Netphoria Message Board - View Single Post

reprise85 · 09:32 PM

I had a friend who told me her therapist told her something like: "My job is to hold your feelings out to you, in my hands, so that you can see them, examine them, and then, eventually, hold them yourself."

The idea being she just holds them up to the client and doesn't feel them herself.

I do want to do counseling I think, and I could handle talking about bad things. Honestly I've been thinking about corrections a lot lately. About helping people in there who made bad decisions and perhaps did terrible things but are moral people who hate themselves for what they've done and in some cases at least deserve to feel some redemption and forgiveness from themselves. This may just be a place where I am in my therapy right now. I'm not in jail and I never did anything to put myself there (besides sell drugs at one point), but I was in a situation where something terrible could have happened and I would have been at fault even though I wouldn't have actively done anything.

I asked my therapist, would she be saying the same things to me if this thing had happened and I had let it? And she said yes. What good does it do anything for you, a moral person who was in a terrible situation who may have had some culpability in something terrible (or potential culpability, since nothing happened), to suffer and hate yourself forever? And I feel like I don't deserve redemption... but I guess hopefully at some point I will. Yes I was a teenager, and yes I got played by a psychopath who was trying to convert me basically in a cult-like way to hurt other people, but you know - it's complicated - I do think I have some guilt that is not undeserved... and I feel like I should feel bad about it forever and hate myself and I do. But I also trust my therapist and somewhere in my mind I think she has a point.

I know that is terribly vague and it will have to stay that way, but man, if I was still depressed I'd never have gotten to this point where I am dealing with all of this. It's also almost 10 years that I got away from that situation. Ten years in August.

04-04-2014, 09:26 PM	#38
reprise85 BOTTLEG ILLEGAL Location: I'm faced with so many changes that I just might change my face Posts: 32,800	I had a friend who told me her therapist told her something like: "My job is to hold your feelings out to you, in my hands, so that you can see them, examine them, and then, eventually, hold them yourself." The idea being she just holds them up to the client and doesn't feel them herself. I do want to do counseling I think, and I could handle talking about bad things. Honestly I've been thinking about corrections a lot lately. About helping people in there who made bad decisions and perhaps did terrible things but are moral people who hate themselves for what they've done and in some cases at least deserve to feel some redemption and forgiveness from themselves. This may just be a place where I am in my therapy right now. I'm not in jail and I never did anything to put myself there (besides sell drugs at one point), but I was in a situation where something terrible could have happened and I would have been at fault even though I wouldn't have actively done anything. I asked my therapist, would she be saying the same things to me if this thing had happened and I had let it? And she said yes. What good does it do anything for you, a moral person who was in a terrible situation who may have had some culpability in something terrible (or potential culpability, since nothing happened), to suffer and hate yourself forever? And I feel like I don't deserve redemption... but I guess hopefully at some point I will. Yes I was a teenager, and yes I got played by a psychopath who was trying to convert me basically in a cult-like way to hurt other people, but you know - it's complicated - I do think I have some guilt that is not undeserved... and I feel like I should feel bad about it forever and hate myself and I do. But I also trust my therapist and somewhere in my mind I think she has a point. I know that is terribly vague and it will have to stay that way, but man, if I was still depressed I'd never have gotten to this point where I am dealing with all of this. It's also almost 10 years that I got away from that situation. Ten years in August. Last edited by reprise85 : 04-04-2014 at 09:32 PM.