Go to therapy. Seriously. Helping you work through your mind not doing what you want is literally their profession. I've found it incredibly helpful multiple times throughout my life, for lots of things vaguely similar to this.
I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine what they do when someone shows up depressed for reasons that are totally reasonable. She said they try to use drugs and therapy to generate some minor delusions that would help the person feel better in their environment.
Maybe OP is just having the reasonable response to corporate work and the rest of us are deluded.
But yeah, talking to therapists is like a cheat code OP. You'll feel better. But you might just be having a totally rational experience.
Edit: since this seems to be the wrong place to have this conversation (my mistake), I'd like to emphasize that my point is that you should seek therapy as it was suggested OP, but also to commiserate that offices are often horrible experiences.
Calling what therapy does as "creating delusions" helps nobody. Therapy offers a number of tools that helps a person get grounded in reality, helps a person create boundaries, and helps strengthen a person's abilities to deal with their life stresses by creating the framework to either deal with them or help move on to a new environment that doesn't create as much stress.
Not all therapists are good. If you try somebody and don't connect or trust them, try to find somebody else. Internalizing stress really destroys the body, and it's important to find somebody you trust to help process it.
Really? It helped me. It was nice for me to have someone else acknowledge that the emperor was in fact naked. The emperor transparent clothes in this situation was the suggestion that offices aren't horrible places to be. Take the IBM book of songs, for example.
I would like to emphasize that I agree with you (and my original comment): Therapy is a cheat code! It will make your life immeasurably better. Everyone should do it!
No need to fight, I think both of you are right. Some people can get stuck into painful context or interpretations, in which case some therapy trick can help get out of the pit. That said if you discuss high level sociology you often end up in the "what a massive soup of chaos" too.
Yeah. I can't write in my own first language. Forgive me. Let me try again: The emperor is actually naked (offices are bad), but for various reasons people say the emperor is not naked (offices aren't bad). Does that help? I need help, clearly.
The problem is not that you’re saying “offices are bad”, it’s that you’re conflating “the ability to maintain a healthy-ish mental state after being exposed to an office” with “a delusion that offices are good”.
Lots of bad things exist, being able to function in the face of Bad Things does not require you to deny or ignore that reality.
Poisonous spiders exist, but overcoming arachnophobia (an unusually debilitating reaction to encountering spiders) isn’t a “delusion that spiders are safe”, and won’t make you try to kiss a Black Widow.
I've never needed therapy, but from the outside I've seen people who have been failed by it. It seems like the industry is plagued with one common issue. Therapists aren't incentivized to help you stop needing therapy.
I've heard this "therapists are just out to keep you hooked on therapy" trope many times and I don't think it is true. The demand for good therapists vastly outstrips the supply - they don't need to keep patients hooked when there are plenty of new ones waiting.
Most therapists I've had recently have said something along the lines of "therapy should be temporary for most people, if you're a few months in and not seeing measurable progress then you might need another therapist." This is in keeping with my experience, which is that you make progress on whatever issue brought you to therapy, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and it's no longer worth the time and expense.
Of course some people have more serious conditions and do need to be in therapy constantly, but that isn't the norm for most who experience mental health problems.
Also - never needed therapy? Ever? For anything? Not even a little bit? Sounds like some self examination might be in order.
Interesting perspective, and I'm sure I've never heard someone talk about their success with therapy because it isn't a topic that's likely to come up.
No, I've never needed therapy. I self examine on a regular basis. I have generally followed a stoic philosophy of life, which means regularly working on my physical and mental wellness. I've steered clear of unhealthy addictions and other problem generators. Therapy is just one tool in a large toolbox of mental health.
The first thing to try is to bring that up. By stating that you struggle to trust people, you can ask them to help you examine what thoughts you have that are associated with trust in the first place, and that's really helpful in developing a mindful understanding of what's happening.
Trust is also a push-pull thing in the first place, so going in with an honest attempt can help you gauge your reaction before learn who to trust.
> She said they try to use drugs and therapy to generate some minor delusions that would help the person feel better in their environment.
I struggle to believe that's actually what they said. That sounds more like your interpretation of what they said, and in particular, a funhouse mirror description of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
That's a perspective on CBT I've heard many times from many people with extensive experience with therapy and chronic health conditions. You might think it's wrong, it's certainly not absurd.
That sounds like a pretty nihilistic psychiatrist (which I'd note is different from what I'd understand a therapist to be - therapists are psychologists, psychiatrists are medically trained). Therapists aren't just for irrational or subconcious emotions. It can help enormously to talk over your reactions to a terrible situation you're in and see if there are other paths for your feelings.
>I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine what they do when someone shows up depressed for reasons that are totally reasonable. She said they try to use drugs and therapy to generate some minor delusions that would help the person feel better in their environment.
I've literally just been through this, and I can 100% say it actually helped. I'm still on the drugs but I've got just enough tools to create just enough minor delusions to ride out the current funk and get to a better place where I can come off the drugs. I'm pretty glad I caught it in time as I can totally see what that level of stress/anxiety/depression does to people and I'm particularly vulnerable to it.
What do you mean by that? A delusion is often a symptom of a mental health issue, something doctors treat to get rid of, so I don't understand it's use in this context.
My entire knowledge of the subject is what she said in that quote and I'm otherwise ignorant of the subject from a professional perspective so I'd just be guessing if I was going to elaborate, but I can tell you what I took from it: to me it meant that most people are a little deluded about their lives. Some productively, some not so much.
