it is always a bit of a risk as to whether these kinds of responses find or miss the mark... sometimes my rambly raves do miss the mark entirely. i am open to people saying 'bollocks', however. take what helps and leave the rest is my motto on boards (and in life more generally, i guess).

> I am afraid to try sometimes - afraid of 'getting it wrong,' even though there aren't right or wrong answers.

i think therapists can have more or less helpful responses to our self disclosures. if i say something that i'm embarrased about or ashamed of or something like that then i'm taking a risk. if the therapist tells me that my thought is silly or a cognitive distortion or that it is false then that response isn't so helpful because it inhibits my self disclosing. if the therapist responds kindly with validation then that response is helpful because i feel like they are respecting my experience and i trust their ability to do that and i am more likely to disclose other things that are hard.

because i have lots of thoughts and feelings that i'm so very ashamed and embarrased about. i think i'm a bad, horrible, disgusting, repulsive, vile person for having such thoughts and feelings. if i take a risk and disclose some of those thoughts and feelings and my therapist responds by trying to change them then i take that to confirm my belief that i am a bad, horrible, disgusting, repultive, vile person and that my therapist can't possibly accept me when i'm having those thoughts and feelings. and i can't possibly accept myself when i'm having those thoughts and feelings either.

if the therapist responds in a caring and validating way then i can internalise that and respond to myself in a caring and validating way when i become aware that i'm having those thoughts and feelings. and in that way... when those thoughts and feelings occur in me i don't judge myself harshly or beat myself up over what is going on. that really helps. and over time... those thoughts and feelings occur less...

i used to have these kinds of automatic thoughts occuring in me:
i deserve to die: i hate myself: i'm a vile, detestible, disgusting human being: i'm not fit for human company: i'm a disgusting pig: i'm lazy: etc etc. and i'd feel really very upset when they occured to me. they still occur to me, but i know they occur to me because they are things my mother used to say to me when i was a kid. i don't challenge them, i just acknowledge them. acknowledge them for what they are: things i've heard other people say that i've internalised. just because they occur in me doesn't mean i believe them. just because they occur in me (and i've heard other people say them) it doesn't mean they are true. i've learned to give myself a kind of inward hug and smile and kind vibes or something. like how my therapist used to respond to me when i'd share some of those thoughts and feelings with her. and i refocus my attention on something nice for myself. mindful awareness of the sky or a tree or thinking about my t. and try and half smile and be really very gentle with myself.

it is hard work... and it is an ongoing process. sometimes i'm much better at doing this than at other times. those thoughts probably occur to me... around 7 or 8 times every day. but they used to be a fairly much constant torment to me. they aren't a torment anymore. i have come to view them as something that shows me that i need some care. and i've come to learn how to care for myself by internalising some of the way my t used to show care to me.

trust can be hard... i'm a fan of taking little baby risks and assessing how they turn out. the biggest thing for me assessing the degree of risk in therapy is how the therapist responds, however. if i take a risk and they launch in with the cognitive restructuring then that risk has not paid off for me. i feel embarrased and ashamed about my self disclosure. i feel worse about myself. and as a consequence of that... i find it next to impossible to take another one of those risks...

i'm wondering if you are finding it hard to self disclose to your t because your t doesn't respond to your self disclosures in the most helpful way...

why did you choose your current t?

does she remind you of anyone...

i really enjoyed 'sophie's world'. also 'the solitare mystery' by the same author. while it isn't terribly politically correct to say so... there is a bit of a division in philosophy similarly to how there is a bit of a division in psychology with respect to psychodynamic theories and cognitive behaviour theories. there is continental philosophy (aka 'history of ideas') and there is analytic philosophy (aka 'problem solving philosophy'). explaining the difference can be hard... basically, continental philosophy focuses on different theorists (derrida and the like) and tends to engage in 'apologetics' aka 'what that person really meant was this xxx and clearly that is right...' while analytic philosophy has origins in philosophy of math and logic and language and attempts to solve problems by figuring out the answer regardless of what other people have said. you only read other people so you don't make the same mistakes they did... some people try to work between the traditions, but i have to admit i don't really know anything about the continental (and hence existential) philosophers.

there is a bit of a division in analytic philosophy too. between the people who work on 'philosophical problems' like the nature of truth, knowledge, belief, justification, good, right, mind, etc on a-priori grounds (by use of reason or analysis of concepts) and those who attempt to solve philosophical problems or problems that scientists have by reading up on the empirical findings and trying to develop a coherant theory that accounts for the data and makes novel predictions. with respect to the latter enterprise... the majority of scientists who turn to theory development get to count as philosophers too :-) the difference is supposed to be in intellectual training, however, where scientists learn facts by rote and then learn how to do experiments and then proceed to do experiments... whereas philosophers study what follows from what (logical entailments) so that (ideally) we see that there are many different theories that can account for the data and we are meant to be better at seeing the logical possibilities and digging out conceptual confusions and inconsistencies in theories... computer science has helped with respect to the notion of inconsistency. if there is an inconsistency in the program the program won't run. philosophy (of the analytic variety) is supposed to train you to spot contradictions so one can revise ones beliefs towards a more adequate conception of reality... thats my account anyway.

as such... sophie's world is more in line with the historical (continental) tradition rather than the analytic tradition. i didn't really get the opportunity to do continental philosophy. that is kind of a shame, however, because there is a long tradition of continental philosophers studying freud and lacan and jung which i would have loved. the analytic philosophers don't really do that (except to be fairly hostile) :-( reading continental philosophy is like reading another language to me because it has its own distinctive terminology which i don't understand. like 'being-in-the-world' and 'authenticity' and the like...

I'm serious about that wiki article being some kind of joke... though reading it again i don't know that the person is joking... but it really doesn't make any sense to me. i was only recently informed that what i was doing was 'embodied cognition' so i tried to look that up last night... that certainly wasn't what my panel had in mind, i'm fairly sure about that...

i think the notion is that there is this current project of people working in philosophy of mind where they treat the mind as a computer program. the notion is there are units of meaning (concepts) and there are logical rules of inference that govern the relations between concepts. they study the mind by studying the logical relationships between these atoms or units of meaning. a problem is... the 'grounding problem' or the problem of how those little units of meaning get to have meaning (which must have come from outside the system initially? nativists think these atoms are innate but that seems fairly implausible...)

there is a theory called 'teleosemantics' which tries to explain how we get those little meaningful atoms in virtue of our relationship with the world. they have lots of (possibly insurmountable?) problems, however.

i thought... the notion behind embodied cognition was that instead of looking at the mind or mental processing as being the very abstract manipulation of symbols according to logical rules... one looks at cognition as something that arises in order to get the body to accomplish certain goals. hence cognition is something that has evolved (by natural selection) in order for us to solve the problem of 'what do i do next' in real time (ie it is important to duck a looming brick fast!)

there are 'dual inheritance' models where there is genetic inheritance and also social inheratance via 'niche construction' which is when our parents and the like scaffold our learning by carefully constructing our learning environments. there has been some work done on how we learn to feel and express the higher emotions, for example, and how we learn moral behaviour. i want to apply some of that to how we 'learn' to be mentally ill aka how we 'learn' to express distress in different cultural environments. that should account for some of the cross cultural variability in behavioural symptoms while allowing a role for there to be the same underlying deficits to neural / cognitive mechanisms so that the same kind of mental disorder can express differently in different cultures. nosology should distinguish different kinds of mental disorders on the basis of these causal mechanisms rather than on the basis of behavioural symptoms (as behavioural symptoms evolve in response to evolving stereotypes of mental disorders). all very complicated... sorry...

i think you will make a good t :-)
hope your move goes well :-)