenses against the things we fear, they're designed to not be easy to root out. Or look at it this way: if defense mechanisms were easy to find and destroy, they'd be pretty shitty defenses. If the conscious mind could go into the unconscious at will and monkey around with stuff, then a lot of very efficient things we can do on autopilot would suddenly become prone to being much less efficient and more erratic. The conscious mind is constantly focusing on one thing (or at least that's what it does best), processing and altering information, jumping from thing to thing in a generally linear way. The unconscious contains all of our experience, and the best way (IMO) we've come to see it is as a gestalt; a non-linear mess of everything. Any data written into the unconscious is meant to be persistent, as well built habits give us survivability and efficiency. Unfortunately, it also means we can develop persistent problems that seem impossible to get to the root of.

We do a lot on autopilot, freeing up our conscious to do more important things (i.e. not having to think in detail about how to step off a kerb every time frees the mind to look for traffic). Often though, basic emotional responses to uncomfortable events will create defenses without us even realising. They aren't particularly thought out, just designed to impel us towards or away from things, and that can have long term consequences including baffling spates of negative moods.

Your emotional states likely have specific triggers, but getting to see them even after they've happened and you're in a funk or angry is difficult. Getting to the point where you see them coming in advance is very hard indeed. The defense mechanism is not something you unconsciously want to see, and the emotions caused by it are a confusing whirlwind that tends to relate to many present and past things in your life as well as fears for the future.

It often stays that confusing if the only thing you do is think (or not think) about it. Largely, forms of therapy are formalised, more refined ways of doing things people already tend to do when they're troubled: Talking to others or expressing it in some way.

There are a number of reasons people don't pursue therapy: As well as the potential expense and opportunity cost, applying a medical model to mental illness has created a great deal of stigma, including what people assume to be the severity of it. I think an idea in which we get the equivalent of mental colds would be more useful (i.e. if someone really hacks me off for a few days to the extent my thoughts dwell on it and my emotions are generally negative, I see that as the equivalent of a minor illness).

Self therapy can work wonders. I highly recommend keeping some kind of diary, but then writing is what works for me. Any form of externally directed thought will do it (what ever it is for you: painting, drawing, talking, poetry, etc.), as it will help you to unravel that clamour of thoughts and gradually dismantle it.

Solving any persistent problem that has put me into random negative moods has followed the same progression:

1. I get seriously fucked off by things and start to wonder why.

2. I gradually work out the trigger event(s), by recognising the moods.

3. That recognition time gradually contracts through more exposure, but recognition still occurs *after* the trigger event.

4. As the recognition time contracts and I get more experience with the problem, it eventually flips, so rather than seeing after the event what my unconscious would hide from me if left to itself, I see the trigger event coming before it happens.

5. This time period gradually expands. In the case of a really serious problem, it may be that it expands by mere seconds over the course of months of work, but eventually it accelerates into minutes or at least ample time for me to see an emotionally negative situation arising.

6. I work on ways of handling the trigger event that generate a better emotional result. By the time the process is finished, the original defense mechanism is almost completely destroyed (Severe cases of the event may still provoke remants of it, and also your general mood can affect how much of a grip those remnants have on you at different times. Keep overwriting the old with the better new responses and any relapses will become less intense. Bear in mind it's perfectly possible for your old habits to be rewritten over time if you slip into old forms of behaviour/become a recluse, etc.).

Exposure is the difficult thing. If it's a rare event, you need to seek more of it out to gain experience, but your defenses are likely to impel you away from that. Example: The weird religion I was raised with completely fucked with my sexuality. In general, it's a religion that's shown a tendency to create either fetishes or alcoholics by being extremely sex-negative and pro-marriage. In my own case, I didn't go to either of those typical pathologies (not that I see fetishes as harmful or something to be "cured", but several people I know with them are ambivalent: they *really* enjoy sex of kind n, but say they know the reason they enjoy what they do is that something fucked them up a bit at some point), but instead developed a really major shyness of women. It was so extreme that I ended up getting myself a job in a nightclub to accelerate exposure (pun intended ), and that worked pretty well. It still took several years to actually carve through the problem and all associated feelings to the point where I felt it was no longer fucking with me.

Winning a fight with your unconscious is just like winning a street fight. There are a few tiny bits of advice you will get from anyone who actually teaches to fight rather than teaching people to compete in a sport: Go all out, and never give up.

No amount of generic advice on stance, footwork or technique is particularly useful when someone is kicking you in the nuts or pulling your hair. That really cool move you learned is useless too. In real fights, the primary reason people get beaten up is that they take one good hit or even a good hard slap, start going into a foetal position automatically, then get knocked off their feet and get the shit kicked out of them while they're on the floor. This can include people with very fancy training.

People are the same when they get bitchslapped by their own emotions. One short sharp shock and BAM, they're in front of the TV with a duvet and some comfort food while the problem sets to work fucking their unconscious with knives. Your unconscious mind is not a civilised place. It does not respond to being fought with rules or gentlemanly conduct, it will just work around them. Do not go foetal when something sucker punches you in the heart, treat it as a (painful) opportunity to root out every last bit of data you can on the problem. Your first instinct will be to dull your mind with something that takes it off the problem, whether that is a drug or form of entertainment. Do the opposite. Go and find your problems, don't leave them alone. Become relentless and emotionally tough with yourself.

The biggest problem in starting any form of self-therapy is fear. I got lucky: I hated myself and was pushed to a point where I had to leave behind every single human being I knew, bar four. As a result, there wasn't much of a comfortable life or identity to lose once I'd made that jump. Several troubled friends have asked me about starting some kind of self-therapy, and all have refrained from it because they "Obviously need to do it, but are too afraid of what they might find". The unconscious is a scary place, and puts up major defenses at the merest suggestion of changing or losing your identity.

I strongly recommend sucking it up, you will shit yourself in fear at times but it's a part of the process, and you stand to gain a lot of happiness out of it. If you leave your unconsciously held problems alone, they will only get bigger and lead to more fucked up moods and pathologies (If they don't you are phenomenally lucky). Destroy them instead. Put it this way: Would you like to be doomed to a repeating cycle, or pulling yourself gradually into a diminishing one? Do you really value the bits of your identity that put you into these emotional states, or would you rather detach them and toss them into an incinerator?

Our bodies and minds are amazing, but at the same time they partially suck because they're the best, quickest, jury rigged solutions that genetics could come up with for the problems we've faced for millions of years. Hence, we have bad backs, sweet teeth, become alcoholics, get seemingly randomly fucked off all the time, love hurts, etc. As tool users we've done what we can about that stuff, but we've done an especially bad job on figuring out how to be happy.

I've practised self therapy for years and my default emotional state has gone from depressed to content (I still consider myself as having work to do though). It wasn't done with or according to any specific external agenda; there are a lot of people that will hard sell you stuff to solve problems, with a lot of other promises attached to it too, but I think they tend to boil down to something like the process above. I'm generally interested but agnostic and non-committal when it comes to named forms of therapy.

In summary: Just fucking do it or years will pass

[Scrobbs]

Nice post, D.

I think I manage to do some form of this, without actually recognising and formalising the process as you have; there was a definite point many years ago when I became automatically a lot happier for no real reason - but it happened after a few years of mental wrangling and self analysis (late teens, early 20s). Perhaps it's a lot more automatic now - but becoming complacent is bad: occasionally I find myself being unhappy and unsatisfied. Self examination is fairly rapid now - I can spot myself being a dick, and spot a self-pity episode before it hits and act accordingly.

However, right now the most resonant thing from your post with me personally is "Go all out, and never give up" and "Do not go foetal when something sucker punches you in the heart, treat it as a (painful) opportunity to root out every last bit of data you can on the problem. Your first instinct will be to dull your mind with something that takes it off the problem, whether that is a drug or form of entertainment. Do the opposite. Go and find your problems, don't leave them alone. Become relentless and emotionally tough with yourself" - except not to do with emotions, and more to do with self improvement.

To expand a little if I may: Where I am professionally I feel like I could be so much more - for instance, I have a job in IT security, just one of millions of folks. I read blogs of leaders in the field - Kaminsky, muts, rel1k, who all contribute to the world of security by developing tools, software, hacks, 0-days and what have you. I feel like I could be one of those people. But I have never applied myself.

So, to summarise - "Become relentless and emotionally tough with yourself" is a piece of advice we all need to take.

So yeah. Top post.

Edited June 19, 2010 by Scrobbs

[Nachimir]

Thanks very much

It sounds like we've gone through something similar in terms of efficiency: the more I've uprooted and destroyed, the more efficient I've become. Writing about internal stuff used to be a daily thing about a decade ago, now it's once every few months at most and tends to direct me straight back out to things to do, people to talk to, and external stuff to get out of my life. Edit: Often it's just a thought process now and I can spot problems a lot more quickly than I used to be able to.

I think there's definitely a point where the process switches from uprooting and destroying shit things to creating much better ones to replace them, and that's quite a tough problem in itself.

Edited June 19, 2010 by Nachimir

[ThunderPeel2001]

Wow. That's one incredible post, Nach. It's very inspiring to hear about your battles! I guess we all have our issues to deal with. I love the idea of being able to re-program ourselves. There's always a problem with giving advice over the internet, though, and that's that it can be misinterpreted. There are times when you shouldn't be actively pursuing negative thoughts, for example when you're in a state of bereavement. Trying to tackle your pain head on can lead to things far worse things. I guess I just wanted to make the point that your advice isn't for everybody in every situation.

Also 'self-therapy' is never going to as effective as formal therapy with the right person, especially for those who haven't even gone through a course of it. For me, formal therapy was fricking amazing. It totally changed my life and helped me deal with a lot of issues I'd been carrying around with me. It's absurd that there should be any stigma with people attempting to sort themselves out. Life is difficult for everyone, and you can make it better for yourself very easily. (Although it can be costly depending on your age and country, unfortunately.)

Thanks for your advice, though, Nach. Life has been increasingly difficult of late due to loneliness after breaking up with my girlfriend, and your post is very inspiring. Makes me want to take the bull by the horns and proactively sort it all out!

[Scrobbs]

Thing is though TP, is that you only do it as much as you can cope with. The next time you will be stronger in yourself, and able to critically go further; the brain is capable of becoming stronger like a muscle: the more weight you lift, the more you will able to.

[Armchair General]

Nice post Nach, well put.

A small point if I may. I don't think that the application of the medical model to mental illness created stigma, the stigma of mental illness was already there and itself is a function of our unconcious mind, at least in part. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to distrust a member of the group who looks the same as they always did, but now cannot be trusted to function as well or be relied upon perform certain tasks etc. I haven't described that very well but I hope you see what I am trying to say there

I am a vehement crusader for increasing awareness of mental illness and encourage patients and their relatives, colleagues, family, friends etc to think of mental illness in the same way as any illness i.e. a broken leg- 'they will get better but they need time to heal/adjust etc. To me, being mentally ill can be much, much worse than being physically ill.

Although it didn't work for Thunderpeel, I think that self therapy can be as successful if not more successful than formal therapy but it's not for everyone. I have experienced formal therapy and it was near useless, the only person that could help me was me.

I am intrigued about the seemingly madcap religion you experienced Nachimir, if only to reinforce my already well established aethiestic stance

[Scrobbs]

As an aside, the UK is pretty much at the forefront of how we treat mental illness in the world. I'm generally down on the country, but in this field, I think we pretty much rinse the world.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Although it didn't work for Thunderpeel, I think that self therapy can be as successful if not more successful than formal therapy but it's not for everyone. I have experienced formal therapy and it was near useless, the only person that could help me was me.

Well, to be fair I've not tried "self therapy" in precisely the way rigorous way Nach has described, but I don't think it was for me, either way (until I had done formal therapy first, at least). Like everyone I've attempted to deal with life's problems on my own, and with the help of those around me. I've kept diaries, done regular exercise, given myself time to relax, etc., all the things that help, but even with all that, sometimes a specific type of external guidance is needed.

I do completely agree, however: The only person that can help you is you.

I'd also like to expand on what you said. Formal therapy might not work for certain people for many different reasons. Sometimes, with the reason being nothing more than it being the wrong type of help for that particular person. But I've heard complaints from people about formal therapy, and after having it work wonderfully for me, I began to see many of the reasons why it might not work for some. Sometimes, for example, it can be down to having the wrong therapist, or being in the wrong situation. More often it can be down to having the wrong mindset (not being prepared to actually discuss issues completely openly and honestly), or even the wrong attitude (expecting the other person to do any of the work, or give you any answers -- that's not their job!).

From my experience (from hearing friends and relatives talk about their issues), it's usually a combination of the above, but mainly hindered by one factor: Attitude, meaning that you have to really want to help yourself.

If there's anyone here considering formal therapy, then please don't be put off by Armchair's experience, but also be honest with yourself. There's no point in trying to push yourself into therapy if you genuinely don't want to get to the bottom of your problems. To actively fight and work through them in the way that Nachimir described. To want to stop the cycles you're repeating, and really change. And yes, there will be pain and frustration along the way.

Also, don't be put off from not having immediate results. One of the most common things people do with therapy is project their problems with life onto the therapy sessions themselves. This can make it feel like a waste of time, or worse, like an example of the very type of problem you're actually trying to avoid in the first place (this is something I made myself feel, until it was pointed out to me that I might be doing it -- and then I had to admit to myself that I was). The human mind is great at conning itself into doing things that aren't actually in its best interest (as Nach so vividly described), so I'd suggest at least giving it a month before moving on and trying something/someone else. Also judge your progress by how you feel walking out of the session, NOT by how you feel before going in. Just like going to the gym, you'll often give yourself very convincing reasons not to go: "I feel fine this week." "I just REALLY don't feel like going." "It's not doing me any good, I don't know why I bother." etc etc etc. So remember how you feel coming out of the session, and use this as a point of reference.

It's precisely because of all these potential pitfalls that I really do think there are benefits to formal therapy over attempts at self-therapy (for most people, anyway). From my own experience: People are utterly useless at being able to objectively see themselves and tend to go around in circles without realising it. Think about it: How many people do you know who exhibit this behaviour? People who have the same problems again and again? They'll often convince themselves that they're "never doing that again", or they're "better now", but then you see them and they're falling into exactly the same patterns of behaviour. It's very easy to spot things like that in someone else, but very hard to do it with yourself. For me, having something external to myself was absolutely essential to being able to truly gauge my progress. For Nachimir, a diary was enough to fulfil this role, but I think having another person can be even better, if you're able to completely honest with them, at least.

The other benefits of formal therapy over self-therapy, I would imagine, are exactly the same types of benefits you'd get from having a personal trainer compared to going to the gym of your own accord: 1. Consistency - you won't slack off when you don't "feel like" dealing with your issues, 2. External support - something completely lacking with "self-therapy", 3. Objectivity - Having someone to keep you on track and recognize when you're falling into familiar bad habits, and 4. Professional experience and knowledge.

If "self therapy" works for you, then great, that's wonderful, but for the I think for the majority of the world, it probably doesn't (unless they're able to be very strict with themselves). People find it very difficult to solve these problems without external assistance.

Saying that, for those interested in attempting some form of therapy, I'd suggest giving Australia National University's "Mood Gym" a go. It's nothing more than a website, but it uses the same techniques that you'd be exposed to in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I suppose this is really a form of "self therapy", like Nachimir described, but it's a bit more formalised and is based on accepted medical research. It's actually very similar to Nachimir's own realisations, recommendations and experiences, and if you find it working for you, I'd personally recommend taking it further and finding a CB therapist in real life.

Even though it's just a website, I've personally found it very helpful at difficult/stressful times in my life, and it only takes a few minutes a week.

Give it a go: http://bit.ly/Moodgym

[ThunderPeel2001]

Thing is though TP, is that you only do it as much as you can cope with. The next time you will be stronger in yourself, and able to critically go further; the brain is capable of becoming stronger like a muscle: the more weight you lift, the more you will able to.

I have absolutely no idea what you're referring to.

[Scrobbs]

Trying to tackle your pain head on can lead to things far worse things.

Just that. You say it may lead to far worse things internally, but each time you tackle it head on, you will be able to deal with more bad things. The pain threshold increases.

[Garple]

Holy shit them's some hefty posts. I'm going to read the hell out of them...just not right now.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Just that. You say it may lead to far worse things internally, but each time you tackle it head on, you will be able to deal with more bad things. The pain threshold increases.

This type of miscommunication is precisely why giving advice over the internet is a bad thing.

Tackling things "head on" can be very helpful in certain situations, but very harmful in others, and especially depending on how such advice is interpreted.

Here's an example of how tackling something "head on" could be misinterpreted by someone suffering from depression:

Instead of taking it to mean "get professional help", they take it to mean they should rationally attack their irrational thoughts. So they focus on their own negatively distorted view of reality. This is NOT a good thing. It will not make them better quicker, nor improve your resilience to the depression (quite the contrary). Things will be made worse by obsessing on all the reasons why life is pointless, worthless and horrible. Even by attempting to fight these irrationally negative thoughts you're obsessing and interacting with them. An irrational (i.e. ill) brain cannot be reasoned with like that, so all you're doing is focussing more on this distorted perspective and making it more real.

Best medical advice, if you're suffering with depression, is NOT to focus on those thoughts, but rather to distract yourself from them. Go out, take up a hobby, socialise more, but don't sit around trying to "fix" your problems. If things get worse, then you need medical help. Period.

This might seem obvious, but I've witnessed people actually give similar advice for people suffering from depression, literally saying "explore your depression further, go deeper into it". This is WRONG.

It might be worth pointing out, before anyone decides they know better, that 80% of all suicides are caused by untreated depression. And that suicide is the second biggest killer for males aged 10 to 25 (so like, just about everyone reading this). And that studies continue to show that a combination of psychotherapy and antidepressant medication is the most effective way of treating most people who suffer from depression.

Nobody should be told they should be tackling their negative thoughts "head on", because it simply will not work.

Similarly, in my own situation, someone could interpret tackling something "head on" to mean coming up with reasons not to feel lonely... when the best thing I could be doing is actually going out and meeting new people.

Another example: If you're suffering from bereavement (either after having been dumped, or having lost a loved one, etc.) then focussing on that pain will actually slow down the process of healing. What happens during a normal, healthy process of bereavement, is that the subconscious will feed our conscious just as much of the pain as we're able to deal with, bit by bit, rather than hitting us with the whole thing in one go, in way we couldn't handle. Over time we will naturally come to terms with the reality of the situation, at a pace which works for us. Forcing that process is NOT a good thing. (But likewise, it's probably not good to totally avoid the little bits of pain our subconscious is feeding us, either.)

I don't mean to beat a dead horse, or to be having a massive go at you, Ian, but someone reading wooly advice like "tackling things head on will allow you to deal with more bad things" could totally misinterpret it and that could be very dangerous, depending on their state of mind. (I'm actually kind of shocked that Armchair General so casually talks up "self-therapy" considering, again, how dangerous such advice could be to someone in a vulnerable state.)

I hope that clarifies what I meant when I said, "Trying to tackle your pain head on can lead to far worse things".

Edited June 19, 2010 by ThunderPeel2001

[Armchair General]

Good post Thunderpeel. FWIW I think I would have got on better if I had followed some of the 'groundrules' you talked about.

Also, and I don't think you were saying this to pooh pooh me or anything, I was trying to say 'if professional help doesn't work for you, don't worry, you are not abnormal, it just isn't the right thing for everybody' rather than trying to put people off getting formal help if you catch my drift. So yeah, don't be put off by my experience, but don't feel bad if it formal help doesn't gel for you either.

On a side note, are we all/have been/currently are, fucking mental on these here forums?!

EDIT: I don't get exactly why you have such a bee in your bonnet about the self help way of thinking? I wasn't 'casually' bigging up self help like it was the only form of treatment, just commenting that formal help doesn't work for everyone, you did say after all, that self help will never be as good as formal help and that just isn't true for everyone.

I would also like to see your source for the 80% of suicides are caused by untreated depression statement. That sounds like nonsense to me so I would be keen to look a little deeper into that.

I respect that you have had a rough time of it at some point and that certain advice or treatment doesn't/didn't work for you but you are coming across a bit angry and confrontational. I'm pleased that the treatment you had worked for you, it just doesn't work for everyone.

Edited June 19, 2010 by Armchair General

[Nachimir]

I don't mean to be down on professional therapy; it's helped people I've known. Likewise for anti-depressants; so while I've avoided them myself I wouldn't advise anyone against taking them. Conversely, both have failed for people I've known too. Problem, symptoms, attitude, treatment and the kind of professional help available are a very complex set of interactions and I wouldn't claim for one second to have all of the answers.

There are a lot of various therapies I've read about (Including CBT), but one book I'd really recommend is "Self-Analysis" by Karen Horney. She was a relatively early psychoanalyst who advocated patients taking charge of their own problems alongside therapy. It's directly stated self help from the 1930s without the patronising fluff you'd get in recent toss. It's also relatively independent of any psychoanalytic dogma from the time.

As a rule, if someone is really unstable then of course they need outside help. Mostly though, even troubled people tend to keep themselves out of danger: if possible, we tend to avoid trauma we can't cope with, and I think that's what Scrobbs is getting at. I didn't mean to come over all "BE A MAN" about problems. They take time.

TP, you pick a good example with grieving. It's an innate process, one I've read a lot on and am very curious about. I seem to recall you've also read some of John Bowlby's work on it? People seem to have their own speeds when it comes to it, and mine is fast. If you hadn't picked it up yet, I'm pretty brutal when it comes to my own feelings. The last time I fell in love with someone who wasn't interested, but was a friend, I asked her to look me in the eye and tell me she wasn't and never would be interested in me that way. Hurt like hell, but meant I didn't waste a second on hope and got on with acceptance.

I wouldn't say grief should always be left alone, but the grief itself is not something you can attack. The hope that keeps it hanging around is well worth having a dig at though if it will help you to reach acceptance. As I said initially, it's about removing structures that support (and perpetuate) negative states. Attacking a feeling itself is like striking a flame with a dry stick...

I don't want to come over as confrontational in any way so I'd just like to say that:

I guess I just wanted to make the point that your advice isn't for everybody in every situation.

that's very true.

Armchair, well pointed out on stigma and medical models. I think the DSM IV falls pretty far short of a comprehensive view of mental illness, and the inverse of its definitions isn't a picture of mental health. It's better than it was, but I think we have a long way to go. I didn't mean to lay responsibility solely at the door of medicine; stigma is a much wider cultural problem of course.

Edited June 19, 2010 by Nachimir