fantasy literature

Introduce yourself (and say hi to others). What are you passionate about? Who do you love? What fires you up? What are some questions you don't know how to answer? What projects are you working on?

And if you like sharing the stuff like where are you from, and what do you do, and how many kids you have, we'd love to know that too!

On the plethora of Therapeutic modalities.

There's a genre of book that's the therapy modality book. They're all the same. They go

I was a therapist and what I was doing wasn't working, and then I discovered <specific technique the book is advocating> and then it cured me and all my clients and now things are great and we just need to teach everybody this technique.

So many therapy books are like this. Focussing, the IFS book, the EFT book, to name a few. The various ACT books. Waking the Tiger.

And the specific technique is different from book to book. Radically different. And even contradictory.

So what's going on here? Apart from probably there's some book somewhere about how to write a therapy book, or some ghostwriter that's cranking these out?

If we take these stories as more or less true, how do we make sense of these seeming contradictions?

This is not a rhetorical question! I'm going to give you my best guess below, but please take a moment to think of your answer, and ideally post it in the comments for everyone to see. I am very much interested in other answers here.

Ok, my best guess (at least, the guess that I find most interesting):

What works is having a therapist who believes they are helping. It's like the placebo effect. If the doctor handing you a sugar pill is like "Yeah, idk, people told me this is helpful. lmk what you think", my guess is, you're not going to get much placebo effect out of that pill (actually they've done research and you do still get some but not as much iirc).

So when the therapist is out of school, they're doing what they were told works, but for a certain kind of mind, that doesn't give them confidence. So then they have to go on a big heroes journey, and come back with some technique, some approach, that for whatever reason they believe in.

Now they're back, and they believe it works, and low and behold, it does!

It's like Dumbo's magic feather.

"some technique, some approach, that for whatever reason they believe in."

So why do they believe in the technique they chose? Because they love to do it. Because, when they're doing it, they feel most like themselves, and they feel most connected with the person they're working with. Or they feel most connected with what they consider important, about a mind, about a heart, about a life.

And maybe this gives it some extra sauce too. Maybe this love of themselves, this intrinsic interest, radiates out, and reminds their clients that they too can love themselves, love life, be enthusiastic, and intrinsically interested.

Or maybe that last part is just what I have come to believe works ;)

omg I'm a Slytherin. I took the official Hogwarts House quiz and was stunned to discover that I, someone who always considered myself not only a Griffyndor, but Harry Potter-type himself, am actually a Slytherin. I mean, MAD respect to Snape, for real, and apparently Merlin himself was also a Slytherin, but this is never how I’ve seen myself.

Somehow, this designation has been really opening my eyes to seeing myself in new ways. And so far these new ways feel pretty damn liberating. Maybe almost any map can be helpful.

I’d love for you to join me in finding out your house if that sounds fun to you: https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/discover-your-hogwarts-house-on-wizarding-world

My patronus is a dolphin. That one’s pretty easily received. Smart, playful, and loves swimming and orgasms (totes google it if you don’t know why I said orgasms for dolphins) (maybe my desire to say that is part of my Slytherin-ness).

What are your sci-fi TV show recommendations? Some i loved that jump to mind:

• The Expanse
• Most of the Marvel stuff like Loki, What If?
• Rick and Morty
• Legends of Tomorrow Etc

Roads as interconnection of all, metaphor for selves. This is kinda silly and obvious in some ways, but the other day I was really struck by a simple fact I’d never considered: All the roads are really one road…

I live on Bryker Dr, and it dead ends into 34th street on one end and 30th on the other. So I think of this as a singular, discrete street that is 4 blocks long, and a couple car lengths wide. That’s how most people think they’re thinking about it.

But actually we’re all thinking of it as something much greater than that, we just don’t always realize we are. The street is my access to the rest of the world—and it is concretely (pun intended) connected to every other street in North America.

So is it really my street, or is it one giant system? My finger is obviously a finger, and obviously doesn’t exist separately from my body. If I were dismembered, it wouldn’t be my finger for very long, would it?

I think this is a beautiful metaphor for a self. We usually think we’re thinking of ourselves like we do roads, with beginnings and endings. But we’re actually the entire system, wholly interconnected with every other part. Getting from a small street in Austin to a small street in Winnipeg takes a long time, but in some incredibly real and grounded sense, there’s no separation between them.

( technically minus a few old roads that maybe don’t have any connections, but c’mon )