The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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I’ve started seeing a therapist. If you had told me 6 months ago that I would be in this position today, I would have called you insane.
I’m still fiercely critical of the “medical model” of mental health, and find much in contemporary “therapy culture” that is deeply disagreeable to me. You can’t manufacture human subjectivity on an assembly line. But, the fact that I’m seeing a classically trained Lacanian psychoanalyst rather than a more “mainstream” therapist is part of what allowed me to reconceptualize the enterprise enough that it became palatable.
I don’t have much of a point in posting this besides: if you feel like you’re stuck in a rut and things will never change, you can have hope. Sometimes radical change can happen very fast if you just give yourself a little push.
Congratulations! I once eschewed therapy, too, but after Serious Shit went down in my family a little over a decade now, I became open to the idea, even though it took almost six years and a total breakdown before I actually started seeing a therapist myself. In the almost five years since I started, it's become an integral part of my own life, and I'm not even sure that I'll be slowing down anytime soon. There's a strange sort of alchemy that happens when I'm getting my thoughts and experiences out of my own head and sharing them with someone that I can trust that helps me to understand myself, my choices, and my experiences much more fully. Minimizing that to the idea that I'm paying someone far out the ass to basically redirect me back towards taking care of my own self and making the choices that are best for me and damn the torpedoes really doesn't do the experience justice. I've thought a lot about doing an effortpost on this, but I have yet to be brave enough to do it.
This part I don't blame you for at all. I can understand why medicine seemed so promising 50-odd years ago when, "the screaming stopped," as the OGs used to say in reference to the efficacy of the first wave of antipsychotics. These days it's obvious that there's far, far more to mental illness than simple neurochemistry, especially when considering things like spontaneous-seeming remission of schizophrenia, but as always, the old joke about how many therapists it takes to change a light bulb is evergreen, and when it comes to treating symptoms, drugs are at least something, even if only a placebo. And as I said in this exchange, the narcissistic and personality disordered types have thoroughly weaponized therapeutic concepts for their own ends, which in a way is a sign of its success, but also deeply corrosive to the overall field. We have, IMAO, over-corrected.
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