@RabbitsMum
Perhaps avoiding hurting my therapist wasn’t doing good per se, but it was averting a badness. And isn’t that more good then having the badness occur? I suppose, though, in truth, it wasn’t so much averting a badness as a badness was bound to occur one way or another; someone had to suffer, either her or me. I used what limited control I had over the situation to try to steer that suffering towards myself. Isn’t that what virtuous people do? Decide to take the blow themselves when the choice falls to them whether that blow falls on themselves or someone else?
Whether or not I’m a submissive slave isn’t really pertinant to this issue. Or, perhaps I should say, that unless I was slave to an ethical, admirable, honourable mistress, my predicament with the therapist would’ve been no better off. However, what would have been pertinant would have been to know how to please and thus earn favor with the people around me, so that I could call in that favor for assistance in ethically breaking off contact with the therapist. I wouldn’t be nearly as stuck as I had been in therapy if I could’ve counted on these people to tell the therapist that I had died, or I was hospitalized for a long time due to an accident, or something, if the therapist had inquired about my absense. But I couldn’t.
The fact is that if I’d told some of the people I knew that my therapist was crap, they probably would’ve have instructed me to tell her that she was crap and bail out on her. Most people I know unfortunately come from that “f*** everybody else, look out for #1!” mindset. It’s bad enough that they they treat others like this, but they also actually try to encourage this mindset in others! It’s an ugliness to be sure and there’s already too much ugliness in this world, so I have no interest in projecting that mindset out into the world myself.
Perhaps I misinterpreted you, but when you mentioned “wanting someone else to tell you what to do”, I get the impression that you were talking about someone who would tell me to tell the therapist she sucked and that I wanted to be rid of her. This certainly isn’t what I would’ve wanted. What I needed was someone I could brainstorm with, who likewise (tries to) live by the creed “treat others how you want to be treated”, who could help me concoct and exit strategy on-the-fly that would allow me to get out of therapy while still leaving the therapist feeling like she was good. Of course, if my partner in this regard was particularly brilliant, and automatically knew a sound strategy to accomplish this, then of course I would want direct instructions from him/her.
The therapist didn’t email me every day, as a matter of fact, she emailed me quite rarely. What happened was that she had instructed me to email her every day. I’m sure she didn’t read them all, as there were some emails that required a reply which never got one, prompting me to re-ask my questions in a subsequent email. I don’t think that it had anything to do with thinking I was suicidal, as she implemented this ritual from day one of our therapy and I don’t think we talked about suicide that early in the treatment.
I don’t especially blame the therapist for my being stuck with her, but I do think the system needs a bit of work in that regard. Therapy is marketed as the white-knight, saving grace that comes to the rescue of anyone who’s life isn’t worth prolonging. It is marketed to desperate people who are desperate to have some goodness poured into their lives. Add to that the fact that there’s this be-all and end-all dogma throughout society that ending one’s own life is always, always, always the wrong choice - a claim which, in order to be true, demands that there must be actual value in life; this claim is marketed as an absolute, undeniable fact. And the route to this value, for those who are yet to have it, is made out to be the mental health system. So basically, when you have desperate people walking in to therapy, there is little to no consciousness of the idea that the therapist isn’t actually prepared to help their patients. So the thought of ever needing an exit strategy is something that never naturally occurs to them. I think that somewhere within all the proclaimations of “If your life isn’t worth prolonging, a shrink *will* help you!” there ought to be a clear warning that the patients should prepare an exit strategy beforehand, just incase the therapy doesn’t work out.
I’m sorry if I didn’t make sense with my comments about doing good and survival. You talk about how a suicidal person surviving for just another day is doing good just by surviving. That can potentially be true, but not automatically so. For example, if the person is alive, but alive in deep misery, wishing deeply that they were dead, but are bullied/oppressed into continuing to survive by other people who are staunchly anti-suicide, then it’s hard to see how this situation can be classified as being in any way good. And if you were going to argue that potentially this period of misery is simply a bridge to an eventual period of substantial joy, then I would point out that for many people, this bridge is just a pipe dream that is almost certain to never occur and that the subsequent term of suffering that the suicidal person is pressured into enduring is utterly pointless.
Secondly, it depends on whether the suicidal person is a good person or not. I have to say that my personal experience is that most suicidal people tend to be quite selfless, but I doubt this is the case for every last one of them. We all know there are evil people in the world: domestic abusers, terrorists, serial killers, hate preachers, rapists, con artists, pedophiles, slave traders, mafia/cartel people… We know that the world would be better off without these people. So if they commit suicide, is that a bad thing? Hitler committed suicide, and for my 2 cents the only thing tragic about that was that he didn’t do it 6 years earlier, before the war and holocaust he engineered killed millions of people and inflicted untold suffering on the world.
Obviously, these examples are at the extreme end of humanity, but they illustrate that humans are capable of being bad things. The ones I mention above are the very bad examples. But there are lesser degrees of bad, too. Most of us are extremely unlikely to bump into a Charles Manson in the course of our lives. But we are quite likely to bump into someone who is driven primarily by survival dogma, rather then a desire to do good. In essence, when these people strike an opportunity to aid their own survival, but at the cost of being a thorn in the side of someone else, they take it, because that’s what their priorities dictate. They’ll never inflict the untold horrors upon you that a Hannibal Lecter-esque supervillain might, but at the end of the day they are prone to be something that darkens your door, if only in a small way. Because unless doing good for you will in some way help them survive, they have no real inclination to do it. Conversely, if doing something that helps them survive has unfavourable consequences for you, they have no reason not to do it, because surviving is more important to them then doing good.
When this gets really scary is when you find yourself in a world where you are surrounded by nothing but these kinds of animals. Survivors who offer you nothing but inconvenience and trouble as they skulk around seeking what they need to survive, without any interest in offering the world goodness and joy. In a world where no one, or barely anyone has an interest in serving goodness, is it any wonder why there’s no goodness to be found?
And I wouldn’t have said that I obsess over my therapist. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t say I think about her all that much. But people in this thread started inquiring about my past therapy experience, so I’ve been addressing their questions and follow-on questions as best I can, so in that regard, it might seem like I’ve been talking about her a lot recently.
I must say though, that the thought that people are still stumbling into the trap of this system worries me. I would love to see the system fixed so that it offers actual help to people; or else have people guided towards a differant system that has an actual willingness to help them.
So is your lifestyle good or bad? What do you think? Is it both good and bad at once???? 
