CBT experiences

[velociraptor]

Not every problem can be reframed away or accepted and incorporated into a fulfilling life

The following video features a very good friend of mine (he taught me light painting over two decades ago). He had a massive heart attack and is kept alive by an artificial heart. You can't even bathe normally when you have one as you are no longer a "watertight unit".

As you can see from the video, the bugger figured out how to go scuba diving with his and he is still alive and scuba diving more on his own without the medical support team eight years later.

Larrie and others like us reject your reality and substitute our own.

 

[Wizardry]

The following video features a very good friend of mine (he taught me light painting over two decades ago). He had a massive heart attack and is kept alive by an artificial heart. You can't even bathe normally when you have one as you are no longer a "watertight unit".

As you can see from the video, the bugger figured out how to go scuba diving with his and he is still alive and scuba diving more on his own without the medical support team eight years later.

Larrie and others like us reject your reality and substitute our own.

So he refused to accept perceived limitations placed on him by his circumstances, rather than accepting the limitations others tried to place on him. I have no idea how you're concluding that this undermines my position in any way. If anything, it supports it. His problems were not to do with mindset, but with constraints on reality. Rather than accept those constraints, he sought to overcome them.

CBT would probably have encouraged him to accept the fact that he'd never get to go scuba diving again, and encouraged him to focus on other things that seemed more within his control.

 

[Wizardry]

Simply erasing negative thoughts pays huge dividends.

BTW, A friend of mine gained significant benefits in using A.I. as a counsellor for something else.

If negative thoughts are faulty or not grounded in reality, then yes, challenging them and getting rid of them is the appropriate way to proceed. My point is that not every negative thought, perception or experience is wrong, invalid or responsive to reframing.

Ungrounded, delusional optimism sets one up for disappointment.

I don't advocate for pessimism. I advocate for realism. A realistic appraisal of reality involves recognising both the positive and the negative.

 

[Matthias]

A limitation on CBT's effectiveness for certain individuals is that sometimes, it isn't actually faulty thinking that is the problem, but rather the adverse circumstances themselves. Not every problem can be reframed away or accepted and incorporated into a fulfilling life.

I wonder whether therapists would agree with that. I don't think CBT can cure everything but I'm curious how much it can do and whether it can help people in your situation who think it can't help.

 

[velociraptor]

Ungrounded, delusional optimism sets one up for disappointment.

I disagree with your definition of delusional. There is always room for improvement.

 

[Wizardry]

I wonder whether therapists would agree with that. I don't think CBT can cure everything but I'm curious how much it can do and whether it can help people in your situation who think it can't help.

I don't think therapists tend to like acknowledging where talk therapy can't help, as it undermines the authority of the field, implies that changes to some frameworks might be necessary, and sometimes gives the therapist no alternative place to send the patient for help. It's easier and more convenient to try and make the patient fit into the model, even if they don't.

My determination that CBT and talk therapy are unhelpful for my issues is not something that I've arrived at lightly. There are several reasons for this.

I don't follow the Thought → Feeling → Behaviour structure that CBT assumes. I'm more like Reality → Structure → Meaning → Emotion → Action.

I don't start with feelings or even isolated thoughts. I start with structural evaluation of reality. I don’t act because I feel. I feel because something either fits or breaks my internal model.

CBT assumes: Changing thoughts = emotions change, but for me, changing thoughts doesn’t work unless the system becomes coherent.
I don’t believe things just because they are helpful or convenient. They have to make structural sense. If anything, therapists experience my thoughts as too coherent to be able to challenge as opposed to disorganised or distorted. I remember making one therapist visibly lose their composure in an instance when my chain of logic made their framework and apparent preconceived notions irreconcilable with each other.

I've had about 7 or 8 therapists in my life, and while a couple of them occasionally made good suggestions, I never experienced any change in my mental or emotional well-being with any of them. A couple of them even suggested or outright told me that therapy is not the appropriate intervention given my particular difficulties and the way I operate.

Like I said before, my understanding of the intricacies of my difficulties has come infinitely further through solitary introspection and analysis (and more recently, the assistance of ChatGPT) than it ever did with the help of any therapist, and better-understanding my situation has had a grounding effect, making old harmful but understandable beliefs untenable with the emergence of contradictory evidence.

My problems are not relatable to the majority of the population, so therapists in the past have often misunderstood or misclassified them, which has had a negative impact rather than a positive one. I don't think I've ever seen somebody with issues like mine say that they've benefitted from talk therapy, but I've seen many who have said it hasn't helped them.

I think the mental health industry as a whole is largely underserving and getting it wrong as it relates to people with issues like mine, so much so that I'm in the process of creating a theoretical framework that makes novel claims and predictions that aren't currently accounted for in the field of psychology. Elements of this theory have been discussed in posts I've made in other threads.

 

[Wizardry]

I disagree with your definition of delusional. There is always room for improvement.

Ungrounded, delusional optimism could be defined as believing there's a high probability or near-certainty that a specifc good outcome will happen despite sparse or zero evidence to support that belief, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This generally involves ignoring or dismissing the constraints of reality in favour of what one wishes could be true.

I'm not saying that optimism itself is inherently delusional, if that's the interpretation you've arrived at.

 

[velociraptor]

if that's the interpretation you've arrived at

The interpretation I have arrived at is that I will simply ignore you in the future. Life is too short to engage with people who are determined to be negative. Good day.

 

[Wizardry]

The interpretation I have arrived at is that I will simply ignore you in the future. Life is too short to engage with people who are determined to be negative. Good day.

Suit yourself dude, but I'm determined to be realistic, not negative.

Also, just gonna put it out there that I engaged with every point you made, while you engaged with almost none of the points I made. The one time you did reference a point I made, your counterexample came closer to supporting my point than contradicting it.

 

[Matthias]

I don't think therapists tend to like acknowledging where talk therapy can't help, as it undermines the authority of the field, implies that changes to some frameworks might be necessary, and sometimes gives the therapist no alternative place to send the patient for help. It's easier and more convenient to try and make the patient fit into the model, even if they don't.

My determination that CBT and talk therapy are unhelpful for my issues is not something that I've arrived at lightly. There are several reasons for this.

I don't follow the Thought → Feeling → Behaviour structure that CBT assumes. I'm more like Reality → Structure → Meaning → Emotion → Action.

I don't start with feelings or even isolated thoughts. I start with structural evaluation of reality. I don’t act because I feel. I feel because something either fits or breaks my internal model.

I have a strong interest in psychology so I'm interested in how you see things. While your view appears different on the surface, I don't see much of a difference between the two. Feelings are how people subjectively experience emotions while actions are a type of behaviour. Thoughts often occur in response to real circumstances (reality). I think the structure and meaning you refer to are part of what psychologists call perception.

I think the following is what most psychologists/therapists believe:
Reality (circumstances) -> Perception of reality (structure, meaning, and thoughts) -> Emotion-> Behaviour (actions)

CBT assumes: Changing thoughts = emotions change, but for me, changing thoughts doesn’t work unless the system becomes coherent.
I don’t believe things just because they are helpful or convenient. They have to make structural sense. If anything, therapists experience my thoughts as too coherent to be able to challenge as opposed to disorganised or distorted. I remember making one therapist visibly lose their composure in an instance when my chain of logic made their framework and apparent preconceived notions irreconcilable with each other.

I don't think you can believe something that you know isn't true. Therapists are supposed to help patients form new thoughts that are not only helpful or convenient thoughts but that reflect accurate perceptions of reality.

I've had about 7 or 8 therapists in my life, and while a couple of them occasionally made good suggestions, I never experienced any change in my mental or emotional well-being with any of them. A couple of them even suggested or outright told me that therapy is not the appropriate intervention given my particular difficulties and the way I operate.

Like I said before, my understanding of the intricacies of my difficulties has come infinitely further through solitary introspection and analysis (and more recently, the assistance of ChatGPT) than it ever did with the help of any therapist, and better-understanding my situation has had a grounding effect, making old harmful but understandable beliefs untenable with the emergence of contradictory evidence.

I think most people are extroverts who find solitary introspection difficult to do without the assistance of a therapist. If you can introspect on your own and do so accurately, you might not need a therapist.

ChatGPT is a yes man. It's trained to agree with almost anything you say. As a test, I got it to agree that I was God and it praised my ability to read my family's thoughts through radio signals to learn that they were secretely plotting against me, despite that being clearly delusional. I've found that Google's Gemini is much better for mental health related prompts but it also tends to be agreeable.

My problems are not relatable to the majority of the population, so therapists in the past have often misunderstood or misclassified them, which has had a negative impact rather than a positive one. I don't think I've ever seen somebody with issues like mine say that they've benefitted from talk therapy, but I've seen many who have said it hasn't helped them.

I think the mental health industry as a whole is largely underserving and getting it wrong as it relates to people with issues like mine, so much so that I'm in the process of creating a theoretical framework that makes novel claims and predictions that aren't currently accounted for in the field of psychology. Elements of this theory have been discussed in posts I've made in other threads.

My understanding is that therapy mostly helps people reduce the intensity and frequency of distressing emotions. I think it struggles to help with increasing the intensity or frequency of positive emotions unless those emotions are solely diminished due to stress or distressing emotions.

 

[Wizardry]

I have a strong interest in psychology so I'm interested in how you see things. While your view appears different on the surface, I don't see much of a difference between the two. Feelings are how people subjectively experience emotions while actions are a type of behaviour. Thoughts often occur in response to real circumstances (reality). I think the structure and meaning you refer to are part of what psychologists call perception.

I think the following is what most psychologists/therapists believe:
Reality (circumstances) -> Perception of reality (structure, meaning, and thoughts) -> Emotion-> Behaviour (actions)

I also have a strong interest in psychology.

I agree interpretation mediates emotion. What I’m describing isn’t just surface thoughts but the deeper structural model that generates those thoughts.

A CBT patient might have the thought "everybody hates me", and while there might be some basis for that patient to feel that way, the thought itself is likely a cognitive distortion or an overgeneralisation of how they've been treated in certain instances.

If I was to have a thought like that, it would have to pass a structural analysis test and a coherence test before it could even affect me emotionally, and if it failed, it would be discarded. I don't have isolated thoughts that affect my emotions. My perception of reality is based on structural analysis, heavy coherence testing, and fidelity to the truth. Simple reframing doesn't work without fundamentally challenging my models of reality, which isn't impossible but requires contradicting them with more coherent, more potent explanations than those I've already arrived at. A therapist has never been able to successfully do that. In therapy sessions, I'm the one that's more likely to leave therapists with questions they can't answer or logic they can't contend with than the other way around. I'd dare say this isn't because therapists are stupid, but rather because there are no cognitive distortions to correct, therapy doesn't have much to offer my issues, and I'm already pretty good at introspecting and analysing on my own.

CBT therapists typically only have to challenge a thought, where with me they have to challenge a robust, coherent structural analysis of reality.

I don't think you can believe something that you know isn't true. Therapists are supposed to help patients form new thoughts that are not only helpful or convenient thoughts but that reflect accurate perceptions of reality.

I don't think therapists generally ask patients to accept thoughts that they know aren't true, but in my experience, they're more likely to offer an alternate way of thinking about something that they think would be more helpful than reckoning with the nature of reality itself and what is more likely to be true based on analysis of the available evidencr.

I think most people are extroverts who find solitary introspection difficult to do without the assistance of a therapist. If you can introspect on your own and do so accurately, you might not need a therapist.

Like I said, I've been able to get infinitely further with solitary introspection and analysis than I ever have with a therapist. When I look back to earlier points in my life, there are probably ways therapy could theoretically have helped me, but therapists never identified or addressed those issues. It was on me to figure it all out on my own later. Now, I have insight coming out of my ears. I see zero value in seeing a therapist seeing as I do a much better job on my own of making sense of my situation, most therapists have no clue about my problems, and improving reality rather than improving thoughts or reframing is the way my life will actually improve. I see no plausible value-add from therapy.

ChatGPT is a yes man. It's trained to agree with almost anything you say. As a test, I got it to agree that I was God and it praised my ability to read my family's thoughts through radio signals to learn that they were secretely plotting against me, despite that being clearly delusional. I've found that Google's Gemini is much better for mental health related prompts but it also tends to be agreeable.

It depends how you use it.

I don't just vent to ChatGPT. I more frequently ask it questions and keep digging until I get answers that make sense and don't collapse under scrutiny. I stress-test ideas and simulate hostile critics to strengthen insights. I didn't set out to create a theoretical framework. It emerged as fragments as I kept asking the right questions.

My understanding is that therapy mostly helps people reduce the intensity and frequency of distressing emotions. I think it struggles to help with increasing the intensity or frequency of positive emotions unless those emotions are solely diminished due to stress or distressing emotions.

That's probably true. The effectiveness of therapy is measured by symptom reduction rather than improved life satisfaction.

That said, there is a technique called Behavioural Activation that is used for clinical depression and anxiety. It aims to increase engagement in rewarding activities to overcome avoidance.

Therapy (and medication, for that matter) is most appropriate when there is a mental health disorder to treat. Low life satisfaction can be completely circumstantial rather than pathological (ie, if a specific circumstance or circumstances changed, the person would no longer be "depressed"), in which case, CBT tends to be less effective.

People who are clinically depressed tend to remain in a depressed state no matter what happens to them or what changes in their lives, and those cases are where therapy and medication are the most appropriate interventions.