Edit: so please also help me understand this- if a person doesn’t have family and friends to support, sounds like therapy won’t really help this person unless they change their living conditions, or they relapse?
In: 68
Therapy comes in a lot of shapes and sizes, but I can speak to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – I’ve been in treatment for a couple months, and it’s been wildly effective.
I’m… “Me”, I guess. I have my ways, I have my instincts, I have the ways I think about things. “Me” is kinda like driving a new car off the lot – these are the specs, this is how it handles, its gas mileage is whatever.
If the car has crappy horsepower, we can beef that up; or if it handles wierd, we can change the shocks; or maybe we upgrade the stereo/speakers for better music.
CBT is along those same lines: there are things that “off the lot Me” isn’t particularly good at. Therapy gives me a series of exercises and daily practice that, as I work through them, makes me intelligently/consciously aware of what my natural wiring does, and – being acutely aware of that – I can intelligently handle it a different way that has a better outcome in the long run. With practice, the natural/crappy wiring… Changes to the upgraded way.
More concrete: 3 months ago (and for 30-ish years before that), I’d face an unfortunate thing but I had some tricks I learned as a child that made the unfortunate thing “disappear”. It didn’t really disappear, but it got kicked out of my head so I didn’t worry about it. That makes a slow burn that eventually explodes in very bad ways. After a short time of CBT, I unlearned my child tricks and I face the unfortunate thing in the moment – I acknowledge it, address it, and move on with it resolved.
No slow burn, no disastrous consequences in the long term. Happy, healthy, well-adjusted person. Sweet!
Even more concrete: I was given an exercise called ARC. At the end of the day, I’d look back on difficult situations and breakdown the Antecedent (what happened), my Response (how I handled it), and the Consequence (good or bad, what happened after). After a few days of it, I’d start noting the A in the moment to make my exercise easier later. After a few days of that, I became aware of both A&R, both in the moment. After a few days of that, I could foresee the C. Pretty quickly, it clicked that “C is bad. I need a different R”.
In no time, I went from “making it disappear” to addressing the thing in the moment.
The tricks I’d learned as a child were important then. I was a kid in some fked up situations and I needed them to get by. As an adult, I can handle fked up situations. Keeping the kid tricks is self-destructive now, but they were soooooooo ingrained in “me” that I had to consciously unlearn them.
https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cognitive-behavioral
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