INTrePid Sushi & Therapy Adventures
Mar. 18th, 2007 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jamesqI was lucky enough to convince my friends ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kermie_canada and spookiemonkie2 to join me for some sushi (Tokyo Garden, down on Southport Road. Didn't suck) and later some gelato. It was a little time slice of Vancouver here in Cowtown. Can you be homesick for someplace you've never lived? I suspect you can.
The sour mood has been nipped in the bud, which is good because I'm not the sort who can easily control them. Hide them, yes, sometimes, but never change them easily. For me a bad (or angry or depressed) mood is something that cannot be averted - it's like being on a ship at sea when a storm whips up. You just have to weather the storm as best you can and wait for it to end. Sometimes the storm lasts a long time. I once had a storm last so long I forgot what calm seas were like. But that's in the past thank heaven.
I'm no good at helping others out of their bad moods either, possibly because I haven't a clue what to do. If I knew I'd apply it to myself!
If you're an INTP, that probably sounds familiar. Another INTP-ism came up in therapy a few months ago. I was a few seconds late for the session and was beating myself up over it. I think I said something like "being late is irresponsible and shows a lack of respect for the person who's expecting me". I was thinking of Eeyore, a guy I used to be friends with (that ended when he and his cohorts ostracized me) who was chronically late. He kept a job, so I knew he could be on time if he wanted to. He did not respect the people he called his friends though.
Back to the session. My statement triggered something in my therapist because she wouldn't let it go. She kept pursuing it. I, in turn, got more and more angry and frustrated, not knowing what she expected me to say. This always happens when my subconscious is hiding something important and this time was no exception. We eventually got to my desire for competence. I hesitate to call it a quest for perfectionism. I'm not perfectionist, but I do want to avoid fucking up at all costs.
You know the saying "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried"? That could be my motto. Hell, I didn't tell anyone that I was jogging for over a year. If I started jogging, then stopped, I didn't want to have to field queries from people asking how the jogging was coming (and then have to tell them that I failed). There's nothing I hate more then being wrong, or having someone know that I failed at something I tried. My desire to be on time for a session locked into this quite tightly.
In therapy, I ended up blurting out this gem: "I can't let someone have a reason to not like me."
She stopped for a minute for my conscious mind to absorb what had burst from my subconscious - and also to write it down.
A non-stop rational nature combined with a childhood filled with bullying will make you that way too. I know, intellectually, that this is an irrational conclusion - that I don't have to be perfect for people to like me. Heaven knows I'm not perfect. But still, it resists therapy because it's such an attractive delusion. If I can just keep my faults hidden long enough, I won't be hated, laughed at, ridiculed. If I can put my best foot forward I will be liked, admired, loved.
Is it any wonder why I'm a nervous wreck on job interviews and first dates? In my mind, absolutely everything is riding on first impressions.
Reversed, I'm not like that at all. I know people are fallible. If they goof up somehow, it's a huge relief to me. I can relax slightly.
Finally, I've liked people I've had no reason liking and I've not liked people that I should have gotten along famously with. It just goes to show how much of likes and dislikes resist the rational mind. Logically, I must affect other people in similar ways.
It's a problem though, because it negatively impacts my life in so many ways. Relationship anxiety is just one way. I also tend to procrastinate tasks I haven't learned 100% yet. This led to my recent bad luck comes in threes Seneschal experience. My first council meeting was a cluster fuck. The MSCA meeting the next day was not much better and the Curia meeting three days later was stress incarnate. Frankly if I didn't have people depending on me I'd have walked out of the meeting right there and never returned. The desire to quit as Seneschal has been pretty high - that it would be a psychological set back is making me stick to it.
Eventually I'll master these skills though, and I'll be happy as a clam. The trick now is to survive the experience.
Yeah, more issues to work through. I'm starting to think that I could live to be 100 and still require therapy.
So what else is new? On the unabashedly good news front I've lost a few more pounds and I'm now at 62.2 pounds down. Less then 8 pounds to go!
Birthday-to-Valentines-day-suicide-season is official over for another year, so if I sounded down in the writing above, think about how much worse it could have been. The snow is melting and the days are getting brighter. Running is getting easier and I did 11-12K this morning along the river. I'm on pace to beat my best time for 10K. Not bad considered I had a second-degree torn hamstring 6 months ago.
Last weekend I went to Drumheller. I'm going to Saskatoon for an event next weekend. The weekend after that I'm going to Vancouver to visit my friends out there. I'll have lots of Sushi, maybe a little sunshine and perhaps a wee bit of gelato.
kermie_canada and spookiemonkie2 to join me for some sushi (Tokyo Garden, down on Southport Road. Didn't suck) and later some gelato. It was a little time slice of Vancouver here in Cowtown. Can you be homesick for someplace you've never lived? I suspect you can. The sour mood has been nipped in the bud, which is good because I'm not the sort who can easily control them. Hide them, yes, sometimes, but never change them easily. For me a bad (or angry or depressed) mood is something that cannot be averted - it's like being on a ship at sea when a storm whips up. You just have to weather the storm as best you can and wait for it to end. Sometimes the storm lasts a long time. I once had a storm last so long I forgot what calm seas were like. But that's in the past thank heaven.
I'm no good at helping others out of their bad moods either, possibly because I haven't a clue what to do. If I knew I'd apply it to myself!
If you're an INTP, that probably sounds familiar. Another INTP-ism came up in therapy a few months ago. I was a few seconds late for the session and was beating myself up over it. I think I said something like "being late is irresponsible and shows a lack of respect for the person who's expecting me". I was thinking of Eeyore, a guy I used to be friends with (that ended when he and his cohorts ostracized me) who was chronically late. He kept a job, so I knew he could be on time if he wanted to. He did not respect the people he called his friends though.
Back to the session. My statement triggered something in my therapist because she wouldn't let it go. She kept pursuing it. I, in turn, got more and more angry and frustrated, not knowing what she expected me to say. This always happens when my subconscious is hiding something important and this time was no exception. We eventually got to my desire for competence. I hesitate to call it a quest for perfectionism. I'm not perfectionist, but I do want to avoid fucking up at all costs.
You know the saying "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried"? That could be my motto. Hell, I didn't tell anyone that I was jogging for over a year. If I started jogging, then stopped, I didn't want to have to field queries from people asking how the jogging was coming (and then have to tell them that I failed). There's nothing I hate more then being wrong, or having someone know that I failed at something I tried. My desire to be on time for a session locked into this quite tightly.
In therapy, I ended up blurting out this gem: "I can't let someone have a reason to not like me."
She stopped for a minute for my conscious mind to absorb what had burst from my subconscious - and also to write it down.
A non-stop rational nature combined with a childhood filled with bullying will make you that way too. I know, intellectually, that this is an irrational conclusion - that I don't have to be perfect for people to like me. Heaven knows I'm not perfect. But still, it resists therapy because it's such an attractive delusion. If I can just keep my faults hidden long enough, I won't be hated, laughed at, ridiculed. If I can put my best foot forward I will be liked, admired, loved.
Is it any wonder why I'm a nervous wreck on job interviews and first dates? In my mind, absolutely everything is riding on first impressions.
Reversed, I'm not like that at all. I know people are fallible. If they goof up somehow, it's a huge relief to me. I can relax slightly.
Finally, I've liked people I've had no reason liking and I've not liked people that I should have gotten along famously with. It just goes to show how much of likes and dislikes resist the rational mind. Logically, I must affect other people in similar ways.
It's a problem though, because it negatively impacts my life in so many ways. Relationship anxiety is just one way. I also tend to procrastinate tasks I haven't learned 100% yet. This led to my recent bad luck comes in threes Seneschal experience. My first council meeting was a cluster fuck. The MSCA meeting the next day was not much better and the Curia meeting three days later was stress incarnate. Frankly if I didn't have people depending on me I'd have walked out of the meeting right there and never returned. The desire to quit as Seneschal has been pretty high - that it would be a psychological set back is making me stick to it.
Eventually I'll master these skills though, and I'll be happy as a clam. The trick now is to survive the experience.
Yeah, more issues to work through. I'm starting to think that I could live to be 100 and still require therapy.
So what else is new? On the unabashedly good news front I've lost a few more pounds and I'm now at 62.2 pounds down. Less then 8 pounds to go!
Birthday-to-Valentines-day-suicide-season is official over for another year, so if I sounded down in the writing above, think about how much worse it could have been. The snow is melting and the days are getting brighter. Running is getting easier and I did 11-12K this morning along the river. I'm on pace to beat my best time for 10K. Not bad considered I had a second-degree torn hamstring 6 months ago.
Last weekend I went to Drumheller. I'm going to Saskatoon for an event next weekend. The weekend after that I'm going to Vancouver to visit my friends out there. I'll have lots of Sushi, maybe a little sunshine and perhaps a wee bit of gelato.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-03-19 03:19 am (UTC)Considering that your link shows us as being about one percent of the population, we seem to be dominating this corner. On the other hand, we are not exactly a representative cross-section of the North American population.
On the gripping hand, I think we should blame Nikita, Eh?
no subject
Date: 2007-03-19 03:22 am (UTC)Familiar Enough
Date: 2007-03-19 03:31 am (UTC)Give your therapist credit for being perceptive - she found a thread hanging loose, and tugged on it until something registered for you. Good for her ... and good for you not just picking up on it, but obviously your still working it through well after the fact.
As for "tales from the therapist's couch", I have one or two that I'll relate sometime when I can find the motivation to put them to words...