I need therapy. I don’t have a lot of money, therapy is very expensive and there doesn’t seem to be any therapists around that fit my budget. So I need to replace therapy with something else. I’ve read or skimmed over some books before, “Feeling Good” for CBT and “Reinventing Your Life” for schema therapy. Neither of them resonated with me and I had a difficult time following the books. Friends do not exist and they are not there to give me therapy anyway so I am on my own in this, as usual. Even therapy given by a professional is not really enough so I am also working on finding a medication that works for me as well, in case you were wondering. I am asking for book recommendations, and to make it easier for you to recommend something that is relevant to my issues, I will try to briefly summarize them here.
-I have very low tolerance for uncertainty. It causes me a lot of distress and makes it completely impossible for me to make any long term decisions, and by long term I mean longer than a week. It also means that I am unable to put any effort towards things that require long term commitment, like going to school for example.
-I doubt everything. I doubt every emotion I feel, every decision, every observation or judgement I make, any action that I took in the past, that I am taking today and planning to take in the future. Just complete confusion, I have no trust in anything that is a product of my thinking. Including this text that I am now writing. Something in me tells me that what I am writing right now is wrong.
-I have very low distress tolerance. Any small thing that happens gets immediately catastrophized and I crumble so easily under any kind of pressure, and simply give up.
-I have no willpower. Any task that involves even a small amount of difficulty, I simply give up. I can’t find any motivation or discipline or whatever it is that I need to have to do anything I just don’t have it. The easiest way to put it is that I am exceptionally lazy.
-I have no confidence. I failed so many times, I’ve given whatever my mind could allow myself to give so that I can get better and it doesn’t work. I feel fractured and I have no confidence in my ability to do anything beyond simple tasks. I’ve tried starting with establishing small habits like brushing my teeth or going for very short walks but in the end they all fall apart. It’s like an acid rain going on inside me, any structure that gets built immediately starts to erode and eventually they all collapse. Keeping them up requires a constant input of energy which I lack, and none of it ever gets easier, for example I can go for months taking daily walks and getting off the bed and going to walk remains as difficult as it was when I just start doing it.
-I hate myself. I have done a lot things that hurt people in the past, I won’t let go of any of them. I can’t. I still feel capable of doing these things. I stay away from people because I am scared that I will hurt or betray their trust in me again, and I genuinely feel that I haven’t learned my lesson from my mistakes so I will most certainly do the same mistake I have done again, if I give myself the chance. I just feel an intense impulse to abandon myself. I haven’t started hurting myself again like I used to, but I did slightly burn my palm because something inside me just froze my hand above the stove and made me want to feel the burning pain while I was cooking. I feel a lot of guilt for my existence. I feel a deep emptiness and I feel like I am some kind of self serving machine, lacking the warmth that I desire so much. I believe I have narcissistic tendencies and impaired empathy. Every action that I take feels self serving and narcissistic, even when I do it to make someone else happy, it just feels hollow and selfish. I feel guilty for making this post and asking for help, I feel like I am faking my own emotional distress. I can’t even go back and read this text without realizing that it was written by me, that I exist as a physical being that interacts with and is known by other humans and it makes me feel guilty and deeply disgusted by myself.
-I feel odd. There is this unreality about my own self and the world around me. I feel like everything about reality can slip under my feet at any moment. Nothing feels real, everything feels like a dream, the world lacks emotional substance. I belive this is called derealization. I also feel like I have weird thoughts and I act in weird ways that do not make sense to other people. I feel existential dread, it’s like I am stuck in this weird, scary world and it all makes so little sense, I make so little sense, I can understand so little of what is happening inside or outside me, and it all feels dreamlike. I can’t genuinely connect to anybody and part of me just doesn’t like being around others or interacting with anybody.
As usual if you’ve read this far, I appreciate you taking your time do so, and thank you. If you have any book suggestions please leave them in the comments. I am not looking for any particular genre, if you think something can help me feel free to recommend it.
by smoothbrain_1947
1 Comment
I’m really sorry you’re going through all this and feeling this way! Anything by Brene Brown is good! I personally liked “the gifts of imperfection”. That really helped me work through some self-esteem issues and also understanding the human experience.