I enjoyed your post about hobbies Wishful Thinking, and you seem to have been around a fair bit longer than me. I'm a newbie here but I find that there is... a difference of opinion between people who simply say "I'm sorry this is happening to you" and people who are more edgy, ironic, or simply - in my case - want to say "you consider yourself to be a victim but perhaps also look at the other person's experience". In my perception this is a gap between the therapy world - which is centred on the client - and the outside world which has all manner of agendas - money, survival, good and bad. If I am looking for a job, I look at what I expect myself if I employ someone and I ask questions which may not come up with answers that are sympathetic to my situation. If I am dealing with another person, unless that person is violent/ dangerous to me then I look at them like I look at myself - with compassion/ irony/ belief/ disbelief/ attempted empathy and understanding.

Due to low income, I don't live in the therapy world... so my comments are not so gentle, empathetic as they were when I believed that there were people out there wanting to... help me, when I believed that if there were not people out there to help then other survivors would fight alongside me. I do value gentleness, but I've also come to value edginess and life experience. Someone at my back has been more desperately needed than sympathy. But it takes all energies to make a healthy world..

People's experiences are different. I've found a few people's replies, posts etc to be disturbing.. but that's an education in the number of different takes and different personalities.

So long as someone isn't out to hurt me, then I would give them credit.

I agree that a person managing and owning a mental health forum has the right to make decisions just because they invest the time and energy to put the forum up on the web in the first place. Before I joined this site, I read about people being banned and I thought, "well I will try, I will learn what there is to learn, I will move on if it doesn't work out for me".

I hope that it works out for you Wishful Thinker!!! I agree that people need to be free to make mistakes in order to be creative - that's what you posted with your paintings on the hobbies thread. I'm a survivor of extreme violence. I was on a website for 15 years (it crashed a few months ago) where there were fights and people/ I was left to stick up for myself and to resolve my own battles. Tough, but good practice.

I suppose that I did once need to be named a "victim", or at least "a survivor"... and I would have been angry if people didn't believe me. But to be honest most of the therapeutic establishment here didn't care about anyone with an income that wasn't above average. "We were not meant to survive".

There are contradictions anywhere that human beings interact. Once again, I wish you very well.

Saidso