Frustrated with a world that seems to discourage healing

[fofo5]

I always feel like what happened to me wouldn't have been so bad if there was actual help. If our society was more forgiving and able to support my parents so they wouldn't be stressed to the point of abuse. What they did is just a symptom of this piece of crap world. I had to save myself because the only advice people seem to have is

Go to therapy!
Yes let me pay another human being with their own problems 200 an hour to pretend to care about me. Someone who might actually make things worse and waste my time. LOL. And there's nothing they can say that will magically change the fact that most of the population (including my own father) is addicted to porn and DOES NOT respect women at all and I'm supposed to just be okay with it. Or that the food industry capitalizes off of people's pain and encourages them to numb themselves with sugar. Or that children are sex trafficked every day. That corporations are destroying the environment. Therapists, like everyone else in this capitalist hellscape, make a living off people's pain and desperation to be relieved of it. If the world was a better place they'd have no job so most people in the mental health industry don't actually care at all about making you better.

I HATE IT HERE. And I feel like the only way to make it through is to be cold hearted, which just makes me feel inhuman and worse. I get so frustrated I always end up truly wanting to die after 3 months of faking it till I make it. There is so much wrong that it's actually MADDENING to me and I don't know how people survive in North America without drugs. When I don't have coffee, drink, eat crap, watch TV, I am just miserable now that I can see clearly what I was trying to run away from with all these little distractions. I feel like I'm just coasting through with no direction. I always regress into these animalistic mental breakdowns of just hitting myself and objects and feeling this uncontrollable rage that feels very justified, yet I have no idea where to direct it. I don't know how to control it when it comes.

 

[arfie]

hello fofo. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here.

everything you say is true and daunting. how sad is it that it is what we have to work with? for this child sex trafficking survivor, paying somebody $200/hour to care is far simpler than changing the world. never mind that the pay-for-care system reminds me an awful lot of the world of prostitution i am still working to escape. the world is as the world is, not as i would have it.

i wish i had an easier way to heal which i could promote, but? ? ? here i am, working with what's available. healing hopes for all. no exceptions.

for what it's worth
"anger channeling" has been my most effective tool for dealing with the justifiable rage attached.

 

[Rose White]

I hear you!

Someone who might actually make things worse and waste my time

Some might. And some might help you shift your focus. It took me six therapists to find the right one. It’s like a good relationship, the first one rarely to never works out and same with the second or third.

I'm supposed to just be okay with it.

No!! Absolutely not! I’m not okay with any of that stuff you mentioned and I try to find other people who are also not okay with all that because then, to me, that means they are paying attention! So nice to meet you!

Therapists, like everyone else in this capitalist hellscape, make a living off people's pain and desperation to be relieved of it.

Therapists, the good ones anyway, are about as anti-capitalist as you can get. Yes they are paid, because… have you noticed that Uncle Sam ain’t subsidizing shit? The payment is an artifact of capitalism, true, but the work they do? Super anti-capitalist. (You think capitalism is about authenticity, doing what’s meaningful, and having brutally honest conversations? ‍ Which is probably why therapy (good therapy) is becoming more inaccessible, sadly! And being replaced by AI and generic online text therapy.)

What they did is just a symptom of this piece of crap world.

I agree with you wholeheartedly! But! (And?) There’s something called personal responsibility and individual accountability. (Which is one of the hardest things for people with PTSD to accept— that someone chose, with their free will, to do something awful to them.)

Everything you said is super relatable to me. I think what’s missing for you is a sense of “your people”. And if your people are all miserable then that can make it seem like the whole world is miserable. And even though there is a lot of shit going down, there are people who are actually trying to do something about it. And you can learn to be with them and care about them and even (horror of horrors for someone with PTSD) *depend* on them.

So the T is not there to save you but rather act as a kind of scaffolding for you to rebuild your sense of self and trust in yourself. If you had emotional abuse and neglect by your parents along with sexual abuse then likely trust is not one of your strong suites.

Not trusting can be a superpower for surviving childhood but it turns around and smacks you on the face as an adult. So the T can be a kind of practice arena for learning how to trust others and yourself—which are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing from the brain’s perspective. And yes, you do have to fake it for a while which feels very humiliating to the ego but if you stick with it, with the right T (wrong T can f*ck you over so definitely some risk involved and you do need to check in with yourself)—with the right T something almost miraculous can happen, which is seeing the world differently. It’s like going through a mirror, everything looks the same externally but your experience of it is fundamentally different.

 

[Movingforward10]

Yep the world is shit. The wars. Climate breakdown. The hate. The current racist riots in my country and the rise of the far right. The violence towards women. The normalisation of rape culture.
Yep. There is A LOT wrong with the world.

And that's why I don't have a TV. And I create a little bubble for myself. And I try to think about relationships I can impact and happiness I can spread. The saying thank you to the bus driver. The letting someone else on first. The giving of a seat to someone who needs it more than me. Little ripple effects of care and kindness that I can give. And that others can give me (for example a man helping me with my lugagge this week). It's those things that I try to hold on to. As those are the things I can control.

The anger of why trauma happened, happens and no one cares at all. That anger can eat you up. And it only hurts you. The anger itself doesn't change the situation.

 

[No More]

Yeah, I get a lot of this.
I try and stay in my own lane, because I find that if I expand my horizons out into the general social media then I just end up riling myself up over things that I can’t really do a whole lot to change.

The treatment of women is really very bad in the uk at the moment. Complete lack of any functioning justice system or sentencing has made rape and pedophilia basically legal by virtue of suspended sentences, community service, previous good character and reluctance of the police to rock the boat in certain communities. You don’t have to be okay with it. I’m not. But it’s a case of you do what you can do. One person can’t change the world. Personally, I’m very passionate (it’s also my job) about sport. I care very much about kids access, about clean sport, about equal opportunities for PoC and disadvantaged communities, about equal numbers of men/women on start lines, about access for different religions, and about keeping biological male advantage out of the female category. And so I do what I can do to make change happen.

You can work through stuff without ‘traditional’ talk therapy. It’s not the only way forward. Things can change, if you want to work at making them change for yourself.

 

[Friday]

I’ve lived in too many places to blame “the world” for anything.

Some places? Have tons of help. Some have none. And everything in between. Depends on where I’m standing.

Feeling as if the world owes you? You somehow deserve help “from” ABC-XYZ simply by breathing / existing? Shows some killer self-esteem / self-confidence / expectation / entitlement. Curiously paired with helpless victim give-up mentality. Ditch that last powerlessness bit, and I expect you’ll do amazing. As instead of being pissed off at what you don’t have handed to you, you can create or acquire both what you need & want, your own self.

 

[fofo5]

I’ve lived in too many places to blame “the world” for anything.

Some places? Have tons of help. Some have none. And everything in between. Depends on where I’m standing.

Feeling as if the world owes you? You somehow deserve help “from” ABC-XYZ simply by breathing / existing? Shows some killer self-esteem / self-confidence / expectation / entitlement. Curiously paired with helpless victim give-up mentality. Ditch that last powerlessness bit, and I expect you’ll do amazing. As instead of being pissed off at what you don’t have handed to you, you can create or acquire both what you need & want, your own self.

That's a ridiculous response to give to someone clearly in the middle of a mental breakdown. And women deserve a level of basic respect that is clearly not given around the world. I agree with you on needing to keep going but I doubt your comment would have been helpful at all if I read it that day.

Edit: Just forget what I said. I can't figure out how to delete it but I thought you were trying to say I need to lower my expectations and pull myself up by my bootstraps *cringes* Thanks for the help

 

[Friday]

but I thought you were trying to say I need to lower my expectations and pull myself up by my bootstraps

Nope! That definitely wasn’t what I was trying to say…Almost exactly the opposite. So I’m glad you reread, and caught that.

It’s one of the double edged swords of travelling… some of the places I’ve lived have an almost Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts level of WOW very real very amazing level help/assistance available to anyone, others are so bad that they make places with zip-zero-zilch-nada available look good. And everything in between, like there’s good help, but only for this teeny tiny minority & crap for everyone else; and/or/but/etc.

You/me/anyone are the exact same people… no matter where we’re standing, or what the “norm” for that place is. Whether help is not only considered a basic human right, but people outdo themselves to come up with better and more effective ways & means… or whether it’s a privilege only a tiny minority can access… or whilst begrudgingly seen as a human right, the bottom of the barrel is considered too “good” for funding, focus, driven exploration & application…or, or, or. Soooooo many people make the mistake of taking what’s offered (or not) as a reflection of themselves, and/or how things “should” be. You don’t. Which is a wicked good thing. And a hurdle far too many people never manage to scale. Which is why I think you’ll do amazing.