Mind palace, without the map

A year or so ago I had a few sessions with a cognitive therapy person which didn’t amount to much – cbt seems mostly about breaking patterns and helping people out that can’t manage their day-to-day life, and whatever my problems are, it wasn’t a good fit. I’m still on SSRI:s but am hoping to drop those as soon as I get some breathing room, but I’ve also started meeting with a honest-to-goodness lie-on-a-couch therapist.

It’s an exciting process and offers a challange to my recursive introspection. His axiom is that most problems stem from conflicts, and identifying those conflicts – be they internal or external – can allow me to get a better understanding of myself as well as be used as a tool to avoid the traps of overthinking and negative spiraling. In a sense, everything is borne of a choice at some point, even if it doesn’t feell like it in a moment of anxiety.

I don’t have any principled objection to medicating my problems away – the psylocybin/ketamin experiments with depressed persons seem promising – but if I can learn to manage my mind better using only my own body, I’ll be more resilient regarless of what other tools I’ll have at my disposal.