Thank you, man.

Well I reached out in a very harmful and manipulative way is the thing. Only a few EAP sessions are covered by my job. My insurance is shit so I pay the full price of therapy as if I had no insurance because it’s not covered. But I have still been in therapy anyway because I know it’s necessary and I am paid well enough to afford it.

Occasionally I feel like I need to talk to someone in the middle of the night, but that’s not really a thing. Suicide hotlines are for suicidal people. I was in extreme distress but not suicidal. I’ve never called one before. I have heard of warm lines like just recently after that event. Usually I am not to that level of extreme as the other day though, just high distress not extreme extreme distress lol. But idk that any of these are suitable idk what to do man.

Yeah I will def tell my therapist when I see her next and my provider was in the process of starting me on a new SSRI but I am not at the minimum therapeutic dose yet. I see her in a few days. I don’t have a DBT group but someone did suggest that to me. I wasn’t interested but maybe I’ll have to investigate further.

Yeah basically everyone at work knows I’m in therapy at this point.

Doesn’t it make me bad that I hurt them though? That I said those things and didn’t really mean it though? That I have made them concerned about me before?

Also, are you able to call suicide hotlines if you are not actively suicidal? Occasionally I have been at the level I was a couple nights ago with extreme extreme distress (usually it’s just high distress), but since I’ve never been to the point of like almost dying, I never called it. I don’t want to tie up the line and idk if they’d just hang up quickly anyway if I said I wasn’t gonna kill myself. I have also just found out about “warm lines”, but idk if it’s too intense for that too lol it’s like an intermediate issue. And a lot don’t seem to be open in the middle of the night.

Idk thanks for listening.

Curious how old you are if you wouldn’t mind sharing.

I know you didn’t ask for it this way, but I don’t believe in a good. Thing is we get only one life on this planet. At its core, we are all organisms simply fighting to survive with as minimal pain possible. So if life truly has no meaning then the only thing you need to worry about is pleasure. Not in a decompensatory way, but as a way to realize that that’s what we are here for. To survive and persist and do what we can to find kindness and pleasure for ourselves.

I’m sorry if that’s not overly helpful. I just hope that you see that we here you. You are not alone in this community. Please stay with us.

Wow! Do you have sex? Other forms of physical touch? I never knew two people who don’t enjoy kissing could find each other.

I did twice in life. It was very wet and tasted like spit. Confusing why it’s pleasant to others lol.

Thank you. :) Right now my issues are not from social anxiety, but rather from ongoing social “abuse” and rejection/abandonment at work. I used to wake up every day excited to go to work, but now I just feel so alone there. I cry often in the bathroom and before and after.

It’s not as simple as “get a new job” either. My field is small and it would necessitate moving away. Yet I own my place. Plus I am tied with someone who I felt to be my best friend at one point who no longer is. For someone with social anxiety, feeling accepted is important to me.

I feel very alone in person rn and am struggling, but that’s why I’ve always taken solace on the internet. Sure there are also a lot of shitheads online…often more than irl. But at the same time, you can run into people who you can pour your heart out and that will actually accept you. Maybe it’s “unhealthy”, but it has always helped me. I started talking to people online during my early teens when I had such extreme social anxiety that I could hardly talk to anyone in person. I credit my experiences online with helping me to develop social skills in person despite me being unable to do so at the time.

Hoping the best for you all. Happy Friday. :)

Glad to hear, OP! Anything in particular that helped? Or just the natural flow of things?

The only thing certain in life is change. Sometimes it’s change for the bad and sometimes it’s change for the good. But it will change. So the possibility of a good change always keeps me going.

Ok this is a dumb question, but do antidepressants help with this? I’m in therapy and tried an antidepressant before and one other class of med but it didn’t seem to help. My provider wants to try me on a different antidepressant again, but it’s a bit disheartening to have already tried two different meds.

Interestingly, I had a 23andme done for funsies. And there is a section I didn’t know about where it talks about how the action of some drugs can be affected by my genetics. It actually said that I would have reduced efficacy for the SSRI they had me on first. I brought this info to my provider which is why she wants me to try a different SSRI even after several failed meds.

Very interesting. I had never really heard of this before. Thanks for the info. I’d try it out, but personally I don’t watch much TV anymore tbh. It’s all YouTube videos (ad free with ad blockers and modified apps) with very rarely some free streaming platforms thrown in there (PlutoTV, Tubi, etc.).

Have you looked up “contamination OCD”? That’s basically what you’re describing! I wouldn’t say it’s overly common among the general population, but it is an incredibly well known phenomenon and something that providers are definitely able to treat! If you’re not able to see someone due to various reasons like cost (totally understandable!), you might try looking up the methodologies that specifically address and treat contamination OCD.

So a caveat to this is that digital signal is absolutely shit compared to analog. Back when we had rabbit ears, even if the picture was fuzzy/suboptimal, you could watch the show just fine. Nowadays? If you’re not getting 100% full strength signal, it is literally unwatchable. The audio and picture freeze every two seconds which makes it literally impossible to understand and follow dialogue. Either I get a crystal clear picture and audio or I get an unwatchable mess. There is no in between anymore with digital signal.

Plus, I only seem to get this crystal clear signal from the top floor in my home and near a window. If you have a lower floor or have the antenna a bit too far away from the window, it also just does not work hardly at all. This was never an issue with analog signal for me.

Idk if it’s just me or not. There are a ton more channels overall with the digital signals compared to analog, but it’s frustrating that I only seem to be able to watch them if the signal is absolutely perfect.

Ok I know you are trying to help at all and chronic headaches can occasionally point to something bad about this.

But there is a funny sort of humor that comes from telling an incredibly anxious person that they might have a brain tumor lol.

I really mean no disrespect!

Idk…I struggle with this too like the OP said. Yes, the directions are there. But notice how that paragraph was hidden within walls and walls of text.

If they put it at the top or at the very least bolded it or made it in a different color or literally anything, it would be way better for everyone and even more idiot proof.

Yeah…I don’t agree with the sentiment of the OP necessarily. What gets me through shit though is knowing not the meaningless and sometimes inaccurate phrase of “it always gets better”, but rather that “change is inevitable”. Really, the only certainty in life is change. Sometimes it’s change for the better, and sometimes it’s change for the worse. But things do change…whether we do want them to or whether we don’t. It’s always that chance of the next change being a bit more positive that keeps me going in life.

Idk if this sounds weird…but I’ve always felt this way because I feel…different?? from people somehow? It’s like I’m a different sort of being…like someone with a brain defect or a subhuman or something. I don’t really know how to explain this. But others are good and real people so it’s acceptable. But for me I “know better” and am defective so this sort of rule doesn’t apply to me. Idk.

No, sorry. The second therapist who I only saw 3 times gave me a workbook. The one who I have been seeing for a long time did not. So I’ve only been doing the workbook relatively recently.

This second therapist doesn’t say anything to me during the sessions tho. She lets me talk a bit and then is just like “I love this chapter. Guess what happens in chapter 7? Chapter 4 is my favorite”. And I don’t know how to keep responding to that.

The workbook doesn’t answer big picture questions tho like my old therapist asks. The workbook is very useful, but I’ve only just started with it. One frustrating thing is I feel like it just puts a bandaid on the issue. It doesn’t solve it or help stop any of my pain.

My old (current) therapist gives me only vague things that I have a hard time figuring out what to do with.

You don’t understand what I’m saying. I’m spinning my head around and around and trying to come at some of these questions from all angles. I spend hours and hours trying to figure it out…bouncing ideas off of ChatGPT, wracking my own brain, working without ChatGPT to come up with new ideas.

I’m already in my head entirely too much and was already trying to dive into there to figure things out before therapy. It just made things worse and ended up with me spinning in circles in bizarre thought loops and ideas.

I cannot for the life of me come up with my own solution to my problems, no matter how many hours I put into it or how many different angles I try to come at it.

Is it really such crazy of an ask ask for me to want a therapist to vaguely help to slightly point me in the hope of any direction at all whatsoever to even start to begin to figure out any of my problems at all? Like even just giving me the hint of an idea? Or like some sort of coping skill? Or some sort of new way of looking at something that I haven’t managed to think my way into yet?

Here’s an example of a convo in therapy.

Me: I’m having a lot of trouble with X. I can’t figure out how to deal with it.

Therapist: How do you think you should deal with X?

Me: I don’t know. I can’t for the life of me figure it out.

Therapist: You need to figure out how to deal with X.

Like I just want some sort of direction at all.

Am I just too mentally challenged for therapy then??? I just don’t understand what else to do.

I have been trying a lot of different medications, with my provider, yeah. I’m not sure how a medication could make my thinking “less rigid” like you say.

I can say that the session ending 35 minutes early for any reason other than one you agreed upon ahead of time is extraordinary and almost certainly unprofessional.

Granted, I didn’t exactly try to stop her from hitting the end call button. But when me trying to talk about my experiences was just met with “ok well I don’t like that part of that chapter” or something, I just didn’t know what else to say. We stared at each other for a while before she was like welp see you in a few weeks! Idk…I did try to contribute. It just wasn’t met with anything overly meaningful. She also spent like 10 minutes talking about how her dog needed extensive treatment and she had a not great day. Like I get that sucks but I would have rather you cancel the appointment than to just not listen to me and then end the call 30 minutes early.

also dunno about all this workbook shit…

I agree with you to some extent. I was excited when she showed me the book because it’s actually a gold standard book for DBT. BUT I was hoping that it would be a supplement to the therapy, not just her telling me how much she loves the book for the entire session and not really say anything to me when I relate things back to my own life. The way she talks about the book all day, you’d have thought she wrote the thing lol!!!

A good therapist doesn’t just ask you how you can deal with X (though that is in fact an important part of it), a good therapist works with you to help you figure out how you can deal with X, including making suggestions of their own. A good therapist doesn’t just watch you sputter and flounder on the high sea asking, “jeez looks like a tight spot you’re in there, how ya gonna get outta that?”, they throw the therapist’s metaphorical equivalent of a float and bring you aboard and place you (to the extent possible in the circumstances) in calmer, shallower water.

Thank you so so much for saying this. Everyone in these comments is assuming I am not working hard because I don’t even know where to begin to deal with X. All these comments effectively saying “introspect and figure it out” isn’t helpful to me when that’s all I do and I still can’t figure out anything!

I kind of feel like I’m a teen just learning how to drive. And instead of explaining how the car works, your parent is just like “drive to that stop sign there.” And I’m like…ok but I don’t know how to drive yet can you show me? And they are just like “well figure it out. Go drive to the stop sign.”

Everyone in here is chastising me for being unable to figure out how to reach the stop sign on my own. I am trying as hard as I can, but I can’t get there without being given at least some idea of how to turn on the car, put it in gear, etc. I get that eventually someone could learn to drive that way, but it’s gonna take them 20 times as long.

Fuck anyone who implies you’re not trying hard enough or that a mediocre therapist is good enough. You can tell good and well for your own damn self that it ain’t workin; TRUST YOURSELF. Yes, it’s important that you do most of the work and yes, some people or some issues can tolerate mediocrity, blah blah blah. Is that working for you? Seriously ask yourself. Keep trying 'til you find the right one. But don’t drop the one until you’ve picked up another, if possible. less-than-ideal therapy is usually better than no therapy at all.

Thank you very much for your kind words. It has been very disheartening for me to hear on a mental health community of all things that I am just not trying. I honestly didn’t expect that kind of response from half of all of the people there. It certainly isn’t motivating or helpful to me. It just makes me feel even worse.

This second time around, I was searching specifically for a therapist who does DBT because that helps treat “emotional dysregulation”, but now I’m wondering if I need to look for a trauma therapist instead.