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Therapy has worked wonders for me. But it's not something you do for a couple of months and then conclude the process by living a happy life. Your problems are
by marvin 18y ago
Therapy has worked wonders for me. But it's not something you do for a couple of months and then conclude the process by living a happy life. Your problems are part of you, and you can't just throw a part of yourself out of the window in a short time.
I've been in various forms of psychotherapy for two years now, taking medication when it was necessary. To be specific: characteristics of OCD and schizoid PD as symptoms of depression and social anxiety. The personality traits were not prominent enough to warrant a diagnosis in itself.
In therapy, you get to know yourself better: there are probably reasons why you have certain problems. If you dig deeper in them, you probably get to a point where there are no more reasons. As a random example: you obsess because you fear (x) because you were on multiple occasions in a painful situation regarding (x), and this situation was painful because of (y) and (y) is painful for you but not for others because...and at one point, you might run out of good reasons. But getting to know yourself better helps, and exposing yourself to these issues can give you tools to make them less pressing. Dampening the oscillations, as it were. I have seen plenty of examples where this has made life easier for people, but it takes at least a couple of years. In the US, this might be a tricky proposition because 300 hours of attention from a psychologist is expensive. I hope you have good health insurance, but if you have a well-paying job, I'd say it is worth it.
We nerds are often suspicious of processes that are unpredictable, messy and nondeterministic, but any treatment to psychological issues will necessarily have these characteristics. It doesn't mean that it is pointless. These issues can rarely be cured, but they can be managed and mended.
- Retric 18y agoI will preface this by saying my mother has a PHD in neuroscience and it's application to learning and talking to her we know a lot of the details but little of the complexity's in how the brain functions. Anyway, several years ago I was riding on home from school and saw a bird out the window. Out of boredom and curiosity I just started overlaying everything I know about birds and flight. Everything from it's bone structure to the aerodynamics of flight feathers etc. I blacked out and by the time I was aware again we 10 - 15 minutes had gone by. I assumed it was probably a good idea to never do that again, but I have a incredibly detailed memory of what I pictured so there is a pull to try it again. My point is I think you can overstress your mind and like overclocking a CPU it becomes less stable as you do so. Our minds are a complex balance of chemical signals which has real limits. I try to get enough sleep and take care of the wetware because I think it's less stable than you might assume. Rest and good food are the basics, but so is balancing how you use your mind and trying to avoid unbalanced behavior. I have gone all out 12 hour days for long periods, but they seem to lead directly to burnout and depression. Yet, if I don't work really hard after a few months I start feeling useless and slow, so I don't think steady state is the best long term idea. My guess is finding a good cycle where I avoid burn out and feeling useless for long periods but I have periods of extreme activity and rest is my best long term balance. However, I have no idea how this relates to my inner biochemistry.
- kaens 18y agoOut of boredom and curiosity I just started overlaying everything I know about birds and flight. Everything from it's bone structure to the aerodynamics of flight feathers etc. I blacked out and by the time I was aware again we 10 - 15 minutes had gone by. I do the same thing on a regular basis, and I think the same "blacking out" thing happens to me (unless you literally blacked out), but I wouldn't really describe it as blacking out. It's more like day-dreaming - I end up in a mental state where there's nothing but what I'm looking at / thinking about. Very "visually" vivid, but hard to describe, and when I come out of it some amount of time has passed (5 to 15 minutes), and I'll have no clue what happened in my surroundings during that time.
- Retric 18y agoThat's sounds close, so I guess the Neurochemistry is probably similar. How do you find this useful? I can concentrate on one thing when coding but I can still direct my thinking process, but this seemed to be just build a model without anything spare to manipulate it. It also seemed fairly draining as I was out of it for a while.
- kaens 18y agoIt's not always useful, and I don't have full control over it - although I can somewhat tell the level of concentration I have to be in to enter that state, I don't have any control over whether or not I enter it past not focusing extremely hard. It tends to happen when I concentrate on one "thing" in an abstract manner for too long. It has been useful for visualizing overarching design - if I know what an unwritten application needs to do I might visualize how the "parts" should fit together (not in any magic sense, just faster than I would without being in that state). Sometimes it's good for solving logic problems, riddles, etc. Sometimes it's not good for anything at all. Most of the time that it is really useful, it's by coincidence. It's not a physically draining thing for me at all, just a bit disorienting.