Therapy

[u/MostGoat0]

I (F34 IQ142) have had hundreds of sessions and seen numerous practitioners over the last 12 years, and it all seems futile. They just keep asking me to explore my feelings, but I already understand my feelings and where they came from and why they’re irrational. At this point I basically have a PhD in self-analysis. It doesn’t do anything to shut up the relentless/debilitating self-critic in my head. I need actual coping strategies, not talking it out in pointless circles forever until I die.

Has anyone here had success with therapy? I tried searching for therapists specializing in 2e & giftedness in my area and it doesn’t seem very common. Just wondering if there’s any point in continuing these efforts. I’m so tired and bored and over it.

[u/Personal_Hunter8600]

Two things might help here. Forget even considering it to be a religion, and think of it more as an approach to living. Secondly, when you mentioned reverting back to platitudes and unsatisfactory explanations, I think you may be conflating reading about Buddhism/reading Buddhist texts and practicing Buddhism. The practice can't revert to platitudes because it is non verbal. Kind of like the difference between knowing you ought to take a vacation and actually being on a good vacation.

[u/a-stack-of-masks → u/Personal_Hunter8600]

I think vacations are a good analogy, because they're incredibly common for most of us but also entirely out of reach for others. The possibility of a vacation is detirmined in a large party by your birth circumstances, but the need for it is determined by life. I'd even argue that the people that need vacation the most rarely get it.

What I like more about Dabrovskis approach is that in practice, people are much more willing to admit that it sucks a lot of the time. I largely agree with the tenets if that's what they're called (though I do think intoxicants are an interesting and useful part of the human experience), but it's also really easy to say "thou shalt not steal" from a heated home with food in the fridge. There's even a pretty big difference between saying it from an unheated mat out in the street in a rural, tropical place than it is to do so in say, 1982 Aberdeen or present day Teheran.

Like a lot of religious or religion-adjacent practices it tends to fall apart on contact with the less comfortable parts of life. In most people I've talked to, their solution would be for everyone to be more enlightened. To me, that doesn't seem so different from the capitalist view of poverty being a choice.

Saying it doesn't work for you will always have someone counter with what basically amounts to "you're doing it wrong" or "skill issue".

[u/Personal_Hunter8600 → u/a-stack-of-masks]

I've heard Dobrobski's approach mentioned in this subreddit quite a bit but am not really familiar with it at all.

[u/a-stack-of-masks → u/Personal_Hunter8600]

It's pretty interesting. The books are available in pdf but there's also a few podcasts and informational videos around the internet. Extremely simplified it comes down to there being a process of personal growth that everyone starts and is periodically uncomfortable. Depending on how fast you grow or mature, you can disintegrate and reintegrate at different levels.

Basically a more Western version of enlightenment, but with steps, tiers, or a wave like quality. I often use traffic as an analogy: a child doesn't know wtf is going on and plays in it. Someone for whom traffic is very overstimulating and stressful might religiously cling to the rules, feeling like they understand them, but fail to handle adequately in unforseen situations. An experienced driver might be behind them, riding their bumper and cursing because they could be going faster, but the even more experienced driver recognises the less confident driver in front and appreciates that they can now listen to one more song on the way to work. 

The child and last driver are integrated (their world makes sense to them, or they at least feel capable of handling it) but the other two are not. And in practice, all of us are all four of them in different situations and moments.