Dear Brown Owl 2,

You experiences are quite interesting to me.

My experiences with psychotherapists run the gamut. Generally speaking, [and I know speaking in general can often lead to gross oversimplification] I have benefited from my relationships with therapists.

I am the kind of person who tends to gain knowledge, experience and insight from anyone I meet, even when the relationships are not that great. I even seem to derive benefit from those opposed to me or who scorn me for this or that.

It is like . . . I don't know . . . It is like I am building myself and everything I encounter is something I can use. I think it is a little like making a painting when every person one meets adds a little new color or tint to one's palette.

Or maybe a better analogy would be a plant that takes what's in the soil and transforms it into itself even when some of the stuff in the soil is rotting food or manure. I suppose it could be equally well stated that a plant would perish from poison in the soil. But I have never yet encountered anyone who is poisonous like that.

In the long run I have learned the most from books written by famous psychotherapists. I have generally found reading books by such famous psychotherapists to be about 10 times as beneficial as face to face therapy.

I tend these days to have a "could be worse, but isn't worse" point of view. When I was younger my default attitude tended to be "could be better, but isn't better." I was a perfectionists of sorts. I was not very happy if things fell short of being 100% ideal.
Now I am kind of the opposite. I don't expect 100% and am happy if something yields anything greater than zero.

I wouldn't call this point of view "optimism." To me, optimism centers on the future. It is an attitude geared to one dimension of the temporal: the future. I tend to look at past, present and future from a "could be worse, but isn't worse" attitude. So I think this attitude is a little wider than optimism.

When I was sort of a perfectionist I looked at my past, my childhood, my relatives, my school life, my personal life, my friends and the people I encountered and saw them through a kind of lens, the "could have been better but wasn't better." I looked at my present life in the same way and anticipated my future life along these lines too.

By having a "could be better but isn't better" default point of view, my default feelings and moods tended toward frustration, aggravation, disappointment, anger, guilt, shame, unhappiness. Later when I was able to see that there is another way of looking at things, such as "could be worse, but isn't worse," I felt I attained more balance and perspective. Appreciation was added to my mood palette, gratitude, feeling lucky and blessed, joy of living, peace of mind.

I have nothing against perfectionism per se. It is wonderful in its own way. I am glad that surgeons are perfectionists, and chemists who work on vaccines, and inventors and I guess in so many ways perfectionism has such great value. But I guess, that for me at least, extreme perfectionism is not good for me. It just leads to joyless striving and general unhappiness.

The famous Sigmund Freud once said something about the goal of therapy. He said that the goal was to transform acute unhappiness into general unhappiness. I have experienced many kinds of therapists in my life and quite a few seem to share that view: relieve acute psychic pain so that all that is left is tolerable unhappiness. I was lucky to encounter some therapists who had different goals. I think especially of the psychiatrist Dr. Aaron T. Beck.

It will be interesting to see if other people here will see your post and respond to it with their experiences. That would be wonderful. I wish you the very best. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences.

Sincerely yours, Yao Wen