Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
20d ago
We have just the one female counsellor who serves all three roles (her individual sessions, my individual sessions, and the couples sessions). Which I’m sure must be a conflict of interest
Absolutely. Assuming you're American, this is enough of a conflict of interest that your therapist could potentially lose her license were you or your girlfriend to file a complaint. It's also all-too-common behavior, unfortunately.
Here in the States, having a MSW is actually a prerequisite for the additional coursework that goes with each particular specialty in question, as is practicing in residence under another licensed mental health professional (LMHP) within the same discipline, such as a licensed professional counselor (LPC) or a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT). If your concern is that they're not equivalent to a trained psychologist, then you can rest easy--LMHPs in general meet that bar and then some. That said, just because and individual has managed a graduate degree and a license, that doesn't necessarily make them a good counselor or therapist. Like all LMHPs, a good counselor or therapist is worth their weight in gold, as there are plenty of, well, not-so-good ones out there. Just like finding a good PCP that will actually listen to your concerns and tailor their advice/treatment to you accordingly, finding a good counselor that will do the same is possible (they exist!), but you might not necessarily find one your first time out of the gate, so I'd advise patience and willingness to go elsewhere to find a good fit. One other thing to address is that since you're doing individual counseling, as a rule good individual therapy will focus your needs, and any relationship counseling will come from the perspective of what is best for you, regardless of whether or not that's at odds with what is best for the relationship. Relationship counseling, OTOH, focuses on treating the relationship and not the individuals. FWIW, judging by your other reply, it sounds like individual therapy is the way to go.
And because we're on the subject, I've also had experience with doing relationship counseling in my marriage, and my situation was similar to /u/RenOS below. Despite being an LPC herself, my wife genuinely acted as if the purpose of marriage counseling was, for lack of a better descriptor, to make me "do right". Our marriage counselor (who was an LPC as well) quickly twigged to my wife's particular issues, which to be fair to my wife are rooted in massive childhood trauma, and although she didn't focus specifically on that, all it took was several sessions' worth of trying to work with that before my wife abruptly ragequit. It took another year and another separation, during which time we each had to come to grips with our own shit, before we were actually able to start doing things differently.
edit: tidied up some grammar
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I've been wanting to read this one for a long time but there's a shaggy dog story that boils down to buying this one in paperback ages ago but said paperback turned out to be a misprinted copy, so when it went on sale in the Kindle bookstore, I was all too happy to pick it up.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
28d ago
Just finishing up The Wizard's Cat (The Wizard's Butler Book 2) by Nathan Lowell.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
29d ago
This comic will always be with us.
Thanks for the laugh, first time I've seen that one!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
29d ago
They are, thanks. It's not all sunshine and lollipops but generally speaking, we've been doing a lot better on the whole.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Strong agree, I have about ten months of sick leave at this point. Nice if I ever get a lingering illness whilst still employed but otherwise? EH!
The Darksiders II OST by Jesper Kyd (not surprised that he's already been mentioned) is the first thing that comes to my mind and it is utterly sublime. I still listen to multiple tracks from it!
Chains: Unbound Book 11 By Nicoli Gonnella.
edit: fixed the book title
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
My personal favorite from that book is the baroque, multi-page detailed account of one of Randy's eating rituals in the Philippines. Pure gold!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I haven't got any solid impression of the consequences of not doing so though, and therefore haven't
I mean, it's not uncommon for one of my wisdom teeth to catch on the side of my cheek while I'm chewing, which is always aggravating, but that alone isn't worth the hassle of extraction in my book.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Yeah. But I'm now convinced that this bag was worse than average, because I remember trying a different brand of pre-ground coffee not that long ago and it was "okay" and smelled like average Arabica beans. This one definitely didn't.
Probably true! My reply was totally tongue in cheek and at least a little hyperbolic in that particular sense.
I think some of the disagreement around the discernment and snobbery in coffee and other food/drink comes from seeking enjoyment vs getting [active ingredient delivery system].
The cheapest coffee, wine or pizza can deliver their caffeine, alcohol or tasty calories, and serve their purpose in that way, and at low cost due to all the cutting of corners, which has some value to many consumers, but that's just one dimension inside the category. If you want enjoyment you want a product that represents some of the better raw ingredients prepared in a less destructive way.
I agree with all of this as well. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong or inferior with mass market coffee, it's that I quite enjoy the ritual of sipping a nice fresh shot of good espresso or cup of pourover coffee and discovering the flavors that said shot or cup contains, which is not something I can do with the mass market stuff. In fact, I'd say that it's highly impressive how brands from Folger's and Eight O' Clock to Starbucks can crank out a specific taste profile for their coffee year in and year out given the inherent variability of the beans themselves!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
letthehateflowthroughyou.jpg
Soulless is a good word for how pre-ground coffee tastes once one's palate has become accustomed to fresh beans. It's more like coffee flavored water than actual coffee! Once coffee is ground, all of that fresh coffee flavor locked into the bean is now exposed to oxygen and that flavor unique to that particular batch of beans is literally evaporating by the minute. Even if the beans were ground right at the store when you bought them, you'd have to rush right home and make coffee with the grinds to have a shot at a decent-to-good cup of coffee from them before the staleness started setting into the taste.
When I have to travel, I can subsist on the drek that's offered up at hotels and such, but it's never my preference. One of the joys of the craft coffee revolution is that there's a decent chance that I'll be able to try out some local coffee shop even in BFE and if not, I can try to fall back to a Starbucks for some Blonde Espresso ('bout time they started going down that road, a smart move IMAO) or decent drip coffee at the worst.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Second this one, I'm of the mind that it's true myself, though I think that simple bureaucratic inertia plus public safety concerns, when taken together, is more than enough to explain the conventional wisdom.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
First blush guess as to why it's terrible would be the film grain, in which case I can tell you that the NR version is a lot prettier and seemed to be pretty well done in that regard, though it's been a good while since I watched it. If it's more that it's the 77 version of Star Wars and not the ANH re-release, yeah, not much to be done about that.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I am a fan of multiple book series featuring talking cats, eg Dungeon Crawler Carl, Craig Alanson's Convergence.
Hey, hey, hey! It's the dog that talks in the Convergence series! Mister Boots is a grimlik. Okay, okay, he does talk, and he looks like a huge cat, if cats had three toes, but still. Grimlik. Completely different!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
It's probably been a decade since I read that but I can't help but wonder if that someone got A Deepness in the Sky mixed up with perhaps A Fire Upon the Deep or another one of his works. IIRC, the closest Deepness gets to software is with the whole
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
I agree that ruminating on a cause or closure might not be terribly helpful. In a larger sense, just about everyone I know well has had some straight up weird shit happen to them in life. My uncle told me stories of seeing a smiling face named Subsunk on the wall when he was a kid. He seemed to think of Subsunk as mostly an imaginary friend but he was clear that he really, physically saw Subsunk on his wall and not just in his mind's eye. For another example, my wife was all alone one day (after waking up from a nap, I think) when she heard a voice tell her out of the blue that she would be pregnant, which according to an earlier doctor, wasn't supposed to be possible for her, and she did in fact become pregnant later in life. I always personally thought that there was no such thing as "normal", but then again, being autistic I would think that, wouldn't I?
Really good comment! If I'm understanding you correctly, which is to say that most therapists will in their profiles/web pages/whatever advertise their preferred specialties and modalities and the like, then I think it does, yeah. To develop this thought a little further, while some modalities have become mainstream and common, there's still plenty of specific modalities for specific problems, like DBT specialists for BPD, CSTs for sexual specific issues, et cetera, and in that sense I'd absolutely agree that it's good idea to do one's homework and pick the right "genre" of movie accordingly. I was glossing most of that over in thinking, okay, so there are relationship issues but OP is doing individual therapy, and asking about counselors specifically... yeah, if they're seeing a LMHC, LPC, or whatever their State wants to call it, then OP should at least be in the right neighborhood. Not 100% guarantee, of course, but generally speaking looking at a good flavor of individual therapist. In making my comments about a PCP, I was drawing on my own experiences with a PCP in the past. I had a bad one that simply brushed off a serious and chronic medical problem that I had and when I got fed up and went directly to a surgeon, said surgeon took one look and was like, "yeah, you need surgery," and promptly scheduled me. My current PCP (when I actually see her) tends to actually listen to my presenting problem and offer me solutions if she has them or referrals if she doesn't, and I'm grateful for that. My wife has had similar experiences, so for both of us even getting more than blown off has been a non-trivial problem that we've had to overcome, hence my thinking that finding a good fit requires work even at the PCP level, and isn't something that can be expected right out of the gate. I think that part remains true, and the whole genre twist is an important one, though now my brain is going, "well, ackshully, all these licensed folks have to do so many hours of continuing education each year, some of which is different modalities, so maybe it's more like go to the right multiplex," aaaaand I'm gonna kill the analogy there before it goes further into the weeds.
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