Embracing Solitude: INTJ's Journey Towards Retirement

[ertyu]

So here's a weird suggestion about the loneliness: at home, when you are at peace, lie down somewhere calm-inducing (dim light if you like it, weighted blanket if you have one and enjoy it, etc, just enjoy), put on a timer for 15 min, and then attempt the following: call up the state you wish your body/insides/feelings were in when you are around your team or whoever. Doesn't have to be the team. You can just postulate a faceless group of friendly individuals who like and accept you. You don't have to visualize, let alone clearly, you don't have to picture yourself talking to them, none of that. You just have to call up on the inside the state you would be in and how you would feel / what it would be like for you on the inside if you were accepted and liked. If you get distracted, go, oh bummer i totally got carried away, and go back to it.

Do this daily.

What I predict would happen is that in the beginning you would have a hard time calling up this state. Keep trying to imagine being in the presence of people who like and accept you. If you give it time, I predict you will start getting a better and better handle on that state. You will sense how it feels different. You will sense where your body was tense but now isn't. You might feel sad - if sads come, sad them out, bawl if you need to, it's a free world and fuck the haters. But overall I predict that even if unpleasant shit does get released from time to time, on the whole, the experience would be positive. I think it will be relaxing and calming and you will like it. I think it will be regenerating after a day of work shit (if you find you want to do it more, increase your timer).

Another thing I predict will happen, but very very slowly, is that your body will start to be slooooooowly sloooooowly and very partially more relaxed in the presence of other monkeys. Monkeys are fun like that, social animals etcetera, they sense this shit. I predict that sloooooowly - like, don't sit around going, are we there yet are we there yet why isn't it happening, oh shit today was awful, this isn't working at all - sloooooowly you will be less tense around your coworkers, there will be less tension in your voice when you say things to them, and they will be less tense around you. I predict that you will eventually begin to feel bit by bit better when in the presence of other humans.

"Go to therapy" isn't an insult. It just means, "shit dude, I wish you got some help with that." I also seem to remember you mistrust therapists because you think it's in their best interest not to help you so they can keep you in therapy for longer. Which is fine -- it's where you are, and if you feel this way, something or another mustve happened that made this make sense in light of your experiences. Some therapists do suck. Finding a good one is a pain. Luckily, you don't have to go to therapy to start working on shit.

There's two broad venues of working on shit. One is cognitive, the other is somatic. They both help differently. For the cognitive, try the book Feeling Good by David Burns. It's old, and it's a classic. It will help with the extent to which the shitty way you feel is caused by cognitive distortions but it won't help completely. For the more somatic approach, try the book Tapping In - A Step By Step Guide for Ativating Your Healing Resources Through Bilateral Stimulation by Laurell Parnell. It sounds terribly woo, but she is a renowned British therapist who started a branch of EMDR therapy and trains therapists (the reason why it sounds woo is that she's into non-dual Buddhist meditation and sometimes the "we all are love and light" parts can get weird to people who've never had these experiences. She's weird to me, and I'm woo lol). What's in this book is the EMDR a honcho EMDR therapist says you can do by yourself at home without hurting yourself. There is zero danger to you from using either of these books.

In the end, you deserve to feel better. There's no reason why you shouldn't give yourself that regardless of what the world around you is or isn't like.

[Scott 2]

No insult intended. I saw my therapist yesterday. Among my generation in the US, I know far more people who've worked with a therapist, than have not. Admittedly, that level of access is also a sign of privilege in my social circle.

Mental healthcare sometimes benefits from external support. It's like going to the doctor or dentist. If your tooth hurt, you would see someone. Same thing.

[zbigi]

@oku
I don't think therapists will "deem your thoughts unacceptable" (unless they're terrible at therapy). Therapists are explicitly taught not to judge, but instead to try help their patients find a path that has, at the very least, less suffering in it.

[delay]

From what I hear, educated Americans go to a therapist all the time, they talk about it as a privilege of social status, and think of it positively. Europeans think mental therapy is for deplorables who have given up on themselves and rely on a state therapist to put them back together. Kind of the opposite of the spectrum! What do you think of cultural confusion as an explanation?

[jacob]

From what I hear, educated Americans go to a therapist all the time, they talk about it as a privilege of social status, and think of it positively. Europeans think mental therapy is for deplorables who have given up on themselves and rely on a state therapist to put them back together. Kind of the opposite of the spectrum! What do you think of cultural confusion as an explanation?

Ha! No wonder I'm conflicted about it. The simplest explanation would be how the two continents approach health care. In Europe, health care is really meant for the sick. The fact that Americans talk about "health insurance" and many Europeans talk about "sick insurance" is not just a euphemism. In Europe, you only go to the doctor when you're sick and the job of the primary doctor is to triage the resources of the specialists. As such, if you do end up seeing a specialist in Europe, there's most likely something wrong with you.

Whereas in the US, health care is a consumer product that people pursue to the extent they can afford it and want to pay for it. To the extent that enough people pursue something, it becomes acceptable and even popular. It becomes a status marker.

See, for example, the recent "longevity trend", which started in Silicon Valley, or the journals, where people pursue fancy blood work to super-optimize their health. This is available because they pay for it and so the doctor-market offers it. I think it's the same with psychological services. Many people (both Europeans and Americans) could surely benefit from therapy. However, only affluent people in the US actually has an option of paying for it. As such US therapists offer many more services such as life coaching or even just someone to talk to for an hour and paid by the hour, whereas EU therapists mainly treat people with actual mental illnesses. Conversely, in the US if you do have a mental illness of sorts and can't afford it and you don't have enough social capital to compensate, it's possible to end up in prison or on the street instead.

[guitarplayer]

DW and I were talking about taking some complex blood tests whilst being in Poland as they cost ‘only’ around up to $140 compared to several times the amount in the UK.

Also, Psychology is generally US driven these days (compared to 100 years ago), so there is a huge internal push to shape psychology and mental health in positive terms - and to in consequence arrive at the American perception of mental health, therapy etc.

I think it is possible for these to swallow heaps of personal resources, aka spending life on maintenance.

We decided against taking the blood tests on this occasion.

[okumurahata]

The issue with therapy, despite the conflict of interests between the therapist and the client (therapists want subconsciously to maximise their profit), is that it assumes there's something broken and in need of fixing. What’s worse, it presupposes that something is broken simply because it deviates n sigmas from the mean. "This person has a mental disorder because most patients didn't exhibit this behaviour." It's like Procustes fitting people to his bed and cutting off heads and legs, instead of recognising that the bed should accommodate different kinds of people. I wonder how many patients, suffering, pills, ‘mental illnesses’, etc. society must endure before realising that perhaps most people are not ill, but are simply struggling with the pressures of being tortured for eight hours a day, dealing with demanding bosses, difficult coworkers, and a life filled with dependencies that, in the end, contribute to illness. I'm only suggesting that the symptoms I'm experiencing and describing here, might be a result of the metaphorical strap around my neck, because for some brief periods without it, my mind was more serene. If an objective measurement could be conducted by a third party to ascertain if someone was mentally ill, akin to a blood test, I would be less sceptical of the psychology and therapy industry.

[guitarplayer]

Hmm maybe you have some poor experiences with psychotherapists. I am not one but I took some courses on it. Briefly, there are three kinds of norms entertained in the context of clinical psychology / psychotherapy. The first one is about sigmas and deviation from mean, but this is mostly or only used in research, comparing groups of people, or famously in IQ testing. Second is cultural norm which is basically kegan level 3, what most people around do and maybe what you are describing. Then there is the normative approach which has the ‘should’ or assumes a model of human development. You have psychodynamic, cognitive behavioural, behavioural, there are some niche ones. Here you can shop around, there’s heaps of choice. I’ve come across therapists who cater to people of particular religious denomination etc. I think that here it is mostly about compatibility of outlook on life plus therapists need some genetic skills, like for example good listening skills, avoiding asking leading questions, not confronting unnecessarily (and there might be guidelines as to when to confront), such stuff.

There is actually also a psychotherapy school based on systems theory with one notable proponent being Paul Waltzlawick. The main critique from therapists about it is that it is difficult to implement ! I think this one would be a perfect candidate for an eresque form of therapy