Alpha 5.0

[mat422]

I'd imagine your therapist will prescribe meditation. From what you're saying, sounds like you need it.

I know what you mean though. I myself have gone through so many layers in the last few days that I can only pin-point fear or, more correctly, "being scared" as an issue of mine.

I use anything to avoid everything, even my own life. It's like I'm on the outside looking in, I'm never inside of it, and any time I'm close to really immersing myself in my life or even myself, I react by distracting myself.

It gets worse too, because even if I am "wrong", it doesn't matter because I didn't really want to be doing that thing anyways. It's hard to explain, but it's like I'm doing things that don't matter to me so that I don't care if I'm wrong or mess up. In essence: I'm wasting my life.

Anyhow, I'll be interested to see how your therapist handles this.

I'll have to see. Right now she's working with me on cognitive distortions. I've heard of them, but working on them alone is a huge task and then I've got my own biased perspective. So far having her help me sort out the thinking is a lot better than doing it all on my own.

What you said pretty much mirrors my exact experience. I take failures way too hard so I'll do one of two things, avoid it or minimize it. That's one of the cognitive distortions she talked about. We'll minimize the importance of something in order to deal with it better. So in my case when it comes to making music I'll minimize the importance of getting better and say that I really don't care how good I get. When the reality is I want to get better, but I'm worried about being incredibly shitty at it in the process.

So far she hasn't told me anything I don't know. But the benefit of therapy is I don't have my ego fighting me all the way. It's incredibly difficult to step outside yourself and objectively evaluate your own life, sometimes it's even impossible.