Here's the problem ... *sigh*

Imagine that life is a sequence of car races, and you are the driver of a sports car.
For various reasons, you keep consistently losing races, and you want to fix this. Losing races consistently is making you anxious and depressed a lot of the time!!

There are three factors at work it seems:
1. Your car has its own design strengths and design flaws;
2. Your driving skills had better allow for adjustments to leverage the strengths and compensate for the flaws in your specific vehicle, and sometimes they really don't;
3. There is a "fly-by-wire" computer chip that uses automated programs to interpret your driving commands into making your car do certain things in specific circumstances, and some of the subprograms do the wrong thing at the wrong time no matter how you drive.

I have tried meds. They are like say, increasing your cars' breaking strength or transmission variability or engine power, all the time. In practice I find this solves one problem, only to create a new one which is as bad as the original problem. I've been at this for 19 years and I have never found anything that solves more problems than it creates. That's why I don't use meds anymore and don't miss them, as they feel almost like making too many radical low-level adjustments to my car's mechanics and electrical system. That works great for some cars, it doesn't really solve much with mine at the end of the day.

My car's computer chip and my driving method seem to have a LOT of subtle little problems. That's the thing - no major maladjustment, but a laundry list of smaller situational ones that in the aggregate make me feel like my high end Maserati is driving like a dump truck with 200,000 miles on the odometer. I've been told there's nothing massively wrong with the chip or my driving, but they just don't cooperate well in too many specific situations.

The thing is, how on earth do I alter my driving and reprogram that chip WITHIN MY LIFETIME(!)? I desperately need some formula for organizing and accelerating that process. Therapy and aggressive self-help has defined the problem well, I think. What neither has done is create an adequate methodology for permanently solving it. I'm excited and guardedly optimistic about finding one, but confused as to what to do next.

** Accidental double post - deleted **

I've been told this kind of problem is VERY common, and that overall I am high functioning. It's just annoying that these little things seem to defy fixing. I feel like I'm being nibbled to death by piranhas over here. Very very slowly. Another neat analogy is Starfleet vs The Borg and other threats in Star Trek. You can take out one cube, Unimatrix Zero just builds more. You can blow up Unimatrix Zero, but now there's nothing to keep the Romulans in check. I need a quantum leap forward in technology or a major strategic victory I can build on, you see? But how..?

I think it depends on how you are identify the "problems" if you think something is a specific type of glitch/bug/problem and treat it as such [say shortage in the hard wiring] , but it turns out there is a different problem [the box of fuses you keep replacing from is bad], then yeah you are constantly treating the problem, and treating it CORRECTLY, but you aren't treating the right problem.

You get some short term results because you treat symptoms, but you aren't actually treating the correct root of the problem.

I went on like this for over a decade. We were assigning most of my symptoms to bipolar, and though most of my therapists admitted that I had "OCD traits", none delved very deep into that. Since OCD is difficult to talk about in full, particularly Pure OCD, nothing ever fully came to light until I was in an IOP- at 27 or 28, though I'd been experiencing full blown symptoms off and on since my older childhood.

Everything had been attributed to bipolar.

I have some spikes in OCD now, but generally I am not terribly plagued by it when I have it undercontrol. The under control thing actually happens because we are treating it as OCD, not as paranoid whatever related to bipolar.

i mean i'm just using my experience as an example, but it is possible that at some point you should have branched off left instead of right?

Every car needs to be maintained On2, so it is easier to drive

So you've defined the problem(s) and presumably cut away things like perfectionism/self-criticism that for me is still like your piranha scenario, hard to get rid of . . . seems to me you just keep hacking at the problem diligently from different directions until something strikes to the heart or it gradually disintegrates. In my case, I also feel I have to accept that some things probably won't change in my lifetime. Obviously this varies for different problems and to have a specific solution, you'd have to think of the specific problem.

Hello, Onward2wards. Print you post for your treatment team. Revise or formulate a treatment plan that defines the problems you face with goals for change and methods of achieving them.

I would suggest that therapy is quite a different scenario than auto mechanics, math, and the laws of Isaac Newton. For heaven's sake, please don't go to a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist and get yourself enmeshed deeper than ever in the mechanistic stuff. A good Psychodynamic, modern therapist would probably surprise the socks off of you by knowing which piranhas to negotiate with first. You might even get hooked and start to enjoy your ability to feel and relate to your right-brain self.
I know I'm being a bit facetious here, but my very worst trouble was intellectualizing, until I met a good T who could get around that and help me with my real problems about life.

I know it is long...but worth the read...
neuroplasticity on the couch - does psychotherapy physically change your brain?

Norman Doidge: People have often thought that you know real treatments are always biological and involve drugs etc. and that talk therapy is just that, it's just talk, mere talk. But we now have really important work of psychoanalytical therapies, cognitive behaviour therapy, inter-personal therapy which of kind of grows out of psychoanalytical therapy that shows that patients come in with brains in certain states of wiring and after these interventions, their brains are rewired. So psychotherapy is every bit as biological as the use of medicines and I would say in a certain respect more precise at times.

people often say what's the use of talking about the past. Well sometimes it can be counter-productive but often it's
productive because when we've had an early childhood trauma development doesn't stop, it proceeds at a pace but in a slightly distorted way. And those old damaged networks are still there, I describe in detail a case of a man who came to me in his late 50s who couldn't form any relationships and he had trouble with alcohol, he couldn't be faithful to people he cared about. And we traced it back to the death of his mother when he was I think about 26 months old. Well it turned out all of those events were registered in his brain but they were kind of obscured by later development.

Unmasking basically means there were pathways laid down earlier on that are no longer used as extensively but they are still there

One of the things we know, and this is a very important point, in general about neuroplastic change, we've discovered that when you remembered something you revivify a particular network and it enters a state—it goes from being kind of consolidated and difficult to change to once remembered a more plastic state again. And so we now understand why it's important to remember, we know that we know the chemical pathways that are involved, and this is in some ways very promising because there are new treatments, many treatments now where we treat post-traumatic stress disorder which is a great example of a disorder that teaches us about plasticity. Someone is doing fine then they get in a car accident or someone holds them up and they have a kind of nervous breakdown, to use a very old fashioned term, which actually I think makes a lot of sense.They can't function well nervously and they can't separate past from present and so on and so forth. And we get them in a very safe condition and in all sorts of different ways we then try to get them to remember the aspects of the accident piece by piece and while they are remembering in a safe place they can begin to rewire their brains and put it behind them. Link..........
AUDIO INTERVIEWS

I would re-evaluate the racing. Who you racing against? There is no contest, just you/your life and what you want. I know in horse racing, the first 4 finishers get paid and there are a lot of "maiden" horses out there that never win but keep themselves fed/away from the glue factory coming in third and fourth

We are not all "winners" by whatever standard is out there. The majority of individuals think they -- and parents, their child, is "above average" http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/25/the...-gifted-child/

Yes we have a mixed bag of stuff, good and bad. You work on accentuating the stuff you think you want and ignore or even accept the stuff you don't (just let it "be", never know, it might come in handy in the future you cannot know about).

Look at what you are trying to change for others. I startle easily and cry out and that upsets my husband. Sorry, but I startle easily and cry out! I have decided I am not going to do anything about crying out when the knife blade is falling toward my bare foot? My husband responds too slowly. I went out on an icy morning to get his newspaper from the driveway and fell coming back up the walk. I'm laying in the ice/snow/slush waiting for Prince Charming to run out (he was sitting at the breakfast table in the window) and help me up, make sure I was all right, but nothing happened. I finally looked up and he was still sitting at the breakfast table in the window, just looking at me. I slowly and painfully got myself up and limped into the house (still with his newspaper :-) and confronted him, "Do you let all your wives (I'm his 2nd :-) slip on the ice and break their neck and then not help?" and he replied, "I was watching. You got up." Ah, true love.

There is always going to be my crying out and his angry glare because I'm loud and startle him and he doesn't like it. There is always going to be his hesitance/waiting to see what is happening, even after I fall down the steps, croak out for him to call 911 and then have to deal with his asking me "what's wrong" so he can tell the 911 operator (did that even through a major asthma attack when I could not breathe/should not have been trying to talk :-) He's slow to respond. I love me and him anyway.