Angry and alone

I'm heading off to bed now @TheVorticon. It sounds like you feel it will be helpful for you to beat yourself up for your mess up. I've been there and done that. My previous psychologist told me I was a stupid f***ing shit, a f***ing irritant, f***ing evil, and a stupid f***ing borderline. It didn't help. So...for me, I'm happy to be a silly peanut who messes up sometimes.

Good night @TheVorticon. I super like you - even if you don't like yourself so much right now.

I don't think it was ok for your previous psychologist to say any of that to you @Phoenix_Rising. And I'm glad that you escaped that harmful environment and can recognise how wrong it was.

Hope you sleep well.

Since staying mad about this isn't going to change the situation, I'll try to think about it differently. But I'm going to do it here, because if I try to do it on my own I'm not going to stick with it.

If someone else had made the mistake, and if they were someone I cared about so I wanted to understand what went wrong and how it could be prevented next time and wanted to help them feel better, then I would think that they made a stupid mistake due to being careless and were being an idiot. But I would try to be understanding about why the mistake was made, and wouldn't constantly hold this over them.

Why the mistake was made:

• Because they were feeling overwhelmed by the thought of the interaction that would have to be done to complete the thing, when they have social anxiety where it's difficult for them to make phonecalls, appointments, assertions about things that only affect them, and particularly make on-the-spot decisions when they don't have all the information and haven't carefully weighed up the right decision.
• Because the information had been presented in multiple different methods of communication, over multiple days, fed piecemeal to them. They had not been part of the decision making process (and had actively avoided it due to the overwhelmed feeling), and at no point was the information collated into a single location to provide a thorough understanding.
• Because the combination of feeling overwhelmed due to the first thing, and feeling confused due to the second thing, led to a bigger overwhelmed feeling which made it harder to fix the second thing.
• Because it was easier to make an assumption than it was to check, when already feeling overwhelmed about something.

What could be done next:

• Leave it as-is and pretend it's fine - not a very good option because there was a reason that this was being done in the first place, and that reason doesn't go away with the mistake being there. It doesn't fix the original problem and just creates a new one. It creates a bigger problem because the mistake will be noticed by other people and it's not really possible to pretend that it was intentional. It would actually be impossible to insist that this wasn't a mistake and try to continue with things how they are, because the next step will highlight the mistake as being even more obvious. If it gets to the next step, I don't think I even have the skill to convince anyone that there is no mistake. So I will be in exactly the same position of having to deal with a mistake, but the mistake will be larger, possibly harder to fix, and will seem more stupid to not have realised. And I'd be pretending that I didn't realise, which is counterintuitive if I'm trying to avoid being stupid.
• Run away from the problem - As far as run away reasons go, this one isn't really up there on the list of things that might be justifiable. What's more embarassing and stupid - admitting the mistake and dealing with it, or admitting that the mistake was beyond my ability to handle?
• Tell people about the problem, let them think that I'm a moron and be mad at me for a little while, pay extra money to get it fixed to the best of everyone's ability to fix it... And then, after a couple of weeks of extra difficult interaction, hopefully never see some of those people again. While the other people who I've told do care about me and will look past the mistake much easier than I will.

Difficulty score (lower = less difficult): 3,1,2

Outcome score: 2,3,1

Total score (difficutly * outcome), lowest score wins like golf: 6,3,2

Therefore I need to pick the 3rd option.

Ways to deal with the difficulties inherent in picking the 3rd option:

• Get the ball rolling quickly like ripping off a bandaid. Dragging it on will just drag out the uncomfortableness of the mistake. The sooner it's admitted to the right person, the sooner it can be dealt with, the sooner it can be over with, the sooner I can move on with other stuff and let it gradually stop feeling like such a big deal.
• Remember that mistakes happen, and it's important to deal with mistakes in a way that optimises the outcome and provides a learning opportunity, rather than not-dealing with them and only learning the lesson that I'm not capable of dealing with things that go wrong.
• It's disappointing but would be even more disappointing to not take the opportunity to fix it.
• I'm going to remember the mistake for a long time, and it will be sitting there like a giant log ready to throw into the fire. But dealing with the mistake appropriately is a bit of a fire extinguisher. I can't be all that useless if I manage to do the things required to own up to and fix the mistake.
• Accepting that I will find the interactions difficult due to a personal issue. But even though they are difficult, I got through the first couple already. I have created extra ones full of extra difficulty and although I don't know when the end of this will possibly be, there is an end to this set of interactions after which things can go back to normal. It will probably still be hard for a little while after it goes back to normal, but I know there is a normal that can come back even if it takes a few months.

Not sure this really helped because I already knew what I need to do but at least it occupied my mind for awhile and I can come back to it when I'm feeling rubbish about the next step.

Hi @CheerBear and @utopia. Thanks for your messages today.

What I wrote last night wasn’t so much about the decision making process, but about explaining the decision to myself. I already knew what decision I needed to make, but it felt difficult, scary, like the worst decision and the most impossible thing to try to do. So I needed my brain to catch up on why it was the right, best decision and not actually as impossible as it seemed. To take the emotion out and stop being afraid of the way it needed to be dealt with. You’re right about that CheerBear – feelings make things seem way more complicated and chaotic for me than they need to be.

If it was simply a mistake that I made and could fix all by myself without involving anyone else, it would be infinitely much easier for me to deal with. But the fact that there’s someone else involved, and that making the mistake means that the other person is involved for longer (when the “other people being involved” thing is what’s making the whole activity difficult in the first place), really just set off a major spiral. I guess whenever it starts feeling too hard again, I can come back to the already-explained reason of why it’s not too hard and is the best solution rather than relying on an abstract “but I have to, but I can’t, but I have to, but I can’t” mess.

Thanks for understanding.