Is Kintsugi anti-recovery?

Unless the US has some seriously fucked up laws compared to Aus re: this, I'm pretty sure it's not actually illegal to provide (read: link) these resources provided you're not acting like you're a medical professional and it's some sort of officially prescribed therapy bullshit. I mean, I'm looking at several government websites right now that link to online CBT resources and websites designed for self-help re: CBT (with caveats that this might not work for everyone and def see a professional if you're strongly depressed, etc). I don't think anyone is under the impression that anyone here is an actual therapist. Ultimately, as long as it's framed as optional and something people can work out on their own to see if it works rather than something you NEED to do because Doctor Kintsugi said so, seems like it would be alright to at least have this shit as a resource.

Or don't. I'm just trying to help.

 

I think maybe there's a disconnect in thr sense that some people are talking about resources to have available and some people are talking about recommending the resources.

Having the resources is good, and recommending them is good, so long as everyone is on the same page that again, this is a social site for mentally ill people where people can get support, not a place for therapy.

I don't mind recommemding resources, but I usually don't recommend resources because I'm not always good at knowing which one is most helpful in what situation. In my 14 years of therapy I've had a lot of therapists give me things that probably work wonders for other people but that just left me baffled.

 

Was mostly a reaction to seebs' post where he clarified that the reason he didn't want a resource post in the first place because he's not a therapist, and seemed to be suggesting that having one is changing the site's nature massively for people who Kintsugi isn't working for (like me, because he was responding to my post, so it def sounded like a specific you than a general). I'll admit I'm not entirely sure what the massive nature change could be referring to otherwise, since I don't think anyone has made any concrete suggestions for change rather than just generally talking about the issues with validation as a sole recovery tool. But anyway, it came off more like having an informal system like with how Kathy would offer links to resources she found on her own is fine, but actually writing out a sticky with resources is bad because that would imply you guys are therapists. That's also what I got out of your post given the discomfort re: worksheets. So that's where the assumption came from.

 

Doesn't that logically follow from what I said? It's not like rollover minutes. You're responsible for your successes and your failures, and they don't make up for each other. If you fail and hurt someone, that's still hurting someone, no matter what a good egg you are some other time.

I don't know. Let's say that very successful doctor gets home every night and throws his empty bottles as hard as he can at his son.

Seebs, you can embroider the metaphor as much as you want, but the trauma our John Doe inflicts on people is still trauma, no matter how many kittens he rescues from burning buildings in his free time. It's a matter of historical fact that Gandhi hated Black people. Gandhi did some very good things for India -- does that mean it's good and cool and Valid(tm) that he was a racist, or that we should all be racist like Gandhi if we want to be good people? Do his efforts against the colonial system outweigh the fact that he harbored this animosity for Black people?

My entire first post in this thread was about how echo chamber communities encourage being as damaged as possible, in part to drive damaged people further into their arms. (I also clarified that this problem wasn't Kintsugi-exclusive or necessarily Kintsugi-specific, before people get all in a huff.) What would you call that? My post ended with a bunch of questions that have helped me focus on how my actions affect others, and how I can be more conscious of that. What part of that is anti-improvement?

If a person's problem is rooted in alcoholism and they look in the mirror after a long night of drinking themselves sick and screaming at people and go, "Oh, God, am I an alcoholic?" I do think saying "Yes, you are, and please get help before your esophagus perforates," is pretty productive!

 

On break at work right now, but I wanted to drop in and say that by aggregating information, I was in fact talking about links to outside sources and not hosting that information on kintsugi itself. I was thinking about stuff like links to meditation websites, organizers and other similar things.

 

I don't feel angry. I don't feel particularly vehement. I feel like you're talking past me, and that's a little frustrating, but I'm not actually whipped into a froth about this.

I've seen people post graphic murdertorture fantasies about other people and then ask to be told they're Good Eggs or whatever and that murdertorture fantasies about real [people|groups] are good and valid, and it is really uncomfortable to behold. I do my best to avoid those people and I am generally successful, but I would consider that an example of the kind of thing I am unnerved by.

I am not angry, but what is getting me frustrated is you insisting how angry I must very totally be.

....???? I spend 200% more time memeing in my friends' and acquaintances' Brainbent threads than I do in Meta. I spend time here and there debugging in FID. I spend a lot of time in PMs with friends, usually checking on them or sharing RL gossip or asking them if they'd mind giving something I wrote a look. Occasionally I use Caring Void to pass on something users-that-prefer-to-remain-totally-anonymous were made uncomfortable by (rare) or something that stressed me out (more common).

Is this an example of you seeing the thing you are annoyed by, and nothing else? :-P

 

Hi, hello! Brief vacation from self care vacation to lay out some thread plans I have for resource aggregation because I like helping.
All of the threads will follow a structure similar to the one I laid out in the boundary thread, possibly with a few more [reserved] posts in case I somehow manage to hit character limits and include in bolded text in the intro that each thread is a collection of resources that may be helpful and are not mandatory to engage with in any way and that the OP [probably me] and other posters in the thread are not able to officially diagnose other users or create treatment plans & the resources linked are not suitable replacement or substitution for seeking medical care. Probably worded more eloquently than that, I'm rather tired.
Threads I am planning on making at some point:
- Hotline services, organized by country. This would ideally be grouped with the following format:
[Country]
[State if I am able to go very granular for the US, this is entirely dependant on spoon level I'm afraid]
[SUICIDE HOTLINE]
[NURSE HOTLINE]
[CRISIS HOTLINE]
- Self-Care And You: The idea for this one is a rough guide for users who have trouble stepping away from the forum when something is distressing them and things they can do if they have trouble with impulse control. Also a collection of handy relaxing links, probably collected from assorted threads around the forum and credited accordingly unless someone specifically doesn't want credit.
- Conflict Management tips: what it says on the tin. Ideally structured to help all sorts of different approaches.

These are not gonna happen fast. I'm getting ready to do an international move and that takes a lot of my Doing Things energy. If someone else wants to do it first by all means please do so. I love collecting things and organizing and helping, it makes me really happy and I want to help this site be a safe and useful place for everyone. Due to the timeline and things going on in my environment though, I can't guarentee I will have these done any time soon, like, in the next few months level of soon.
The pipe dream thread is to collect links for common kinds of personality disorders and what things might be healthy for some and disasterious for others (caveat in here and will be in the thread if it ever happens too that these would be very general and that everyone is different) - massive in-depth discussion of thought patterns and behaviors might be fine to have with someone with one kind, but be absolutely awful to do with attachment focused disorders and put those trying to help in danger of accidentally being pushed into an unofficial therapist role rather than a friend, for example.
Anyway I just wanted to pop in and elaborate there. I've seen people talk about wanting resources for ages, and I like organizing things like that, so I will try too when I can :)
<tosses down smoke bomb, vanishes back onto vacation>

 

Please to include the NDVH, they're helpful (even if they ask you your stupid demographics before transferring you to an operator, as if you want to get into THAT when your shit's burning down).

Enjoy your vacation!

 

(I don't know that acronym, could you elaborate? And thank!)
As for the wider thing of is kintsugi anti-recovery - no, I don't think so. I think that sometimes people accidentally reinforce each others problems and that sometimes the health sought and offered can be the *exact opposite* of what someone needs to recover and improve. That's why I want to eventually make that bottom thread. Sometimes the things people feel like they desperately need may in fact be the product of their disorder telling them that and it might be the thing that reinforces it - like if I were to blow up on someone and tell them I wished they would die, afterward I imagine I would feel crushingly awful and might want to ask for reassurance that I'm not awful. And for me, the correct response to that would be to point out that while the distress I would be feeling is real and I would not be irredeemable, it is not the priority over the person I hurt and I did in fact do an awful and unhealthy thing that needs an apology and a commitment to do better.
Not all distress is inherently bad. Feeling bad about doing something wrong is important! With my illness, my bad feelings get blown completely out of proportion and can send me into an awful hell spiral, but the initial 'oh fuck, I fucked up' is an important sign post. So I think sometimes, there can be a little too much focus on telling people they shouldn't feel bad for a thing, when maybe they should and use that to then make the next conclusion of 'Okay so I have this problem, what can I do to work to fix it, rather than push it into the back of my brain to come back up later.'
And nothing is simple or easy about recovery. CBT and DBT doesn't work for everyone. Meditation can trigger disassociation episodes, some people react really badly to certain kinds of medication.
Sometimes people don't want to get better for a while - maybe their brain is self-sabotaging and telling them that they never will get better, so they shouldn't even try. In which case, like the anonymous quote said above, sometimes it becomes about survival rather than forward progress. Hanging on long enough for something to happen that brings the spark back.
Recovery is an intensely personal process and as others have said in this thread - you probably won't have a full idea of what someone is going through just from what they post in their threads. Please don't condemn people for not trying hard enough.

Spoiler: personal anecdata

I use my own thread to catalog my thoughts, both good and bad, as an unfiltered stream of consciousness thing that I go back and look at later and analyze. Sometimes it might look like I'm upset about forum things when in actuality I'm upset because I live in a hellscape, because my thread is the only place on the forum where I feel able to just talk without compulsively self-editing in also to make sure I won't be misunderstood or others won't misinterpret things and as a result I'm not as eloquent there. Others structure their threads entirely differently.
While I experience great distress over seeing people suffer over forum debates and this sometimes leads to me feeling like I need to try and fix the problem entirely, I recognize that 9.99 times out of 10, I can't, and that's okay. A few years ago, I wouldn't be able to recognize that, and wouldn't think it was okay if I couldn't fix a big overarching problem. So now I do smaller things, little bits and pieces, because being able to do that is crucially important for my own recovery and I learn more about how I work and what the triggers for me being unhealthily caught up in a problem are. So in that respect, kintsugi has helped me recover more than I can express, has made me a more efficient activist and advocate, and taught me when I need to disengage for my own safety. Sometimes I might slip up a little but like, that's important too. It helps me let myself establish personal boundaries, something I'd never been able to do before, and lets me go 'okay no, I need to go for a while.' Helping out with this kind of thing also gives me a reason to get up in the morning when my environment is hurting me so deeply that it seems easier to just give in to that.

Okay, now I'm out. This has been a really neat and important discussion to read, reminder to all participants that you can and should ask for temporary bans from parts of the forum that fuck you up if they are doing so, see ya'll in like a week!
<secondary smoke bomb>

 

Not Khan, but I'm assuming NDVH is the national domestic violence hotline.

 

Late to the party, don’t even have Starbucks. But,

Kintsugi has been incredibly good for my mental health. I have professional resources available for the most part. What I needed was validation, and what I needed even more was... I suppose you could call it role models?

One of the best things that’s ever happened to me was getting advice about agoraphobia from someone who had worked through agoraphobia. It wasn’t advice on how to recover, it was advice on what to do until then. How to make things easier for myself during recovery. There’s no way I want to live with this my entire life if I can help it, it’s miserable, but right now that’s how things are. Right now I need help eating and showering without overcoming my agoraphobia, because it’s unlikely that I’m going to overcome it before the next mealtime or before I become stinky. And I usually have a much easier time doing the actual recovery work if I’m not starving or filthy.

I already have plenty of advice and help and stories about How to Succeed Even If You Suffer from Whatever. I have a lack of advice about what to do if you can’t succeed right now. I’d still like to succeed, but that might take some time, and in the meanwhile I’m doing a lot better thinking of myself as a human person with intrinsic value and rights. Even if Whatever. Even without the success. It’s shelter on the journey.

I really liked the fictitious Noisy Stompy Disorder because that’s a fantastic name. Khan, I hope you don’t mind if I use it.

Spoiler: cut for allegory because this post is already really long

Let’s say I have NSD. The bottom line is I need to work on my shit and figure out how to not make life so difficult and loud for myself and everyone around me. But where I am right now is terrified to get out of bed and go down the hall to the bathroom because my disruptive footfalls will potentially remind everyone, especially myself, that I have yet to sort myself out. I need to talk to other people with NSD who walk down the hall to the bathroom like they have every right, because I’ll look at them and see it’s true. I need people reminding me that I, specifically, have every right to walk down the hall to the bathroom, and that anyone who tells me I should not be allowed to do that if I involuntarily walk noisy is not someone I should listen to, especially if that person is me. Literally everybody in my life will be better off if I go ahead and stomp down the hall to the bathroom when I need to. Yes, even if it’s 2am. Yes, even if I’m trying not to have this problem at 2am. No, it’s not ideal, but that’s not the biggest priority at that moment.

In fact, it turns out people are somewhat relieved about me stomping down the hall to the bathroom because they’ve been worried about me. They’re more happy about proof of life than annoyed at the ruckus. When I explain the situation they help me get a rug for the hall. They didn’t realize that was why I’d requested the rug, but now that I’m more confident about my right to walk down the hall to use the bathroom, I’m able to articulate it more clearly in terms of basic needs and related accommodations for Noisy Stompy Disorder. They offer to go with me to the store so I can have a look at some cushioned slippers. Suddenly I’ve moved from bedridden, flown right past meeting my basic needs, and arrived at the beginning of making my disorder less disruptive.

That’s pretty close to what has actually happened in my life. Distress about my issues has been very counterproductive to my recovery. I’m doing much better with learning to advocate for myself, particularly in my own head. I suppose I could take this as a sign to stop trying and make other people dance around my problems indefinitely, but if I were okay doing that I would never have been in this situation in the first place.

I’m sure that’s not how everyone operates. I can’t think of many things more personal than mental health recovery. And even for me, with needs that align very well with what’s available to me via Kintsugi, I only get out what I put in. Nobody can read my mind and determine what I might need at any moment without me asking, and I’m unlikely to find that the solution has fortuitously made its way into my lap while I sat quietly.

That’s my essay on What I Did over Summer Break why I don’t think Kintsugi is anti-recovery. And why I think learning to accept and live with your illness can be the first step in learning to fight it.

If it’s not an effective tool for someone, I’m totally in favor of them asking for what they need, even if they have to noisy-stomp their way in. Maybe they won’t be able to get what they need here, but they might if they’re able to communicate the problem. I think this thread is a good thing. I’m happy people are making suggestions, and responding to the ones they’re willing and able to help with. I do think it’s a good idea to have resources on hand for people who still don’t find it helpful, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable if people still end up having to ask about it if they need it, rather than having it land fortuitously on their lap when they visit the site.