8 ms·

I was an “alcoholic” for many years. It ruined my life and alienated me from many people I love. Then I met a wonderful woman who wouldn’t give up on me. We we

I was an “alcoholic” for many years. It ruined my life and alienated me from many people I love. Then I met a wonderful woman who wouldn’t give up on me. We went to the doctor over and over again until I was diagnosed with dystonia, a disease which alcohol relieves the painful symptoms of. Once I knew that I wasn’t simply cured, but I had the hope and the knowledge to see though my pain. Many other drugs are the same way. It’s easier to get these classes of drug illegally rather than legally. People who do these drugs know there’s something wrong with them, but they remain defiant and strong in the face of a society projecting its own decadence onto them. If you do drugs or alcohol and you know it hurts you and want to stop, there is always hope for you as long as you can accept help. I know from experience. And to all you who need drugs, but reject a diagnosis. As Big L said “If that’s what you need to maintain, go ahead and do your thang.”

zeroq 1y ago
This. Most people do drugs or alcohol for kicks or to put the pain away, as in general, but there are a lot of people who are self medicating symptoms they are well aware and they know this "medicine" works for them. Breaking out of that habit is extremly hard. At the beginning of covid I found myself in a really dark place and opted to seek help with psychotherapy. I had a long story of health and legal issues and I often told my peers that second opinion is key, no one is omnipotent and with hard legal or medical case it's worth seeking out opinion of at least two professionals (and if their opinions are contradicting - keep seeking). I met eleven certified experts. At the beginning of my journey one of them, guy with stellar reviews, upon hearing that I haven't been properly diagnosed, but I suspect I might be on the spectrum looked at me and said "no... I'm looking at you look perfectly healthy". One after five sessions when I said I'm not getting any feedback, like anything, I was the only one talking during the sessions, told me it take years to get to the core. Long story short - just before someone advertise as an expert doesn't mean they know anything, or they care. Even in highly regulated circuit.
- Our_Benefactors 1y ago
  > told me it take years to get to the That’s the grift — healing sold as a subscription. The incentive for therapists to behave this way can’t be regulated away because the regulation itself acts as a cover for this behavior: credentials, ethics boards, continuing-ed checkboxes — all window dressing to sanctify creating a dependency in the patient. The system launders manipulation through professionalism and calls it care.
  - intended 1y ago
    Yes the lack of a magic bullet is definitely the fault of science. You can have bad experiences with therapy. It will put patients off entirely from further therapy. It sucks if this is you. It really does - because on the flip side, if therapy has worked for you, then you know how your life has improved.
    - zeroq 1y ago
      To be devils advocate it was an intersection point between psychotherapy being socially acceptable here in my part of EU and the start of covid where a lot of people reached a breaking point. From a business perspective it's a hunting season and it's not so different from IT where a lot of people game their way in. I was only shocked because I thought it was highly regulated system and on average you should get at least some help.
  - justonceokay 1y ago
    I’m not so sure. I think there really are a lot of people who benefit from some kind of talk therapy and that that therapy might actually take a long time to produce results. You have your whole life to ingrain thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses into your being. If you anre unlucky, you might be surrounded by other people who reinforce maladaptive ways of thinking and being, such that they seem 100% normal. Expecting those deeply carved neural pathways to change quickly through any intervention is ridiculous. Think about how cult deprogramming is a specialized skill with a high failure rate. Except this cult only has a single member, your inner monologue. It can take a lot of time for a therapist to figure out what the cult is even about, and it all comes from you talking (and talking and talking…)
- itsme0000 1y ago
  I saw many therapists and I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I honestly it did a lot for me when a therapist simply said “Wow that’s a bad situation I feel really bad for you. It so unfair.” But anytime I looked for instructions or objectives on how to improve my life they would basically say “I can’t tell you exactly what to do, you need to come to that conclusion for yourself.” The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. They always tried to see things from my side, but never really believed that spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity. Even though it’s against their training, they can’t help but judge you lifestyle and unusually that manifests as silence on important issues instead of disagreement.
  - nostrademons 1y ago
    > The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. That is the problem, yes. I think a lot of the confusion from people just beginning their psychotherapeutic journey is that they think the point of therapy is to make them happier. No. The point of therapy is to make them happier, and sadder, and angrier, and more driven, and aware of their fear, and connected to their shame and guilt, and able to love. In short, it's to give you perspective on emotions, so that you can feel them on a minute-to-minute basis and decide what you want to do, and realize that "because you want to do it" is just as valid as any other reason, if not more. > spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity A therapist would be naturally conflicted about this, because spending your night in a drunker stupor watching TV will make you happier, but being in agony every night slowly building your contempt for humanity is the work that needs to be done. The point of therapy is to help your understand a.) that you are in agony every night and b.) why are you building your contempt for humanity? It's to help you feel the emotions, and to feel them as emotions, and then to eventually integrate them into your life in a way that is constructive.
    - itsme0000 1y ago
      Yeah actually I don’t need to be in agony or improve my outlook at all or even understand my motivations for my own actions to be happy. I needed real medical care. Therapists think pain can teach you to accept something, but true pain, it can’t teach you anything. It only makes you a worse person. There’s no possibility for the rationalization of true agony. Attempts to do so simply lead to worse, more dangerous mental problems. The majority of people are tourists in the world of pain. They enter, make observations, then exit, assured that they had a harrowing experience. But for those of us who are residents in the city of pain, we know it stinks and it will grind us down until we become evil people. We are stuck there due to some kind of undeserved poverty which is not within our power to control. No amount of compromise or contemplation can escape you from a physical prison. It’s a cage that exists inside you rather than around you and it does nothing to shake the bars other than annoy the tourists who gawk as they pass by. I know that’s pretty dark, but people simply will never acknowledge that life long happiness is somewhat dependent on luck. It would likely cause society to fail if the lucky people realized evil people were actually equally self aware but just fundamentally less lucky and under the influence of random inexplicable pain, that’s just a result of human biology. People just reject this idea even though it’s obviously true. Therapists simply don’t understand this simple fact because it’s not their job, they are there to guide the tourists.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  > told me it take years to get to the core. So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction. The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them. Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them. Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
  - southernplaces7 1y ago
throw83749499 1y ago
I am happy it worked for you, but I find this a bit patronising and victim blaming. Not everyone has money, time and health to go to doctors "over and over again". Plus most doctors are just quacks, who throw hypothesis on the wall, to see what sticks. > as long as you can accept help What help? Society simple does not care about 49% of people, like at all! There are no shelters for abuse and violence victims, no support groups... If you speak up or seek help, there is good chance society or abuser retaliates aganst you! You may endup in prison, homeless, or out of job. Or lose your kids! > but reject a diagnosis often that means months on strong medication, that makes things much worse. And if that does not work, oopsie, lets "try" another diagnosis. No compensation for the hell, from doctor who caused it, of course!
- mieses 1y ago
  Most doctors truly are quacks. They are afraid and greedy. Rehabilitation efforts would be more successful if not de-incentivized to expel participants for relapsing, i.e., compared to the rest of the world, US rehab programs are soft. Why?
- regularjack 1y ago
  "Most" doctors are obviously not quacks.
  - cwmoore 1y ago
    Most quacks are obviously not doctors.
- projectazorian 1y ago
  > most doctors are just quacks, who throw hypothesis on the wall, to see what sticks. This is the argument that actual quacks leverage to handwave away all of modern science and medicine in favor of whatever vibes-based nonsense they're selling, fyi. Creationists love using this one as well.
cindyllm 1y ago
[dead]

zeroq 1y ago

This. Most people do drugs or alcohol for kicks or to put the pain away, as in general, but there are a lot of people who are self medicating symptoms they are well aware and they know this "medicine" works for them. Breaking out of that habit is extremly hard. At the beginning of covid I found myself in a really dark place and opted to seek help with psychotherapy. I had a long story of health and legal issues and I often told my peers that second opinion is key, no one is omnipotent and with hard legal or medical case it's worth seeking out opinion of at least two professionals (and if their opinions are contradicting - keep seeking). I met eleven certified experts. At the beginning of my journey one of them, guy with stellar reviews, upon hearing that I haven't been properly diagnosed, but I suspect I might be on the spectrum looked at me and said "no... I'm looking at you look perfectly healthy". One after five sessions when I said I'm not getting any feedback, like anything, I was the only one talking during the sessions, told me it take years to get to the core. Long story short - just before someone advertise as an expert doesn't mean they know anything, or they care. Even in highly regulated circuit.

Our_Benefactors 1y ago
> told me it take years to get to the That’s the grift — healing sold as a subscription. The incentive for therapists to behave this way can’t be regulated away because the regulation itself acts as a cover for this behavior: credentials, ethics boards, continuing-ed checkboxes — all window dressing to sanctify creating a dependency in the patient. The system launders manipulation through professionalism and calls it care.
- intended 1y ago
  Yes the lack of a magic bullet is definitely the fault of science. You can have bad experiences with therapy. It will put patients off entirely from further therapy. It sucks if this is you. It really does - because on the flip side, if therapy has worked for you, then you know how your life has improved.
  - zeroq 1y ago
    To be devils advocate it was an intersection point between psychotherapy being socially acceptable here in my part of EU and the start of covid where a lot of people reached a breaking point. From a business perspective it's a hunting season and it's not so different from IT where a lot of people game their way in. I was only shocked because I thought it was highly regulated system and on average you should get at least some help.
- justonceokay 1y ago
  I’m not so sure. I think there really are a lot of people who benefit from some kind of talk therapy and that that therapy might actually take a long time to produce results. You have your whole life to ingrain thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses into your being. If you anre unlucky, you might be surrounded by other people who reinforce maladaptive ways of thinking and being, such that they seem 100% normal. Expecting those deeply carved neural pathways to change quickly through any intervention is ridiculous. Think about how cult deprogramming is a specialized skill with a high failure rate. Except this cult only has a single member, your inner monologue. It can take a lot of time for a therapist to figure out what the cult is even about, and it all comes from you talking (and talking and talking…)
itsme0000 1y ago
I saw many therapists and I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I honestly it did a lot for me when a therapist simply said “Wow that’s a bad situation I feel really bad for you. It so unfair.” But anytime I looked for instructions or objectives on how to improve my life they would basically say “I can’t tell you exactly what to do, you need to come to that conclusion for yourself.” The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. They always tried to see things from my side, but never really believed that spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity. Even though it’s against their training, they can’t help but judge you lifestyle and unusually that manifests as silence on important issues instead of disagreement.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  > The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. That is the problem, yes. I think a lot of the confusion from people just beginning their psychotherapeutic journey is that they think the point of therapy is to make them happier. No. The point of therapy is to make them happier, and sadder, and angrier, and more driven, and aware of their fear, and connected to their shame and guilt, and able to love. In short, it's to give you perspective on emotions, so that you can feel them on a minute-to-minute basis and decide what you want to do, and realize that "because you want to do it" is just as valid as any other reason, if not more. > spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity A therapist would be naturally conflicted about this, because spending your night in a drunker stupor watching TV will make you happier, but being in agony every night slowly building your contempt for humanity is the work that needs to be done. The point of therapy is to help your understand a.) that you are in agony every night and b.) why are you building your contempt for humanity? It's to help you feel the emotions, and to feel them as emotions, and then to eventually integrate them into your life in a way that is constructive.
  - itsme0000 1y ago
    Yeah actually I don’t need to be in agony or improve my outlook at all or even understand my motivations for my own actions to be happy. I needed real medical care. Therapists think pain can teach you to accept something, but true pain, it can’t teach you anything. It only makes you a worse person. There’s no possibility for the rationalization of true agony. Attempts to do so simply lead to worse, more dangerous mental problems. The majority of people are tourists in the world of pain. They enter, make observations, then exit, assured that they had a harrowing experience. But for those of us who are residents in the city of pain, we know it stinks and it will grind us down until we become evil people. We are stuck there due to some kind of undeserved poverty which is not within our power to control. No amount of compromise or contemplation can escape you from a physical prison. It’s a cage that exists inside you rather than around you and it does nothing to shake the bars other than annoy the tourists who gawk as they pass by. I know that’s pretty dark, but people simply will never acknowledge that life long happiness is somewhat dependent on luck. It would likely cause society to fail if the lucky people realized evil people were actually equally self aware but just fundamentally less lucky and under the influence of random inexplicable pain, that’s just a result of human biology. People just reject this idea even though it’s obviously true. Therapists simply don’t understand this simple fact because it’s not their job, they are there to guide the tourists.
nostrademons 1y ago
> told me it take years to get to the core. So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction. The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them. Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them. Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
- southernplaces7 1y ago

throw83749499 1y ago

I am happy it worked for you, but I find this a bit patronising and victim blaming. Not everyone has money, time and health to go to doctors "over and over again". Plus most doctors are just quacks, who throw hypothesis on the wall, to see what sticks. > as long as you can accept help What help? Society simple does not care about 49% of people, like at all! There are no shelters for abuse and violence victims, no support groups... If you speak up or seek help, there is good chance society or abuser retaliates aganst you! You may endup in prison, homeless, or out of job. Or lose your kids! > but reject a diagnosis often that means months on strong medication, that makes things much worse. And if that does not work, oopsie, lets "try" another diagnosis. No compensation for the hell, from doctor who caused it, of course!

mieses 1y ago
Most doctors truly are quacks. They are afraid and greedy. Rehabilitation efforts would be more successful if not de-incentivized to expel participants for relapsing, i.e., compared to the rest of the world, US rehab programs are soft. Why?
regularjack 1y ago
"Most" doctors are obviously not quacks.
- cwmoore 1y ago
  Most quacks are obviously not doctors.
projectazorian 1y ago
> most doctors are just quacks, who throw hypothesis on the wall, to see what sticks. This is the argument that actual quacks leverage to handwave away all of modern science and medicine in favor of whatever vibes-based nonsense they're selling, fyi. Creationists love using this one as well.

cindyllm 1y ago

[dead]