[teejai]

If truth be told i have probably needed therapy since my late teens but apart from a few short lived abortive attempts have, at the age of almost 51, had little in the way of therapy.

The first two were an absolute disaster(first in my early 40's second mid 40s)with both the therapists adopting a 'If you want to mend the error of your ways' approach as though i was a criminal and recalcitrant as opposed to someone who is fundamentally a good person but handles negative situations in less than constructive ways due to past experiences.
Both were not backward in invalidating my experiences which scarcely helped matters.
Fair enough to say i don't handle certain experiences well but to dismiss them entirely?!

Last year i saw a woman for 'therapy' i put it in brackets as she was not a trained therapist but had been assigned to me as one of the women working in the day centre i attend to help me primarily with 'anxiety' issues.
After a short while she admitted that i had problems that were really beyond her remit (said i needed intensive therapy) and that the best she could do was a 'sticking plaster' job.

Things started off reasonably well but disintegrated when her religious sensibilities(after several sessions she announced she was a member of a 'minority' religious group) clashed with certain things i came out with in order to get to know me better.
Next thing i am told that her workload has had to be reduced and she is no longer seeing me.
A possible replacement fell through due to him being 'booked up'. This was about 6 months ago.

As things are i have had to try and cope with my issues as best i can on my own with friends who have known me online for years saying they have seen comparative 'improvements in me from when they first met me.

That is not to say that things are perfect though indeed far from it.
Sometimes despite my own best efforts not to i end up messing up big time .
What is so distressing at such times is the reaction i get from mental health professionals and often from other mh sufferers who are quick to pick up on any stumbles and falls in a hostilely critical way without taking on board how much of an effort and struggle it can be to have to deal with things on your own or the many times through your own efforts you have not fallen and stumbled' .

Due to social anxiety/phobia and not too good social interaction skills(not good at initiating conversations/ do not find small talk easy/reliant on others to sustain a conversation as opposed to my leading it) i have had very few real life friends (my late wife being an exception) .

However even if i was to overcome these social anxiety/interaction issues for which again little hand on help has ever been given(though the first overt signs of mental health problems were of a socially phobic nature in my early teens) and less fearful/more able to interact with others in real life i am painfully aware that there are 'personality issues' that in themselves would have a negative effect on sustaining friendships with other people namely the tendency to rejection senstivity/paranoia/and what i think would be called 'black and white thinking'/and enotional reactivity.
For example i can really like someone but then they have only got to say something that i construe as being negative or overly critical and i am prone to going into 'Can't trust them.They're no good '
I even had that with the last woman i saw. At first i thought she was great to the point i was thinking she was quite fanciable and worrying i was getting too strong feelings for her.By the end though and not entirely due to her religious persuasions i was a lot less positive about her.
Let's just say she had swung from relative hero to relative zero.

[Perna]

We can only do as well as we can do! Learning to live with ourselves and not put ourselves down can be half the battle. Everybody screws up but I don't think that's anybody's intent.

Do you do any reading or self-help sort of work? In my 20's-40's I was a big reader, read 3-5 books a week. I found a lot of "teen"/young adult novels helped me enormously because their characters seemed to be struggling with the same sorts of personal problems I was? Just using book characters as examples got me a long way on my own.

[teejai]

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Perna said:
We can only do as well as we can do! Learning to live with ourselves and not put ourselves down can be half the battle. Everybody screws up but I don't think that's anybody's intent.

Do you do any reading or self-help sort of work? In my 20's-40's I was a big reader, read 3-5 books a week. I found a lot of "teen"/young adult novels helped me enormously because their characters seemed to be struggling with the same sorts of personal problems I was? Just using book characters as examples got me a long way on my own.

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Thanks for your reply Perna. I used to be a very avid reader in my teens but have done very little reading in the last 30+ years(aside from reading a chapter or two of a book to my late wife before bed. She was fond of what we here in the UK would call sagas).
The main problem i have with fiction is an inability to visualise characters or scenes as i read which makes the experience rather one dimensional and frustrating.

The other problem i have is that whilst being far from stupid and indeed verbally skilled i do have certain cognitive problems in relation to 'critical thinking ' and executive functioning which can make self-help type work quite challenging.

One of the reasons i fell out with that woman aside from the religious issue was because she assumed i was being awkward and resistant ,even though i turned up to every session when it would have been quite easy not to sometimes when i felt bad,when in reality i found it hard to engage in the kind of 'critical thinking' needed.
For example she gave me one of those thoughts,feelings,and actions sheets and it completely flummoxed me.

[Rapunzel]

I don't do too well with the cognitive or CBT self-help stuff either, which is mostly predominant these days. There are other self-help books that have helped me a lot though (in addition to therapy). I'm currently getting a lot out of a book called "Growing Up Again." I think that everybody here ought to read that one. You have to take it slow and do the exercises and work through things. I take the book to therapy and talk about what I'm learning, and T sometimes corrects my understanding of some of it, or shows me how it related to me that I might have missed, or has me do more processing in a certain area. Without a T you will just have to keep checking yourself and make sure you are really getting it.

There are others that I have found useful too. Try the self-help book and forum on this website (the author participates on the forum and is happy to help you apply it to yourself and your situations). If you look around, you will find some that will speak to you, and others maybe not as much. When you find a good one, bring it here and talk about it. Then look for more like that.

[pachyderm]

I also have found books to be a lot of help. I started going through the biography section of a local public library, starting with the A's (Asimov ) and going all the way through to the Z's, just picking books that looked interesting -- mostly books written by the subject themselves. I was surprised how many prominent people have had bad episodes in their own lives, and how many of them were honest and sensitive observers of themselves and others. I am now in the second library going through its biography section.

I also have found books on mental health issues, both written by those who more or less abandoned the mental health system after suffering under it, and other books written about survivors and types of abusers. You find descriptions of your own experiences coming from the pens of entirely separate people!

Then there are fiction and non-fiction books that describe the lives of people in distant countries such as Afghanistan or Iran or China, where the writers are more familiar with and perhaps more accepting of social conditions that Americans seem to distance themselves from. I think that without all this reading I would have had a much harder time coming to terms with my own rather "different" point of view.

I find a good source of books is the used books on Amazon.com. I don't know how effective this resource is for people in other countries.

[Mouse_]

I was just reading a novel where a guy is so obsessed with his first love, that when they meet by accident many yrs later, he cannot see the reality of the situation. Reading it helped me break through my obsessions and delusions that I suffer from. But having said this, books can only help if we're open to what they can offer? no?

[Perna]

If we are readers, I think we're automatically open to the reading experience to a certain extent. I don't think, Mouse, that you decided before you picked and started reading the novel that you deliberately picked that novel and decided you were going to read it to help yourself break through your obsessions and delusions?

[Mouse_]

Actually thats why I picked it, I'd read the gumpf on it first. I recognised myself first then I recognised it in another.

[Perna]

That use to freak me out; being in the library and finding a book that addressed what I was thinking/working on right that minute. It's like the books were sentient :-)

[spiritual_emergency]

<blockquote>
I knew I'd tucked this link away somewhere. I found it again this morning.

[*] Healing Through Books: Bibliotherapy