Best of luck. It might just be my attitude (Probably is, so take this with a few grains of salt) but a lot of the time when I'm talking to my counselor, we come to the point that I just care too much about stuff that is important/tragic, but has no direct effect on my life. Example And a lot of his advice for dealing with these things amounts to 'Just don't think about it.' Which I hear and interpret as 'Go numb. Don't allow such painful stimuli to trigger a response. Don't care about things other than the NFL and how much less nice your car is than your friends.' We're pretty good at dealing with people who have inferiority complexes, because that's a 'normal' dysfunction to have. To always be after more stuff, to always want more stuff, hell that's how the economy manages to scrape by, most people just want more stuff. (Apologies for rambling, I'll come back and clean this up later)
And a lot of his advice for dealing with these things amounts to 'Just don't think about it.' . That's terrible. Empathy and acknowledgement make a difference. 'Thinking about it' is 90 percent of the reason I post anything on hubski. I want people who follow me to think about things. My facebook wall looks like hubski. My conversations sound like hubski. My friends assuredly get tired of it -- but gradually their behavior starts to change. It makes a difference. If you go into therapy (which I would never do; I admit to a bias) with the personal philosophy that awareness of the human condition matters and are told instead to shut yourself off ... walk out. Walk out without paying a dime.It might just be my attitude (Probably is, so take this with a few grains of salt) but a lot of the time when I'm talking to my counselor, we come to the point that I just care too much about stuff that is important/tragic, but has no direct effect on my life. Example
The beautiful thing about it is that I don't pay him a dime, and I won't until I graduate. (Yay for student resource centers I guess). At the moment I go because he has helped me with mindfulness stuff that I had an interest in before and those skills makes my day to say easier. He believes in... I guess practical empathy would be a good term. He gives heavily to charity, volunteers regularly for mental health care for those who can't afford it, and in general gives a lot of aid to those who he can reach directly, personally. I have very few friends who can speak comfortably about controversial subjects and not get pissed. I treasure those few.
Unlike the masterminds of eloquence that populate hubski I am a perpetual rambler so no worries :D Its the reason I'm voice recording future rants, thoughts and stories because its just more 'me' that way.
I obviously think its important that you take from your counselor everything he/she has to offer-- if you were at a point where you truly felt you needed a counselor's guidance then you should absolutely stick with it and take all the help you can get. That said I learned quickly to also take my therapist's advice with a grain of salt. They're all different people and a person seeking help will find some therapists more beneficial than others. My issue, stemming from my own cynicism and slight broken-heartedness at my experience with my guy, is that they are more or less taught the exact same plethora of techniques, methods, and principles in treating their clients. The problem is that there are no two people with the exact same problems and experiences, and it really feels like they've got all these wooden shape blocks and they're trying to figure out which of our holes to stuff it in. That came out badly. However, humans are simply so much more complex than any single, linear science that its like trying to fit a circle or a square block in a freakin ocean. Somehow they still manage to convince themselves they've done it.
(I guess I took your rambling and raised you a rant, sorry :D )
