PERSONAL

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Counselling Class 3 & What's Wrong With Me

9 months ago1,967 words

The third class of this Counselling skills course didn't go as badly as I dreaded it might, mostly due to revising my expectations. Also, a brief account of exactly why I've been trapped in a pit, and which mental conditions I believe I do or don't have.

I spent all of yesterday anxiously dreading the third session of this counselling course, due to the pain of not fitting in the previous times. I kept wondering whether to just drop out, maybe try again the next time it ran in a few months. Try to improve some other stuff in the meantime.

I felt I might as well force myself to go this time though, at least to speak with the tutor face-to-face about not continuing and what my options might be. I'd also had some nice but brief interactions with a receptionist the other times - she remembered my name and seemed happy to see me - so I was at least curious to know whether that was just her being nice in her role or something beyond that.

When I arrived, she wasn't there, though - there was a different receptionist instead - so... oh well. Equal parts disappointment and relief, I suppose, though neither very strongly.

That meant I was early again, and got a chance to talk with the tutor in the classroom before the others arrived. I talked about my reservations, what could happen next, etc... but said I'd at least give this third session a try and see how it goes.

And it didn't go that badly, actually! I think I got enough value out of it to keep going.



The biggest cause of the pain from the previous couple of sessions was unrealistic expectations. I've been alone for a long time, and desperately hoped that I'd be able to find some local friend - or more - who'd be able to make the loneliness go away. When I got the impression nobody there could be that person, I was devastated. "This means I'll be alone forever!!"

Maybe it was a symptom of the instant gratification we're all essentially programmed to expect these days.

I don't know what it was, or when or how it happened, but my thoughts and expectations seem to have shifted. Now, I'm not expecting lasting connection from this, just exposure to the world beyond the pit I've been in for ages. Meeting that expectation is far more realistic.

I suppose going from one state - isolation - to a drastically different one was never going to be an instant or smooth transition, and the despair I've experienced and written about over the past couple of weeks came from the rockiness of that transition.

I get the feelings our positions in the class are mostly established at this point, and I'm still the outsider. I doubt anyone will be going out of their way to talk to me. I did a discussion task with a woman next to me (after she looked desperately to her other side for a better option), who was married with children and whose name I don't recall, and it was okay, I suppose. Not horrendously strained and awkward, but not something I imagine either of us wanted to pursue outside that narrow setting either.

We've yet to actually practise being counsellors, which will involve three of us going in a room and taking turns being the listener, speaker, or assessor. I'll be curious to see if that alters the dynamics at all.



I also actually enjoy the content of the course; it's not like it's irrelevant or uninteresting to me and I'm just there to meet people. I got top grades while getting my Psychology degree for a reason.

I feel I know more than the tutor (who's younger than me) in some ways though, and I've been speaking up a lot more than I ever did in classes in the past because of that (it helps that it's a small cosy room with a class of about a dozen rather than a huge lecture theatre with hundreds). I'm concerned that I'm coming across as an obnoxious know-it-all though.

(To direct your assumptions a bit, it's less "um, *akshually*..." and more "ooh, I know this!" (when he asks a question and nobody else speaks up). Overly enthusiastic rather than condescending correcting.)

One example is that he talked about AI - specifically Pi - at some point, and I was the only one in the class who'd even heard of it, so I quite eagerly spoke up about my experiences conversing with it and how I found it both moving and concerning.

I can't remember whether or not I already talked about this in a previous post - it's all been a bit of a blur recently - but there's a symptom of social anxiety called post-event rumination, where much of the pain comes after the event rather than during. I was anxious all day before the class, but that anxiety subsided as soon as I left the house and hasn't returned since (I suppose it's similar to the anticipation I imagine a sprinter might feel while waiting for the starting gun). While there, I was okay; I made some social missteps, faux pas, but recognised them and was able to shrug them off in the moment. Now that I'm home, though, they're all coming to mind over and over, haunting me, painfully.

I know that nobody else will be dwelling on my social ineptitude. I have to actively search my memories to try and remember anything anyone else said, and there's nothing I judge harshly. There's a quote (of apparently uncertain origin) along the lines of "you'd worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do". Still, the thoughts come up, and they strike at the heart, the feelings, rather than being some cerebral consideration to logically assess.

That's a symptom of a disease rather than something I choose or want, like how if you have a cold, you don't exactly decide to have a runny nose. It causes you distress whether you like it or not, and there's not all that much you can do other than wait for it to run its course (though not a perfect analogy since you can take easily-obtainable medication to relieve cold symptoms).



Speaking of disease, my previous posts and several of the comments on them have focused on what specific mental issues might be to blame for my recent distress. I wanted to write some post I could pin - and link people to when it inevitably comes up in future - going into detail about exactly what my own self-assessment might look like, though I want my feelings about interacting with a group of strangers for the first time in years to settle down a bit first.

I want to at least write a very brief bullet-point account of things here though:


- I spent my childhood living in squalor with my severely neglectful father, and missed out on much important ∞ socialisation ∞ - essentially 'well-adjustedness training' - as a result. Children are wont to reject their poorly-socialised peers - an infection-preventative measure from tribal times, perhaps - and as a result I was an outcast. My father was perpetually unemployed, so 'going to work every day' wasn't a fact of life baked into my mind as it would be for most children (witnessing it being a part of a parent's life - not your own - is enough to make the mental mark).

- I made Flash games in my teens using self-taught skills, and the MARDEK games in particular blew up in popularity. I was scared of getting a job, so I used this ostensible success to convince myself and my parents that I could just make stuff from my bedroom instead of pushing through the anxiety and getting my crucial first employment experiences.

- I spent years in my bedroom alone working on games and maintaining Fig Hunter, which attracted an increasingly toxic audience I was too poorly-adjusted to deal with healthily. I experienced a lot of people - the volume is really the most important factor - trying to hurt me in various ways, some alarmingly tenaciously. This scared me off socialising online for a long time; I'm still struggling with that, and I'm always on guard.

- The last time I went out into the world was when I went to uni between 2015 and 2018. The closest connection I formed there grew toxic, and I'm still enduring the traumatic fallout of that (I still have nightmares about it often). I also found out I had - and then later had major surgery for - brain cancer, literally my worst fear come true.

- Then I isolated for years, and my experiences of life became increasingly detached from those of others.


∞ The About page on this site ∞ which I wrote a couple of years ago is basically a mini-autobiography that goes into this stuff in more detail. (Also, I should update that at some point. My Patreon page's description, too.)


Hopefully you can imagine how those life experiences would lead to a lot of the problems that plague and hinder me. It's what I meant by 'pathologising circumstance' in a previous post; most of my issues are a result of external rather than internal factors.


In terms of actual nameable mental health conditions, I certainly have social anxiety, but I think I also have Avoidant Personality Disorder, which I understand to be its more severe form (though there seems to be a lot of varying interpretations of it in the relevant Reddit community).

I sporadically experience depression, but as a result of specific circumstances, unlike people with clinical depression who experience it despite favourable circumstances.

I don't have autism; I don't struggle with interpreting nonverbal cues, or metaphors, I've never stimmed or had a meltdown, I don't have any special interests (in the sense that people with autism typically do), and I'm not great with technical details. ∞ On this autism test I just found ∞, I got a score of 10/30 ("few tendencies"; "you experience very few signs of autism and are probably not autistic"), mostly due to things that also fall into the domains of introversion (prefer to do things alone) or social anxiety (get anxious about meeting new people).

I have trouble concentrating sometimes, but that can be blamed on isolation and the depression and stress that come with that - plus literal surgery and radioactive bombardment of my brain can't have helped - without any need to invoke ADHD. I never had trouble concentrating in school as a child (though I rarely went to school due to the neglect). ∞ On the ADHD test on that same website ∞, I got a score of 15/48 ("Your results are not consistent with ADHD").



I'm hoping that if I keep going to these classes, I'll be able to shed some of the spider webs that have grown over me during this period of world-avoidance. The other, not-dissimilar evening class I did a decade ago led to me going to uni soon after, so maybe this one will lead to something similar. We'll see.

For now, I'm getting the impression that the worst part of the readjustment might be behind me... but I'll have to try again next week and see. Maybe all the despair and anxiety will come flowing back in the days to come!!

Also, I really want to write a post about all the work I've been doing on Dreamons!