I've applied for private therapy

[enzyme]

I always felt skeptical about whether or not I truly needed to seek professional help.  I'd always have an excuse that was either I'm not THAT bad or I just don't have the money.

The truth is that I consider myself to be a pretty low conscious person.  Every day I have the same traumatic scenarios from childhood playing out in my mind and it leads me to having violent outburts where I scream and sometimes do something physical (punching and breaking my bathroom mirror, throwing objects, throwing punches as if the person who hurt me is standing in front of me etc.)

Most recently I punched myself and left a pretty nasty bruise on my lip.  I'd call that self harm and that's definitely a valid excuse to chase up a professional.

A lot of the videos from Actualized have helped shift my mind about things in a super helpful way and I'm grateful for them (letting go, forgiveness, survival, awareness etc, taking mushrooms in small doses made me feel briefly happier as well).  I just think there comes a time when if its not enough and problems like this persist, sometimes getting input from a professional is needed.  Especially if its the only thing that I haven't tried yet.

I've honestly been waking up scared to leave bed to face the day because of how frequent and aggressive these panic attacks are.  It's become my default state of being.  I'd rather not live life at all if its gonna be this way.

I want to heal and I have a strong drive to do whatever it takes so I don't care about spending a few hundred if it means I can get to experience being seen by someone who's qualified.  Even if it turns out not to be what I expected, at least I can have a direct experience of it.

My main goal in life at this point is that I just want to be seen as a nice, well-rounded guy by my friends.  There's no way I'm letting my experience with my shitty parents get me so down to the point where I start to infect others with my anger.

[TheCloud]

@enzyme Do you have any plan for if seeing a therapist ends up being more useless than you'd hoped?

[enzyme]

@TheCloud If it turns out not to be effective then at least I can say I gave it a shot.  I feel like I'll also be able to fallback on self improvement a lot easier since I'll know for certain that it's the best thing I can do to better myself.

[Richard Purdy]

Great job taking the initiative. Baby steps every day. You've got this

 

[PlayOnWords]

Well done. Good luck.

[TheCloud]

@enzyme Good luck!

[enzyme]

Thanks for the positive messages everyone!  Minor update since I had my initial session.  I was told the first session would mainly be for the counselor to get an idea of who I was and what was bothering me so.  We spoke for an hour and there wasn't much to take away since they were mostly just asking me a series of questions on where I'm at.

I got a random message from them afterwards requesting payment for this initial session.  This confused me and it's left me miffed to be honest because in our first email exchange I specially asked them if there was anything I should expect in terms of payment/time and so on.  They only told me what date and time we could speak for an initial first session.

Had they said from the onset that they would charge I would've been okay with this but I'm annoyed they didn't tell me upfront and I'm now on the fence about continuing forward.  I don't feel inclined to pay what they're asking when they didn't really give me any advice.

[Raze]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychologically-minded/201604/how-choose-therapist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7GVaW4SESc