[irishkarl]

I personally have learned what "mental block" is all about....when i first started seeing a psychiatrist one of the things i reported to him that i had a very strong mental block alonside other issues such as depression and anxiety......i didnt know what MENTAL BLOCK was about, but throught therapy i learned that this block was me deeply repressing something that was not acceptable to my mind.....it was something that my mind would not accept and thus my mind blocked it out. When you have mental block, you are unable to think and would experience a block

An example of mental block would be to imagine a person who is insecure about his sexuality......he may find the thought of him being homosexual totally abhorrent to him....he might find the thought that he is homosexual totally unacceptable to his mind, and the fact that he feels this way can result in him deeply repressing the thought and never allowing it come to his conscious awareness.....he would never accept that he was gay and he would not allow the thought come aware to his mind, and would thus block the thought as in mental block

i hope i explained that properly, but feel i am probably not articulate enough to explain it properly but hope i did it enough for you to understand

what psychiatric insights have you learned through therapy

 

[Persephone The Dread]

Honestly I don't think I learnt anything in therapy. Nothing that I remember now or that stuck anyway.

 

[FindingPeace]

My therapist has taught me a lot. One that sticks out is that our brains naturally focus on the negative of situations. Positive thinking is a skill that is learned from training your brain to not focus on the negative as much.

 

[harrison]

I think I'm yet to meet one that can give me any startling insight into anything. I do accept that my attitude may have contributed to this to some extent in the past - but it's hard to have faith in some of these people.

I've almost respected a few psychologists - but never really a psychiatrist. I'm glad you've gotten something out of therapy though OP.

 

[truant]

I feel like it would be hard for most people to learn anything in therapy unless their therapy has been extensive and their therapist at least half-decently skilled. I don't think I've learned anything from my therapist, but I've also spent the last 30 years reading about therapy and psychology. I have learned a lot about therapy, and have had a lot of insights, just not in therapy. Even my therapist has told me she probably can't teach me anything I don't already know.

What my therapist is helping me do is actually experience my problems first-hand in relationship with another person, so I can see what I'm doing at the time that it's happening. And that's not something you can do by yourself. There is a very big difference between thinking about your problems/trying to solve them yourself and sharing all your thoughts and feelings with another human being in conversation.

I don't believe a person can fix themselves in isolation since the problem is basically that their mind is a closed system that incorporates new information into their existing model. And that's only the cognitive/data processing element of the problem. There are also significant experiences that can only be had through interacting with another human being at a physical level, through the proximity of their body, touch, etc. (Problems with trauma and attachment mostly work at this level.)

A person in isolation is a person who is probably never going to get better, imo. And I suppose that's something I've learned in therapy.

Interestingly, I just experienced one of those mental blocks first-hand in my last therapy session. I just literally couldn't think of anything when my therapist asked me about [X]. It's very unusual for me to draw a complete blank. I always have some kind of bs to share.

 

[harrison]

I've spoken to so many people I've lost count. One of the first psychiatrists I ever saw would just sit behind his desk and hardly say anything. A complete waste of time. I had a psychologist back around that time too that was actually lovely - an old Dutchman who basically treated me for free. After a while I think we just ran out of things to talk about - I think even then I was just lonely more than anything, although the anxiety was always there. I think I just sensed even at that age there was nothing they could say that would make it any easier to take.

When I went in as an inpatient the first lady I saw (a psychiatrist) at first thought I had narcissistic personality disorder, because I was ranting and raving - no sign of any anxiety at all. I was manic and grandiose but no-one saw it.

That same psychiatrist told me one day that her receptionist had "lost" a detailed report I'd had done earlier that diagnosed me with ADHD. I'd never taken that diagnosis all that seriously (I think about it now though) - but I was annoyed they'd lost it, I should have given them a copy.

I had some pretty crazy experiences in that hospital - some of which I've talked about on here in the past. Enough to make me very wary of the system in general.

I do wish I had some support though and I might even just reconnect with a couple of people I've seen in the past. One especially was a lovely man - very kind and decent with a sense of humour. I think I need that.

 

[harrison]

I feel like it would be hard for most people to learn anything in therapy unless their therapy has been extensive and their therapist at least half-decently skilled. I don't think I've learned anything from my therapist, but I've also spent the last 30 years reading about therapy and psychology. I have learned a lot about therapy, and have had a lot of insights, just not in therapy. Even my therapist has told me she probably can't teach me anything I don't already know.

What my therapist is helping me do is actually experience my problems first-hand in relationship with another person, so I can see what I'm doing at the time that it's happening. And that's not something you can do by yourself. There is a very big difference between thinking about your problems/trying to solve them yourself and sharing all your thoughts and feelings with another human being in conversation.

I don't believe a person can fix themselves in isolation since the problem is basically that their mind is a closed system that incorporates new information into their existing model. And that's only the cognitive/data processing element of the problem. There are also significant experiences that can only be had through interacting with another human being at a physical level, through the proximity of their body, touch, etc. (Problems with trauma and attachment mostly work at this level.)

A person in isolation is a person who is probably never going to get better, imo. And I suppose that's something I've learned in therapy.

Interestingly, I just experienced one of those mental blocks first-hand in my last therapy session. I just literally couldn't think of anything when my therapist asked me about [X]. It's very unusual for me to draw a complete blank. I always have some kind of bs to share.

A very good point and a very good post in general as usual @truant.

 

[buggy]

I personally have learned what "mental block" is all about....when i first started seeing a psychiatrist one of the things i reported to him that i had a very strong mental block alonside other issues such as depression and anxiety......i didnt know what MENTAL BLOCK was about, but throught therapy i learned that this block was me deeply repressing something that was not acceptable to my mind.....it was something that my mind would not accept and thus my mind blocked it out. When you have mental block, you are unable to think and would experience a block

An example of mental block would be to imagine a person who is insecure about his sexuality......he may find the thought of him being homosexual totally abhorrent to him....he might find the thought that he is homosexual totally unacceptable to his mind, and the fact that he feels this way can result in him deeply repressing the thought and never allowing it come to his conscious awareness.....he would never accept that he was gay and he would not allow the thought come aware to his mind, and would thus block the thought as in mental block

i hope i explained that properly, but feel i am probably not articulate enough to explain it properly but hope i did it enough for you to understand

what psychiatric insights have you learned through therapy

Thank you for sharing that. I feel like I am mentally blocking a lot. Can't seem to get to the root of it or what is happening but not giving up in trying to find out.

 

[Saeta]

The second psychologist I went to was pretty blunt in his observations, and I really needed some honest outside perspective at the time (my first therapist usually *****footed around it for fear of offending me, so I think he could have taught me more). What stuck to me the most was an anecdote he told me. He said a lot of hypochondriacs only complain about their symptoms when they're at work. They truly believe they're sick, but they unconsciously do this so that they don't have to admit that they're tired or lazy, because they were shamed for being lazy by their parents. Now, he didn't tell me that to say SA people are lazy, but to illustrate how you convince yourself of certain things because you can't/won't admit to others.

 

[truant]

The second psychologist I went to was pretty blunt in his observations, and I really needed some honest outside perspective at the time (my first therapist usually *****footed around it for fear of offending me, so I think he could have taught me more). What stuck to me the most was an anecdote he told me. He said a lot of hypochondriacs only complain about their symptoms when they're at work. They truly believe they're sick, but they unconsciously do this so that they don't have to admit that they're tired or lazy, because they were shamed for being lazy by their parents. Now, he didn't tell me that to say SA people are lazy, but to illustrate how you convince yourself of certain things because you can't/won't admit to others.

This is something I actually know something about. For starters, "hypochondriasis" is no longer the medical term for it:

The 2013 DSM-5 replaced the diagnosis of hypochondriasis with the diagnoses of somatic symptom disorder (75%) and illness anxiety disorder (25%).

Illness anxiety disorder (IAD) is basically health OCD. And it's about as much fun as other forms of OCD (ie. it can be a source of extreme, debilitating distress). Somatic symptom disorder (SSD) is the diagnosis you get when you develop physical symptoms that can be observed, but which cannot be explained, by a doctor. SSD is usually accompanied by health anxiety. In IAD, the preoccupation may have nothing to do with actual symptoms (ie. abnormal body states); in SSD, the symptoms are what create the anxiety: you may not have any health anxiety until a mysterious symptom appears. You can obviously have both, and I'm sure many people do.

I definitely have IAD and I was unofficially diagnosed with somatic symptom disorder by a doctor who got tired of not being able to tell me what was wrong with me. (And I'm sure there's a note in my medical history about it.) I have had bloodwork, ultrasounds, x-rays, and other medical tests done on me repeatedly over the years. And these were for symptoms that could be observed (but not explained) by my doctor: swollen glands, rashes, swollen/discolored fingers, lumps, etc. The tests usually came back inconclusive, with this or that elevated in some way or another. Most recently, the fingers on my hand swelled up so much that I couldn't close my hand or type. This is your body producing an observable effect as a result of anxiety/psychological conflict, sort of like a much less impressive stigmata. I also suffer from migraines, which I'm sure are also the result of some kind of psychological conflict/stress. Prolonged exposure to stress (eg. work) can also lead to dysregulation of the immune system and produce autoimmune disorders (which is where my colitis comes from).

Ngl, "hypochondriacs only complain about their symptoms when they're at work" made me lol, because it's really not like that at all. IAD/SSD has about as much to do with being afraid to admit you're "tired or lazy" as SAD does. If you're at home by yourself, there's obviously no one to "complain" to (more accurately: share your obsessive concerns with) so obviously you're only going to "complain about your symptoms when you're at work"; there have to be people around before you can talk about it. I obsess about my health with my online friend constantly, I did it with my exes when I was at home, I even do it with my parents even though I know they're sick of hearing about it. Work can certainly be a prime source of mental conflict, and anxiety at work can certainly make things worse, but it has no more to do with work than any other MH condition.

IAD and SAD are actually basically the same thing, just about different areas of experience. SAD is an intense preoccupation with what other people think about you. Typically, that hits you hardest when you have to actually interact with other people (eg. at work), which is what leads to avoidance, but you can sit around and obsess about what people will think of you at home, too. My IAD gives me more anxiety than my fear of other people because I can avoid other people by staying at home; I can't avoid my body. It's there all the time, just waiting for me to obsess about.

As to whether or not these obsessions are a substitute for dealing with other things you'd rather not think about, that's a very complicated question. Personally (and obviously contentiously) I think all MH disorders (which are not strictly neurological) are an adaptive response to an unresolvable conflict (the reasoning is too convoluted to explain here). They will persist for as long as that conflict exists, because the brain is trying to protect you from what it considers a worse condition. Some people will be able to resolve those conflicts if conditions change and the adaptive response is no longer required; other people will never be able to resolve those conflicts because external conditions haven't improved and living with the condition will always seem like the lesser of two evils to the brain. I don't believe this is the sort of thing an individual has a lot of control over since most of it occurs outside of conscious awareness and involves processes we don't have conscious control over. It depends largely on how supportive the environment is, which depends on things like the people they happen to know IRL, their socioeconomic status, their ability to access quality care, etc. That health obsession might be the only thing protecting that person from psychosis or suicide.

 

[Saeta]

I think he meant hypocondriacs but not in the clinical sense. In the same way you can make a distinction between a narcissist and someone with NPD. He was describing someone who was raised to believe they had to be diligent or else they would be inadequate. I have a friend who was raised like that. His mom was a tyrant and pretty much locked him up at home and forced him to study too much and didn't let him have any friends. Eventually he started using medical emergencies as a way out.

My therapist used the comparison to encourage me to stop thinking about my symptoms and see things in context. Maybe you just don't like those people or that activity and that's why you focus so much on whether you're making eye contact or your heart's racing when you're there. That definitely applied to me, but I know other people have very different and more unpredictable sources of anxiety.

I don't believe this is the sort of thing an individual has a lot of control over

Maybe you have very little control over whether or when the symptoms will appear, but in textbook cases of SA and AVPD, the key is realizing people don't care whether you're nervous or avoid eye contact, so you shouldn't try to hide who you are. And there is definitely an element of focusing on one thing to avoid dealing with something else in the case of people who are comically misanthropic or people who think everything that's wrong with them is because of SA, but there's an iceberg's worth of underlying disorders and fixable personality/attitude problems underneath that they're not acknowledging, much less addressing.

 

[truant]

I think he meant hypocondriacs but not in the clinical sense. In the same way you can make a distinction between a narcissist and someone with NPD.

Okay, I see what you mean. People who shift blame to avoid criticism/threats to their self-esteem. Some people shift blame to other people ("I would have X but Y-person didn't do Z"), and some will shift it to purported physical problems ("I would have X but I feel so Y today/my Z is killing me"). People who constantly fall back on physical reasons can look like hypochondriacs, even though they don't have actual symptoms (SSD) or health anxiety (IAD). I just assumed your therapist meant it in a clinical sense.

My therapist used the comparison to encourage me to stop thinking about my symptoms and see things in context. Maybe you just don't like those people or that activity and that's why you focus so much on whether you're making eye contact or your heart's racing when you're there. That definitely applied to me, but I know other people have very different and more unpredictable sources of anxiety.

I definitely think that's good advice. "What is my body telling me right now?" My therapist has been working with me on that.

Maybe you have very little control over whether or when the symptoms will appear, but in textbook cases of SA and AVPD, the key is realizing people don't care whether you're nervous or avoid eye contact, so you shouldn't try to hide who you are.

I wouldn't say people don't care. Only that how much they care, and how serious a problem it is to other people, tends to be greatly exaggerated.

There are really two problems here: being seen as nervous, and being anxious about being seen as nervous. Being seen as nervous by other people is hardly the end of the world; the problem comes from being afraid to be seen that way, which leads to avoidance and attempts to control how other people see you, and that transforms "nervousness" into "insecurity." (One might say that a shy person is a person who is not insecure about being shy.)

This is analogous to being bald. Being bald is not the end of the world; it's the way a person obsesses about and tries to hide the fact that they're losing their hair that ruins their life. Most people don't actually care all that much if you're bald; what they don't like is your insecurity. Same with being seen as nervous. It's a bit meta, though.

And there is definitely an element of focusing on one thing to avoid dealing with something else in the case of people who are comically misanthropic or people who think everything that's wrong with them is because of SA, but there's an iceberg's worth of underlying disorders and fixable personality/attitude problems underneath that they're not acknowledging, much less addressing.

Well, that misanthropy or "blaming everything on SA" is a defense against those underlying issues. This is what I was getting at. It may be true that their misanthropy is preventing them from seeing themselves objectively, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Seeing themselves objectively would not necessarily improve their lives or make them more adaptive if they aren't in an environment that supports that kind of objectivity; it could destabilize them and lead to further deterioration. Hating and blaming other people may be the only thing keeping them going.

Misanthropy is self-protective. If you take someone who has been repeatedly hurt by other people, and who has become a misanthrope to protect what remains of their self-worth, and then you tell them that it's their own fault they have problems because their misanthropy is preventing them from looking at themselves objectively, you have just re-traumatized them; you have effectively blamed the victim; which is why people lash out at you when you try "tough love" on them. That's not to say that tough love never works, only that it only works when a person is ready to hear it (ie. when they are in an environment that makes change possible). These kinds of environments sometimes happen organically when people fall in love, or make a new friend, or get a good job, or accomplish some other objective, which is why people often grow out of their problems. But not everyone has those kinds of experiences. For many people, the only place a good environment exists is in the therapist's office or support group, and then, only when the therapist/support group is any good.

There is a reason why people act the way they do, and until that person has a better alternative, smashing through their defenses is just going to create a crisis, which could be dangerous for them and other people. When a better alternative is available, people will take it automatically and spontaneously. You don't have to badger them. They will want to change. Nobody--absolutely nobody--wants to stay sick or enjoys being sick. It literally never happens. It is always a defensive position.

The brain has one job, and that's to keep you alive, and it does that by moving away from pain. It does that by predicting the amount of pain you will experience if you take a certain course of action. If a person doesn't want to take your advice and change, it's because, from their current position, according to their predictions, you are asking them to move into a state of increased pain, not decreased pain, and their brain isn't going to let that happen. And, like I said, most of this is going on at levels we are not consciously aware of or have any conscious control over, even if the reason seems obvious to outside observers.

We should respect the brain's wisdom instead of chastising people for "not trying hard enough." If you want to help people, the only thing that works is honoring their experience (being nonjudgmental) and extending your compassion. In the right kind of environment, the brain will heal itself. The reason why so many people are sick, and why so many never get better, is because our culture actively fosters environments that promote sickness instead of health.

 

[Saeta]

That's not to say that tough love never works, only that it only works when a person is ready to hear it (ie. when they are in an environment that makes change possible) [...] They will want to change. Nobody--absolutely nobody--wants to stay sick or enjoys being sick. It literally never happens. It is always a defensive position.

Lately I find myself agreeing with this position. If you want advice you don't need it and if you need advice you don't want it. Still, it's much like when a dog tries to bite you when you try to treat its wounds. You can't reason with the dog, but there may be a small chance that the things you say to a person will sink in.

You mentioned support groups and there's someone I know who is a good illustration of this. This forum (thankfully) nips discussions of who has it worse in the bud, but the forums in my country don't. One of them is run by a 40-year-old guy who never had any friends, never talked unless forced to, and had ridiculously overprotective parents, to the extent that they offered to go with him whenever he drove his car for over 10 years. This person really liked telling anyone who wasn't as behind in life as him (e.g.: men with girlfriends) that they were falsely claiming to have social anxiety to get attention. Then he got a girlfriend and changed his tune ever so slightly so that he could still call himself a social phobic despite being in a relationship. This is just context to show what kind of person he is.

My country used to have a very active SA meetup scene, with a nation-wide association with local representatives and everything. Eventually he started going to those meetups and said that he was incredibly disappointed because a) he wasn't expecting people to be able to hold conversations and b) everyone was very unsympathetic because they barely gave him any conversation (not realising how contradictory those two things are, but whatever). In the forums, he phrased this as a warning to anyone wanting to go to those gatherings, which was extra hilarious. He apparently said rude things to them in subsequent meetups, like claiming they were posers or just begging for attention and stopped hanging out with them. He's never tried to make friends since. His reasoning? He's one of the very few true social phobics and that if the people in those meetups were like him, they would immediately accept him, entertain him, and care about him. And of course, if you try to convince him otherwise or even entertain the notion that he's seeing things through a distorted lens, you're just a covert extrovert who doesn't understand what SA is. I have a very hard time seeing him as the victim in all of this. It's just plain stubbornness and egocentrism. He refuses to admit that his impressions of people are super shallow and that being starved of social interactions for decades means there's a lot going on in those situations that he's just not trained to recognize.

 

[Myosr]

the only insights i had was talking to other patients in group therapy. which is kind of sad. i rarely empathize with people irl and it was kind of weird to realize that other ppl can also be vulnerable.

Sent from my SM-G965F using Tapatalk

 

[truant]

Lately I find myself agreeing with this position...

I think we should set aside the issue of blame for the moment. This person is the product of his biology interacting with his environment. We all are. There is no "ghost in the machine" that can step back from biology and external conditions and decide to respond to things differently. If you were him (had his genetics and experiences), you would BE him. You would be exactly like him. If I were him, I would BE him. We can judge his behavior, but we're deluding ourselves if we believe we would be any different if we were in his position. We can see "solutions" to his problems because we're looking at it from the outside, with our own experiences, and only an extremely limited amount of insight into his actual conditions (so our solutions might not be solutions at all). From inside, we would experience exactly the same conditions he is experiencing, the ones which are driving him to act in the way that he does, and we would be driven to act in exactly the same way.

When I say that no one wants to be sick I mean that in an overall, inclusive sense; from a narrower perspective, ofc, some people, for certain reasons, do prefer to "stay sick" than to change. But this is always the brain making predictions about different courses of action and choosing that course which it predicts will lead to the least amount of pain. When people "stay sick" it's because they're avoiding a course of action which they believe will lead to something worse than what they're already dealing with. The resistance is coming from the brain's survival instinct, which responds to pain. What people tell you is just a rationalization for their actions.

Ofc, the predictions that their brain is making about probable outcomes may be completely distorted. That's the kind of thing CBT/exposure therapy helps with. But even CBT will only really help in certain kinds of contexts, like when the risk seems small, the negative outcomes tolerable, and the person has some kind of support network. It's in these kinds of conditions that people get better. If you can convince a person that a course of action will really lead to an increase in the quality of their life, and that they have a reasonable chance of success, they will take it; because everyone wants to be happier than they are. But you, as an outsider, are not estimating risks the way that they are.

Their experiences have shaped the lens they use to view and understand the world and their predictions are based on the experiences they've accumulated through that lens, not through your lens. What seems possible to you won't necessarily seem possible to them. And, for that matter, since you are not living their life, their predictions may actually be much more accurate than yours. Just because most people don't openly reject Person X when they push themselves out of their comfort zone doesn't mean they won't openly reject him.

If you assume that everyone with SAD has more or less the same kinds of resources available and has had similar kinds of experiences (as many therapists do) then you are going to fail people with fewer resources. This is the main reason, I suspect, why so many people have bad experiences in therapy and decide that therapy is worthless. Because their therapists aren't actually listening to them; they're making assumptions which are every bit as distorted as the assumptions their patients are making. And then those therapists blame it on the patients and say that they "just don't want to get better." But their patients' brains work just as well as the therapist's brain does, and it's doing its best to protect them from harm. It's rejecting the therapist's suggestions because it sees them as harmful, considering the conditions they're facing.

Their lens may be distorted, their information may be distorted, but the tool they're using to make their predictions is just as powerful as yours is, and they have infinitely more insight into their own conditions than you do. So, at best, therapy is always a cooperative venture; the objective is for one brain to try to help another brain find out where they can make the most important changes with the least amount of risk. And then to support that brain in making those changes. There is no room for blame in this arrangement.

People's behaviors are always adaptive responses to the conditions they've experienced. They're not perfect adaptations (that's why we try to educate people and show them different kinds of coping techniques) and often they're very destructive (like an adaptation that tells them to kill all their enemies). I'm not saying people aren't responsible for the consequences of their actions, or that they shouldn't be held accountable (a harm is a harm is a harm), and I'm not saying that many adaptations aren't ultimately self-destructive because they're working with a very distorted lens and very distorted information. What I'm saying is that people do not consciously, intentionally, maliciously, stubbornly choose to be difficult or stay sick at an overall level. Even when they are behaving very destructively those behaviors are always serving some kind of ego-protective function.

It seems to me that the identity "The One True Social Phobic" is very important to this person's feeling of self-worth. Without this identity, what is he? He's a nobody. He's nothing special. He doesn't have anything else to fall back on. (This is what I suspect he is thinking, not my opinion of him.) It's better to have social anxiety than to feel like your life is utterly pointless and not worth living. Sharing this identity may be his reason for living atm. Knowing that he has "the most serious case of social phobia in history" is how he gives himself permission to feel what little self-compassion he allows himself to feel. Knowing his problems are "more severe" than anyone else's gives him what little feeling of self-respect he is capable of. If he does not have that identity, if he's created this whole mess himself, then he will stop feeling compassion for himself. He will stop respecting himself. He will hate himself even more than he already does. Even if this isn't exactly how he's set up inside, it will be something like this.

When someone comes at him with a Righteous Hammer of Truth, what happens? He retaliates. He digs in his heels. Because he's literally fighting for his life. If you manage to break through his distortions this way, and get him to see how he's doing all of this to himself, you'll create a crisis, and who knows what will happen. He will have to find new reasons for people to feel sorry for him, and for him to feel sorry for himself, because it's the only kind of compassion he ever experiences, and the only way to do that is to make his own problems worse. He might attempt suicide.

"Tough love" is an incredibly dangerous tactic, and considering how rarely it actually works, and how harmful it can actually be, it's just not the kind of thing I want in my toolkit. My dad is a "tough love" guy (he kicked me out when I was 18 because he thought it would be good for me) and it did me absolutely no good. But that doesn't mean you have to coddle people, either. One can be brutally honest about how all this stuff works without blaming anyone for being the way that they are. If you are depressed and moping around, people won't want to spend any time with you. It's not pleasant, it's not fair, but that's how it is. That doesn't mean it's your fault that no one wants to spend any time with you. It's just the outcome you get, brains operating the way that they do.

This is just my opinion, and I know most people disagree with me, but every person, without exception, is doing the best that they can. Just like every other organism on the planet. The problem with humans is that we've created very toxic mental climates for ourselves through our distorted ways of thinking and it makes healthy environments for people to grow in very hard to come by.

 

[Saeta]

You're making this more dramatic than it needs to be. There is such a thing as smarmy neckbeards who only care about empathy when it's from others to them. This person was one of those. He's not fighting for his life, he's being dismissive of people for petty reasons and then wondering why no one wants to hang out with him anymore. A more humble person would accept advice from people who have done this song and dance before (or mentally blow them off, that's his prerrogative). Is it a crime to point out he definitely played a role in that and that the other attendants weren't being mean by not talking to the most silent, unreadable person in the room? I don't particularly want to baby a 40-year-old man who accuses me of feigning a mental illness because, I don't know, he probably read I went to a concert when I was 28. If realizing he's not The One shatters his self-image, well, it has to happen sooner or later. And if it doesn't he'll continue living the way he does which isn't exactly making him happy.

Internet misanthropes aren't some kind of scaredy cats who are only retaliating against their (definitely non-existent) abusers. They're poisoning the minds of younger, more insecure people and conning them into thinking they have no choice but to end up like them and anyone who says otherwise is a poser or a guru. Also, determinism is always such a bad argument. If my parents were awful neocons, I'd probably be a racist. Does that excuse me being racist? No. I'm an adult who can make informed decisions and tell right from wrong. You can also use determinism to scoff at people who claim they overcame things through effort. Versatile! This person in particular wasn't abused or bullied a lot, but his parents just never seemed to eject him from the nest. Does that excuse him saying anyone who isn't doing as badly in life is only pretending to have a mental illness? Should I be walking on eggshells around a person who's being a douche to me? I guess I don't get to retaliate because I don't present myself as a victim?

 

[Cool Ice Dude55]

I've learnt insights into how my childhood affected who I am today.

 

[LydeaCharlotte]

This thread, maybe, seems to be veering too much towards aggression between users, and Who has it Worse. Please calm down, and try and to keep it reasonably on topic.

Who has it Worse
This site is not a competition - it's not about whose particular brand of suffering is the worse, who suffers more than whom, or who has the right to call their problems Social Anxiety. This includes comparisons of suffering between the genders. The belittlement of others' suffering will not be tolerated.

 

[truant]

This thread, maybe, seems to be veering too much towards aggression between users, and Who has it Worse. Please calm down, and try and to keep it reasonably on topic.

I've deleted my post. I didn't think it was overly confrontational (this is all pretty academic to me :blank ) but better safe than sorry. @Saeta is welcome to PM me if they want to continue the discussion. My apologies if I've been overly aggravating. That's not my intent. I'll try to keep my thoughts to myself in the future.

 

[LydeaCharlotte]

I've deleted my post. I didn't think it was overly confrontational (this is all pretty academic to me :blank ) but better safe than sorry. @Saeta is welcome to PM me if they want to continue the discussion. My apologies if I've been overly aggravating. That's not my intent. I'll try to keep my thoughts to myself in the future.

Thanks for that. No, your post really wasn't the problem. It was just about Saeta getting a bit too confrontational.