And We're Starting at the End

Therapy fucking sucks btw. Cognitive behavioral therapy is intentionally pushing back against everything about how and what and why you think and do things. The therapist is there to challenge you, and then you leave and do alllllll the hard shit yourself. And you keep going back and going back and going back so this person who’s been specifically trained how to will continue to nudge you—not into doing what they want you to do! But into leading a more fulfilling life, whatever that means for you as an individual. They help provide you with perspective that’s different from your own so you can decide what you want to do about it.

I think the “give yourself a reward for completing a task” idea is not meant to train you into not having executive dysfunction. It’s meant to highlight achievements over failures, since it’s really easy to focus on the shame from doing your laundry for weeks, and much harder to admit that whatever the task is, it’s hard for you. “Yeah,” you’ve been told all your life, “but The Task should be simple for you. So it doesn’t matter how much you struggle with it, you don’t need to acknowledge when you overcome that struggle.” We associate rewards with particularly ~significant~ achievements (which is kind of dumb anyway). In order to get a reward I must do something very special. In order to be ashamed of myself I need to fail at literally anything. You minimize your success and exaggerate your failings. (This is especially problematic for disabled people, because to be disabled is to not be able to do certain things!!)

how to develop oc

my honest actual advice here:

Me: *seeing a doctor* Did the test come back positive?

People who work within a system: okay so studies show that the normal system works 90% of the time, but because it’s very bad when it doesn’t work, we’ve set up a process to manage those outliers. We need six well-trained workers to run the system 100% of the time without any serious incidents.

For Firefox users who weren't aware of the AI kill switch, type about:preferences#ai into the address bar, and you should see this: