FORUMS

Connect with people who understand what you are going through, seek advice and surround yourself with support. We're free, anonymous, and professionally moderated 24/7.

  • 47,612Members
  • 1,358,869Posts
  • 1,400,000Visitors
Welcome and getting started

Much needed vent.

Much needed vent.

If any individual - a neighbour, for example, asked all the most personal questions a therapist of any stripe did, we would think them highly impertinent - a sticky beak. However we allow therapists to ask us anything, invade our privacy without restraint, and we comply - tell them all of our private business as a matter of course, thinking we are being helped.

It is implied to be part of our treatment and our hoped for recovery to do so - but if their treatments worked, we wouldn't be here on this forum asking each other for support and assistance - often, for years on end. Desperate for help.

In my opinion, we are exploited in a heartless even unconscionably, sadistic way. They are completely devoid of scruples and we are exploited then often, simply moved on. While our conditions worsen and our lives waste.

It seems more likely that they are invading our privacy for the purpose of satisfying their curiosity as to how the 'other half lives'.

They 'diagnose' copiously - making highly questionable - even laughable, lists of disorders to satisfy your curiosity as to what is 'wrong with you', (from me - you are severely traumatised from the conditioning and experiences you have endured which have altered your personality, your perceptions, your social standing, destroyed your family, employability, security etc.), prescribe drugs of one type or another, one dosage or another, suggest barbaric procedures which are, in my opinion, little more than needless experimentation. And we comply - or some of us do - with misplaced, naive trust. But none are cured.

I have made the following observation - that society is made up of winners and losers. In general, winners can't make a wrong move and everything goes their way. We losers can't get a break. We do everything right, do it well, yet nothing ever goes right for us. And no therapist will help us because we are the group which pays their bills. Occasionally a loser wins - and that provides the impetus for we losers to keep trying, but, for us, to no avail.

Helping us would deny them their superiority, their source of reliable income, their place in a system which works - for them. They would become one of us - and that would never do.

So how long have you been 'in treatment'? Can you look back and see what amazing progress you have made? Are you doing other that paying their bills?

81 replies

51 - 60 of 81
1...567...9

In response to: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

Fair enough, @Historylover .

I hope you are doing well today.

In response to: Re: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

I'm battling on @chibam. I lose myself in my studying, and for a while I can forget everything. It keeps me going for a time. I just wish it wasn't quite so challenging! I have no difficulty researching a topic but having to read so many articles and write about them, then do a bibliography is really testing me. It's all I have to keep me going so I am doing my best to get it completed to my satisfaction.

Really doing it a bit tough at the moment. I hope everything is going alright for you. You didn't say. Sending all best wishes.

In response to: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

Changed my mind about the forum @chibam and signed up.I'm just feeling very pessimistic at the moment. Sorry to be like that. We need to be uplifted, don't we? Are you doing alright? I haven't seen Dec about and I sent her a message but didn't get a reply. She hadn't been online for a while when I checked. Hope you're doing well. Cheers.

In response to: Re: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

Hi @Historylover .

I'm sorry but I can't offer any enlightenment to where @Owlunar has gone. Sometimes users around here just decide they need to take a break from this place. I know @florenceforty recently decided to leave the forums, and I have a feeling that another regular presence made a similar announcement fairly recently, too...

Sometimes people post a notice about their decision to leave, or take a break, but sometimes they don't. Maybe @Owlunar is just taking a break. Either way, I hope she is well.

As for me, I'm plodding on. It's that difficult time of year where the weather is warming up and you can't seem to get comfortable. Too much clothing, too hot; to little, too cold.

Beyond the trivial stuff... a lot of things have been coming together recently to make me reflect on life - more than my tollerance limit for reflection, I suspect... and yeah, a lot of unhappy conclusions come out of that. So I guess I'm nursing those wounds, ATM. I won't spin that out into a lengthy moan, because there's no point.

So yeah, I'm hanging in there.

In response to: Re: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

Sounds like we both have lengthy moans to not elaborate on @chibam!. Wouldn't it be good if we knew what to do with them? Tomorrow is another day.

In response to: Re: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

Hello @chibam 👨 I read your response to the post "The end of my career..." and was astonished to read that someone had told you to 'give up all hope' regarding a career. Did you really take that on board? :face_with_rolling_eyes:

I have never met such potential in anyone in my personal life as I have observed in you. You are like a dynamo with so much untapped ability - but I think, deep down, you know that.

Sending best wishes and hope today in your state is as pleasant as it is shaping up in mine 😁. I'd love to challenge you to a game of racquet ball - any - and you wouldn't need to be good, just be able to hold a racquet!🎾

Cheers!

In response to: Re: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

Thanks, @Historylover .

It was actually both of my main two therapists who told me that. And looking back even further, I think that some of my school teachers were probably dropping hints along the same lines.

I don't think it was so much a message of: "you'll never be capable of generating cold, hard cash", but rather a message that there was no hope of me having a job/career that could offer me the more precious rewards that a job ought to offer, such as strong workplace friendships, pride & enjoyment in your work, stories to tell, recognizable benefit to your community, ect., ect. (as was the principal focus of that "The end of my career..." thread.)

And yeah, I did take it on board. You know a thing or two about what it's like when your in therapy; how susceptible you are to whatever rubbish they want to inject into your head.

It's not like anybody else ever gave me much cause to dispute that conclusion. By the time you bumble in to therapy your already desperate; already stuck in a place where there doesn't seem to be any hope of a worthwhile future. You don't need a lot of convincing. All the therapist really needs to do is give official confirmation to the fact that there's no hope. Of course, it knocks the wind right out of you to hear it said out loud. But it's not exactly a scenario that you hadn't already considdered, you know?

After all, if there truly was hope, why have you found such scant evidance of it?


@Historylover wrote:

I have never met such potential in anyone in my personal life as I have observed in you. You are like a dynamo with so much untapped ability - but I think, deep down, you know that.


Thanks, @Historylover .

But I'm confronted with the dilemma of how much "hope" is up to me, and how much of it comes down to how the deck has been stacked against us.

I watched a video last night about some guy who lived out much of his adult life, and eventually died, as a political prisoner within the gulags of Stalinist Russia. In many ways, I felt his story parralleled the story of Nelson Mandella, except without the involvement of racism, and without the "happy ending" of the prisoner being released in old age, and going on to become a successful leader of change. Unlike Nelson, this Russian guy died in jail as an obscure nobody, comparitvely speaking.

And from what I heard, the guy's fate doesn't come down to dull-wittedness, broken spirit, or lack of initiative. He wrote and distrubuted a book chronicalling the horrors of his gulag life, which was an outrageously brave thing for him to do under that regime.

No, I think his tragic fate really just came down to the fact that he never had chance, within that oppressive regime he was trapped within.

I know it's an indecent exaggeration to draw comparisons between a modern-day Australian and a political prisoner of the Stalin regime. But I think it nonetheless highlights an ever-important question: to what extent is 'hope' governed by us, and to what extent is it governed by the circumstances around us?

It's trendy to tell people that they can make anything they want happen; that if we swim with enough vigor, we mere mortals can reverse the currants of the mighty oceans. But I think that reality is a lot less charitable; and that for many of us, the best we can hope for is that sheer good fortune may guide us one day to some small corner of the globe, where the currants just happen to flow in the direction we wish to travel.

In response to: Re: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

I really don't know what to say to that, @chibam. You have touched on so much of what is relevant to me also.

I have often reflected on my life's path and the events which brought me to this point. I didn't have a chance! I was robbed at every point from my earliest childhood - before I had a chance of understanding 'the game'. My family assumed others were as honest in their dealings as they were, so didn't suspect there were lifelong consequences to the actions of others on their children as well as on themselves. And that there is a cumulative effect. They were so naive, and when they gained a little hindsight didn't know what to do with it - which is the situation I am in.

How I wish I could go back and start again with the wisdom of hindsight - but that we can't is the reality of life. We just have to suck it up and deal with our situation.

I can't imagine a therapist who could say that to a patient and still call themselves a therapist. I cannot imagine the thinking behind it - other than malice. They are there to ensure otherwise, I would have thought. And yes, we are already desperate when we stumble into therapy - and completely trusting. Has the understanding of psychiatry progressed so little in recent times that there is an acceptance that medication, chatting and experimental procedures are their only treatment options?

I watched Osher Gunsberg's program last night out of interest. All I saw was desperate hope and blind trust in the belief that progress is being made by these new procedures and 'new understandings'. That all will be well. No-one spoke of addressing the life events which caused these conditions - just treatments for the consequences. Such ignorance! And it abounds. Just made me angry.

For me though, I think I have been luckier than most, or even all, when I read the goings on with therapists which abound. He gave me me in a rehabilitated state - cured my Depression, rebuilt my very damaged personality, educated me, made me so independent that I could travel overseas on my own - I would never have got out of the country otherwise, taught me money management, my worth, and left me medication-free. How many can say that? That he took away my promised future is something I still grapple with. I think I understand, but it's hard to accept. It's just been too painful and still keeps me awake at night.

Yes, I see the connection you made with that Russian fellow. To what extent is our path already pre-determined? In his case, he couldn't change it - but I just don't understand why we can't get off one path and onto another? I've tried - without success. Why is that so? Perhaps I should put that question out to the wider universe!

Sending my best wishes for a better day. Take care.

In response to: Re: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

Put my name down for the forum @chibam, but have just received notification that it has been postponed. Your name wasn't shown as an attendee?

Edit: Just rechecked - it's there.

In response to: Re: Much needed vent.

Re: Much needed vent.

Hope you dont mind me interrupting @Historylover @chibam

I followed the thread and am deeply heartened at the quality of your interactions.

A lot resonates with me. My grandfather inroduced me to The Gulag Archipelago ... just by being proud he was reading such a thick book. Knwoing his story more now, it was cute, when compared to my father, it was also a subtle little sign of the competitiveness between the 2 sides of my lineage... maternal and paternal ... I read it midway through my pol degree out of deference to both, and valued the shorter ... A Day in the lIfe of ....as a literary classic.

Yes History and all its circumstances bring to bear on the lives we evolve.

Triumphal and Redemptive Stories can be inspiring, but in the wrong way can also become a part of a cancel culture, in that ... the charges of callous comparison ... if you tried harder it could turn out all good for you ... logic not enuff effort .... and you did not have to put up with ... ultimate put down ...

Just saying Cooooeee

Apple

51 - 60 of 81
1...567...9