cherapple

I'd caution against anyone who claims to be a therapist and uses the boards as a place for seeking clients. Drew, what you're doing is not ethical behavior and takes advantage of people who post about vulnerable topics.

I've been eating a vegan diet for over a year following a major health scare (the root of which wasn't directly related to animal products). It may be entirely psychological, but I do it because I have enough stress hormones in my body from PTSD symptoms of an abusive history, without consuming the bodies of animals manufactured, exploited, and killed under high levels of abuse and stress. I don't find it appetizing at all. I experience vegan food as some of the most creative, fun, and tasteful I've ever eaten on any other diet. Many a meal is like a delicious and colorful novelty. Of course, plenty of vegan food is junk food, and I limit my intake of that. I don't care at all for the movement.

Emotional virus - When someone avoids his feelings, so those around him feel them instead. Empathy - The ability to understand, witness, and feel the full range of emotional experiences in oneself and others (not necessarily accompanied by sympathy). Manipulation - Using dishonesty, vagueness, guilt, and inconsistency to control the feelings, choices, and behaviors of another. Non-Aggression Principle - The assertion that all forms of aggression or initiations of force are immoral, with the exception of self-defense. Projection - A form of hypocrisy in which a person remains unaware of his outward actions and their internal motivations, and protects himself from the pain of self-awareness by accusing others of the very behavior he is acting out. Putting the child first - A principle of self-knowledge that looks back to the beginning. It acknowledges the effects of our experiences as vulnerable children in forming who we become as adults. It asserts what should happen -- that the most vulnerable (children) should be "put first" and protected by those who are stronger (adults) -- providing children with examples of strength and freeing them to grow into their most capable adult selves. Sympathy - Empathizing with and acknowledging painful and difficult life experiences and the harmful effects they can have.

A couple observations. You say "in your mother's mind," something is wrong with you to bring up the past. No, she wants you to believe something is wrong with you so you won't bring up the past. She believes something is wrong with HER if she brings up her own past. That's why she does't do self-work. And she wants to manipulate you to feel the same way about yourself so you won't bring up anything about the past either. You can talk to whoever you want to - one parent, both parents, neither parent. You are not a hypocrite, whatever your choice. Do what's right for you, and they will do what they think is right for them. A negative label like "hypocrite" benefits your mother, again, if you believe it. Refuse to accept negative labels about yourself from other people. Most of the time, they are manipulations. All the best in talking to your father. It sounds like there's some hope for real connection there.

Kind people will not disapprove of you for saying something "stupid" if you are honest in your self-expression. They will either gently correct you, or express curiosity about where you're coming from.

Fear. Talking about meaningful topics in childhood brought disapproval, punishment, rejection. So they became a false self with "nothing" to talk about. What are your experiences when you try to talk to people who have nothing to talk about? Or do you ask because you become one of them? (I used to.)

Go find them. Join meetups where you share common interests with people. Consider it all to be experimentation and trial and error. The more you interact with people, the more you get to know yourself and stretch your capabilities. I'm enjoying time with people in one 12-step group in particular. It's called ACA, or Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. These people aren't philosophers, but the self-work they do is no joke. The concepts of false self and true self are an official part of the program. They do the work to know who they are and who their parents were. Just try different things and don't wait for people to come to you. Go to them, be yourself, and see who comes toward you. Reject the ones you don't like and welcome the ones you do. That's it. There are plenty of people in the world to find a few you like spending time with.

Hello, Rooster, from Central New York. Welcome to the boards. Cheryl From Eastern NY

Here's something I wrote about shyness for Self-Knowledge Daily: "Shyness: The Hypocritical Myth"

Here's my contribution to this topic. Published on www.selfknowledgedaily.com How to Find a Good Therapist The Search for Honesty, Kindness and Other Important Traits When you begin the work of self-growth, you won’t be in the best position to recognize helpful people. That’s why you need a therapist to begin with — to improve your ability to relate to yourself and others, and to grow life skills. As the Minimalists like to say: “You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.” One of the most important people you can choose to bring around you is your therapist. A problem may arise, however, if (for example) you had to adapt to your childhood by manipulating your parents to get your needs met. If your parents didn’t allow you to express your needs openly and honestly, but instead manipulated you to suppress yourself for their convenience, you’ll have a hard time recognizing manipulative habits in others, including in a therapist. In fact, you’ll actually be more likely to go toward such people because you’ve learned competence in dealing with them, and like everyone, you want to be competent. And you want to be competent in finding someone who will help you grow more competent! The Catch-22 How do you break out of this catch-22? You’ll be at least partially blind to the maladaptive traits you most need to see. You’ll be unconscious of them in yourself, you’ll be unconscious of them in friends, lovers, and people you choose to work with, and you’ll likely be blind to them in potential therapists. This can be scary. Therapy and self-growth can throw our whole world into question. How do we learn to stop bringing the wrong types people around us? What if we have already surrounded ourselves with the “wrong” people? What do you do when the person in question is a therapist with years of experience, a formal education, and authoritative letters behind his or her name? Can you trust yourself to decide which therapist to hire? “Get back to your simple lived experience. … When you have that level of perspective, that level of sinking into the base evidence of your senses and what you’ve actually lived through in life, it’s … like you’re sailing through fog and that’s a very powerful thing.” —  Stefan Molyneux Telling Points In my early experiences of therapy, I felt a lot anger, fear, and sadness during sessions and I was either terrible at expressing myself — because I so rarely had the opportunity — or I pretended I didn’t feel anything. Yet this habit of self-suppression was one of the things I most wanted to overcome. Many of us have been forbidden to feel anger or express it as children, so this can be a major telling point with therapists. How do they handle anger? How will they handle it when you cry? Are they curious about difficult feelings, do they discuss feelings in accepting ways, or do they reject, deny, ignore, and suppress — while denying their own avoidant behavior? A therapist’s reaction to your genuinely difficult feelings will tell how much self-work have they done, how well they handle their own emotions, how aware of themselves they are, and how much self-knowledge they’ve achieved. If you carry large amounts of grief, anger, and even rage at having to suppress yourself in order to earn “love” as a child, you need a therapist who knows better than you both how to express difficult feelings and how to be curious about them. Most of all, you need a therapist who will sit calmly with discomfort — his and yours. You want one who will express himself and meet his own needs assertively. You want one who will interact with you in a kind, open, positive, and honest way, so you can learn those same skills. The Therapist’s Job The therapist you hire takes on the job of substitute parent, providing an example of treating you well. Your goal with therapy is to learn to treat yourself well, in the ways your parents either failed or chose not to. Regardless of the reasons your parents might give for their harmful actions, even while many therapists say otherwise, therapy is not the time to “forgive.” It’s your parents’ responsibility to earn your forgiveness. It’s up to them whether they try. Your responsibility to yourself lies in handing their responsibility back to them so you no longer have to carry what doesn’t belong to you. Therapy is the time to understand and accept the ways in which your parents harmed your ability to care for yourself, so you can grow in the areas where they stopped you from growing. A good therapist approaches you from the position of experience as an adult who has grown beyond their own parents (whatever that means for them) and shows you how to re-parent yourself in three areas of need: emotional, mental, and physical. No therapist is strong in all three areas. They may be strong in empathy, but weak in philosophy and clear mental thinking. They may ignore physical presentations of trauma and only approach you mentally. They may spend your sessions pulling the authority card and giving advice. They may even lack curiosity about your feelings and actively disregard your needs. —"Are you for real?" At first, the worst therapists may be difficult to avoid, if they treat you poorly in ways you’re used to. This happens all too often! But it isn’t necessarily a bad thing because you are free to learn from the experience and—as opposed to when you were a child — fire the jerk, and keep looking. How to Find Good People More Quickly You may not choose well the first time. The good news is that you have philosophy to help you find the better therapists. I went from therapist to therapist with little progress throughout my adult life. The experiences were often so disappointing that eventually I refused to see a therapist for a period of ten years, resolving that I could be kinder to myself than trained professionals could. Since incorporating philosophy into my self-growth tools, I’ve worked with six different counselors, therapists and coaches and I finally gained traction. With the last two, I’ve experienced 100% win-win interactions. Philosophy helped me begin to learn what to look for, to have the courage to say “no” to people who didn’t meet my needs, and to eventually find confidence in saying “yes.” Your goal is to find a therapist who, when you think of working with them, you think, “Hell yeah!” In the words of Derek Sivers: “If it isn’t a hell yeah, it’s a no.” As long as I kept discounting my own experiences and trusting everyone else over myself, I couldn’t achieve a “hell yeah” in just about any area of my life. I lived to please everyone but myself. Only you can know when you’ve found your “hell yeah” therapist. A Few Tips Before you schedule your first session, ask for a free 30 minutes of the therapist’s time in a phone call. Hire them only when you observe the following—or your version of this list: They say “yes” to an introductory phone call. They show genuine curiosity and ask you empathetic questions about what you’re looking for. They are open about their own life-long process toward self-growth. The best therapists will share rock-bottom moments from their own life. They answer with openness to questions about their childhood and their past and present relationships with their parents. It may be terrifying to ask such personal questions, but remember that you are paying them. You can ask anything! The worst they can do is become defensive or say they don’t want to answer, and this may give you exactly the type of information you’re looking for. Their level of openness regarding their own childhood may be the most telling in how valuable they will be to your growth. How much assertiveness do they display in expressing their own needs in the therapeutic relationship? How do they handle any timing issues in the call? How do they bring up issues of scheduling and payment? Are they friendly and forthcoming about what they expect from you, if you hire them? Do they ask directly what you’d like from them? Finally, do they have an online presence? Google them. Look on the internet for evidence of their level of integrity. This final tip has perhaps helped me the most. Not every therapist will have, nor want, an online presence, but if they are confident about their abilities, in this day and age, I believe having some kind of online identity is a must. It shows they have more to offer than just their credentials. The most recent therapist and coach with whom I’ve worked have been the ones I’ve had the most fulfilling relationships with. I hired them because they generously and publicly displayed their capacity for a positive relationship with themselves. Finally, you want to hire a person who demonstrates success in both accepting and transcending their own worst moments of life. Their empathy level for themselves is a good indication of how well they will welcome you and invite the true you. The person who has successfully gone where you want to go is the one who will go there with you.

Hi Perry, The last therapist I saw before finding FDR in 2009 was ten years prior to that. I searched online for a therapist who specialized in social anxiety, hoping that would finally be "the thing" to help me. (Did internet browsers exist back then? Haha.) He used CBT, and I was so negatively affected by the experience, I swore never to see another therapist again because I was determined I could treat myself better than professionals did. I hope your experience is better! I actually did not gain traction in real self-growth until I started implementing philosophy, but FDR also taught me how to find a good therapist and warmed me up to trying again, which I've since done with trial and error and ultimate success. But what I really want to share is a moment of realization that was a turning point in my experiences with social anxiety. Have you ever paid attention to your own thoughts about other people when you're feeling anxiety? About four years ago, I was in a Skype call. Like you, my anxiety usually magnified in groups. This time, I think there were four or five of us in the call. For some reason, at some point, I stopped worrying about what they were thinking about me, and started hearing my own thoughts that I was thinking about them. While being terrified that they were attacking me in their minds, I realized I was attacking them in my mind. It was the first time I realized that my social anxiety came from projection. I finally understood I was afraid of other people because I feared they were treating me like I was treating them. In moments of anxiety, I became hyper focused on thoughts of others, but I was completely unaware of my own! This was a breakthrough because all I had to do from that point was start being kinder and more gentle in my thoughts about others, and my fears about what they were thinking about me relaxed as well. It didn't make the problem entirely go away because a great deal of past fear remains stored in the body. It has taken time, therapy, a focus on physical relaxation, and relationships with good people. I'm 20 years older than you, so your body and mind may relax more quickly and easily. All the best in your self-growth work, and sympathy for the true hell of living with social anxiety. Getting yourself out of the company of assholes -- while refusing to be one yourself -- are probably the most important and most freeing steps. Cheryl

"Cries for help" are manipulations. Honest communication comes from consciously knowing your own needs, openly expressing them, and giving other people direct choice whether to meet them. It's not up to anyone else to guess what your needs are and meet them for you. People who unconsciously want to be helped nag for it. Those who unconsciously want to be needed help. The relationship turns into a circular pattern of resentment and contempt, under which the real problems are hidden.

"Everyone does that" . . . just as "everyone" also constantly displays their choice to avoid communicating about important things — by saying things like "everyone does that (so we don't need to talk about it)" and choosing to instead spend their time nagging each other about unimportant things. It's simply an avoidance mechanism and the slow death of relationships.

Use Duolingo, find local Spanish meetups, and watch Coinality for Bitcoin-paying jobs that you could do internationally. Congrats on positioning yourself for options.

Thanks, Matthew! It's rewarding to know that others are getting value out of the work a few of us have been doing. We had been reading and following each other separately, until we recently decided to bring our work together in one place. I look forward to more feedback, Cheryl