Thats insightful re focus on problems rather than solutions. My last hospital out patient programme, best I did in 30 years of counselling was amazing. Focused on tools, helped us all be more aware (it was a group) we were not allowed to be negative and had 3 therapist at the time with 8 of us..incredible changed my life and I hav CPTSD
I do find this DS board very focused on the negative and I am member since 2011 on DS. I am not on here much anymore due to that
Not a criticism of the wonderful gang here, just observation of the change I see. I also notice post of helpful things/uplifting don't get much feedback

One of my all-time favorite movie sidebars was in "Patch Adams" where the asylum genius keeps sticking fingers in people's faces and demanding, "How many fingers do you see?" and calling the people degrading names when they answer. Finally, the asylum genius asked Patch on a less focused day and Patch answers double the number of fingers.

"Finally," our asylum genius declares happily. "Someone who can see past the problems to the solutions."

To me, focusing on solutions is important. Yea, the problems suck literal daddy dick. I throws myself a grand pity party when I need one and sometimes my misery likes company, but I needs faith that solutions are out there.

Is it progress that it's been a while since I held a pity parties on a high rise building ledge?

Speaking just for me I go toxic fast on a pity party. In my generations of family abuse going back in my family tree to 1810 (when I stopped tracing my ancestry back), "hurt people hurt people." I've wanted to stop that cycle, and see if in my generation the pattern might go from "hurt people hurt people" to "hurt people heal people"--starting with myself. I'm with you, arf, solutions and resolutions, solving and resolving. Yes, it's progress--at least to me, that is.

In the throw-away kid camps, I was entirely too beaten crazy tough to feel sorry for myself or anybody else. A heart without compassion is a sorry heart, indeed. Is it a great surprise I held my pity parties on high rise building ledges?

Throwing my first official pity party was a healing breakthrough for me. Learning how to offer myself compassion was an important step for me.

Arfie
Glad to see you're back in town.

I go with solutions, prescribed or understood by the medical professionals or not. I know myself. They don't. I have the damn disease. They don't. I'm with you.

Yeah, today something else here reminded me of what I learned about that as a hospital chaplain on a neurosurgical unit in 2010. As brain surgeons, they were the elite doctors, and yet they were the most humble ones I ever met. I asked them why they talked to me like a friend, asked me for prayer like no other doctors ever had, and included me in every chat with their patients.

They said that the brain had never been mapped, so unlike other doctors, they couldn't be cocky. They could do the same procedure on two different patients and get opposite results. Real healing on their unit, they told me, was actually up to the patient, so they needed me to get the patient motivated to take charge of their own healing.

Wow. I have the damn disease. They don't. I'm with you, too.

Career wise, I feel the most secure on the cutting edge. I drifted away from my computer career around the time "digital" was becoming a household word and the internets (pl) were coalescing into the WWW.

It has occurred to me that I am experiencing the same trait here. I would never have chosen the long, pervy trip from child prostitute to comfortable retiree, but the cosmos forgot to ask my opinion again. Here I be, like it or knot. Knot it all! ! !

I sometimes believe the language/theory changes from 1972 to 2019 are far more radical within my still needed psychotherapy than they have been in the tech jargon which as paid for that psychotherapy. I don't care to do the research, but I do believe there are more Appy Kids than brain surgeons developing the current batch of vernacular for the currently emerging PTSD theories. It might be safer to let conspiracy theorists guide my next trip to the voting booth.

Still sorting. . .

Hey.. yeah I haven't ever found helpful ptsd therapy. I work very hard on my own and still go to therapy. But, I feel therapy is not helping. They only want to talk about stupid things that you could talk about with anyone.

Psychic healing is an inside job. Surgical techniques which can be done from the outside have yet to be discovered. In the yaddahs of my strictly personal blahs, the smart parts ain't broke, so I worry more about those *stupid things*. Talking about those *stupid things* with *just anyone* only confuses me further with the cacophony of differing opinions.

One of the potentially smart things I picked up from psychotherapy was how to focus on one voice and make it work instead of continually vacillating in the high winds of differing opinions from *just anyone*.

Color, I had your same experience for 12 years of weekly therapy after my original PTSD diagnosis. I had a great psychiatrist, but his job was prescriptions, not talk. For talk, I had a separate therapist, and we never seemed to get down to cases.

Then I got divorced and decided to move to a new town to a new job and stumbled upon a therapists evenings who was a VA doc by day, a specialist in treating Iraq vets who had survivded Improvised Exposive Devices in their combat zone. That's where my own trauma story started, when my car was hit by a bomb when I was 9 years old growing up as a missionary kid abroad.

Other therapists hadn't keyed in on that, but he did, and suddenly we got down to cases. A therapist who is an actual PTSD specialist made all the difference for me.

Lol. Subbing digits cannot be all bad!

When I am on my phone and try to use the edit triangle I fat finger that too and sometimes delete. Oh what fun.