Ok the thing is if you've survived this far, you already have enough common sense for living life. I acctually very much dislike therapy jargon because it wants to replace that common sense....As soon as I recognised that, and went back to my own common sense (which I am very sure you possess too) I felt a load better and was able to listen to my own gut feelings better again.

That jargon is mostly from *unproven* theories and so they don't really work, it's too much quackery frankly. Even the idea of "healthy common sense" sounds like some serious quackery. That kind of thing doesn't exist, I'm sorry.

And then titrating depth?! What the heck is that even supposed to mean. More jargon and psychobabble that in reality means fu** all and is a waste of time. Your psyche has its own healing capacity that doesn't need to be burdened by ideas like "you didn't have healthy common sense, only a therapist could teach you that", and ideas that a therapist or any unproven psychological theories can actually do something like "titrate" stuff for the psyche. No....it doesn't work like that. We don't know enough about the psyche yet to declare that we can "titrate" anything like that, by far not enough.

I am very glad that you were able to decrease self-harm. I can see how taking on so much would lead one to feel like trying to cope that way.

I posted above about not forcing anything, with common sense either, let alone with the use of psychology jargon, or other ways to try and force mental experimentation. Because of the medical principle "do no harm". Don't do the intervention if you are not sure if it will be more beneficial than harmful. We can't say that about a lot of approaches in psychology as it is, if they are applied without supervision and objective feedback. Instead it's exactly about supporting your already existing healing capacity and inner resources, with help from community and other resources yes. And yes lifestyle changes that you mentioned.

That was your common sense, yeah!!! I agree. The therapist didn't have a lot of it there, lol.

I mean I did what you did, never saying no at work, to more and more work, even when others were quitting and so on. So that's really familiar to me and I mean, the way I solved it was realising that they were having unreasonable expectations. That I was being already so stressed from problems that I would take in the negative emotions of others too much and that compelled me to try to keep up with all those unreasonable demands. Which then made me more stressed and even less able to do "enough". And so on.

But yeah, therapy didn't help me realise that. What helped was talk to normal people who helped me work through how the deadlines were unreasonable and some of the other workplace expectations too, and then I managed to figure out the rest. What really got like glaring to me in the end was that when they increased the demands EVEN MORE, and my pay was not increased at all, and I was able to accept that it was making me more negative to a point that I was unwilling to put up with, it simply felt like too much of a violation of ME, so I realised it was all absurd and ridiculous and refused to work for them again like that. Especially not for that pay they would want to give me for all that work!!

I did get a burn out too from it, I don't know if I'll recover from it, I'll see sooner or later.

If I recover from it it will be only because I stopped when I decided it was too much of a violation if I was to allow it to go on. And that's also because I got that help from talking it through with those buddies who had great sensible input and so I realised it was just too much. I was also already working on how to decrease stress, I read some good self-help on time management and the like and worked on all this with others with similar goals.

Right now I only work part time now and with a much better team. It's just a decent environment, decent atmosphere, decent deadlines, reasonableness, flexibility, all that.

Yeah, after I quit that crap, people close to me told me how it was obvious to them that it was really really unreasonable hours and pressure.

Mmm well that's where psychoeducation helped me a bit, none of the therapists nah, just me using my healing capacity and a little psychoeducation on my own plus some input from a decent support group, in figuring out who expects too much of me, and I dropped all those vampires like I figure your family was too. It did take a while to figure it out but that's just the nature of the thing.

So yeah. You can get to know yourself and sort out your internals without having to be told that you can't naturally do that, like you lack and need to learn some kind of "healthy common sense". That makes me really pissed off, that idea that anyone would need to be told such a thing. It does not help ANYONE to build themselves up, it just tears you (general you) down.

Psychology as an academic science or applied psychology or any of that simply does NOT give anyone or even a book (!) the authority to declare anything like that.