A good therapist doesn’t invest too much in your story. They listen, they show empathy, but they take a position of equanimity and they will gently challenge assumptions and test your perspective without being invested either way - neither in you being right nor in them knowing better.

They will make you feel welcome and they will establish trust such that you can feel safe to share things with them. (Careful not to project and confuse your own internal feelings of being unsafe to share or being judged onto the therapist here.)

They will listen to you. If you tell them that you don’t want to talk about something or that you don’t see the point in going into a topic, while they may challenge you (e.g. “Is it because it feels unsafe to address?” “Is this your better judgment on the matter or is this a way to avoid digging into the deeper issues?” sort of thing) they will also take you seriously.

I think a good therapist should focus on the somatic aspects as well, such as asking you if you are feeling tension or noting that your breathing has changed etc.

There is a lot more but my communication battery is completely zapped. I’ll try to come back to this to flesh it out more or you can ask me stuff and you’ll probably prompt me to give you more of a response.

I like to think of good therapy as existing within a fairly narrow window. Just like if you’re at the gym and you’re doing stuff that feels like you could do it all day without breaking a sweat, you’re probably not making progress but on the other hand, if it’s excruciating then you’re probably doing damage rather than working out and if it takes you days or weeks to recover then you’re probably going at it too hard. Good therapy is like that - it pushes you outside of your comfort zone and it’s a strain but it’s not something that depletes you in a major way and it’s not something that should cause an injury (a psychic injury, I guess? Lol)

I have a tendency to intellectualize (shocking news!) and I know when the therapy is in that goldilocks zone because I will slip into intellectualizing but it won’t be a complete shutdown/dissociate/full-tilt intellectualizing response but instead it will be drawing out my defense mechanisms but it won’t be associated with panic or terror, it will just be the sort of avoidance like when I’m trying to do a tedious task and suddenly I remember that I need to reorganize my media library on my hard drive or some shit. If I’m “wandering off” in a metaphorical sense then I know I’m digging deep enough to be making progress but also I’m not digging so deep that I become an emotional wreck blubbering on the floor.

No shame to anyone who has become a blubbering emotional wreck on the floor of a therapist’s office btw. Sometimes breakthroughs come that way and sometimes it’s the only way that they can occur but generally speaking it should be uncomfortable enough to make you want to have a cigarette break or to comfort eat or to just space out and stop talking or whatever your go-to coping mechanism is but without it feeling like you must do it or you’re gonna have an emotional breakdown.

A good therapist will circle back on things you have previously raised ans they will connect dots that maybe you haven’t connected before too.

Edit: Should have read the body of the post instead of just the title before responding. Ohgodohfuck. Sorry. I’ll try and get to a red flags list later. My brain is pretty exhausted.

Oh nice, I just grabbed the best looking link on the subject - I didn’t watch it through and vet it before posting it.

Turns out there’s occasionally some videos on YouTube that aren’t infested by anticommunist brain worms? Well, I’ll be damned.

I had an exchange with a back-to-bruncher who was just starting to wake up to things and they talked about how the US was descending into fascism and that it’s maddening to be sounding the alarm but to have noone listening.

I was probably a bit unsympathetic in my response but they were acting very self-important in the way the worded it and I said that we’re glad they could make it and that we’ve been here for a long time and the frustration will subside - it’s important to channel it and to not be overwhelmed by it or otherwise you’re not gonna be able to communicate your message very well and you also need to focus to develop a strategy for how to address the root cause of the problem because this has been in the pipeline for a very long time and there’s no voting your way out of it.

They flipped their shit at me because I cleary wasn’t going to pander to them, they were clearly wounded by the argument that it will all blow over when the Dems get back into power next, and they said that they’ve been sounding the alarm for a long time and they got really insulting. I asked them if they’ve been sounding the alarm for such a long time then were they protesting and raising awareness when Bush passed the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act which enabled this current state of affairs or were they unaware of it for years despite our efforts to get people to listen. (Or were they even alive and politically aware at this point in time?)

Then I said that if this is how they are responding to a white person sounding the alarm in the recent sharp descent into fascism in a post-911 political landscape then how are they going to respond when a person of color like a descendant of slaves or a native American tells them that they’ve been sounding the alarm on the fascism in the US for generations and that this been ignored up until now because the flames have only just started at the feet of white people.

I know I’m not doing the best job of describing this exchange but it was quite a while back, soon after Trump got reelected, and the person was desperate to center themselves and act like they were the tip of the spear for this realization but they hadn’t even managed to diagnose the problem, its root causes, or to have a clear position on how to fix it. It was a sympathybait post, a geniune one but one nonetheless, and they wanted to get lauded with praise and mutual commiseration (you probably know this attitude from the extremely fresh baby leftists who think they’ve got it all figured out and they straight up refuse to engage with any of the discourse or the history, they just latch onto a vibe or a slogan and they can’t for a second figure out that there is a whole body of work that has been produced over generations addressing these issues.)

I get so tired of people saying “This is fascism!!” and their solution is to wear pink hats and vote about it; if you really believe what you think you do then please act like it.

I mean, that was the same era as Dan Schneider for Nickelodeon so that sounds completely on-brand for them.

You gotta do what you musth.

That was the one that did it?? Wild.

No politics in the sportsball match or else!!

“The reactionaries will build the wall that we will make them face.”

— Lenin, probably

The virgin Barbara Pit vs the chad Kola Superdeep Borehole

God I wish that Yankee political discourse went beyond the most superficial “there’s a resemblance between thing a and thing b” because there’s a lot of rich material that someone more sympathetic to media analysis could mine here with the George Liquor character in regards to nationalism, militarism, abuse and violence, supremacist hierarchies and shit.

[CW: Violence, abuse, animal abuse etc. - this is vintage Ren & Stimpy so it’s gonna be full of edge]

You could easily make a leftist video essay on this, if only it was the 2010s [11:04] but honestly I’m kinda glad the discourse has developed beyond The Class Analysis of the Cars Universe type shit.

Did you come across this recent post about recovery meetings by any chance?

A good support network is really important for sobriety and if these meetings get going it might be helpful.

Here’s hoping that the mental health crisis clears up for you asap.

You can’t diagnose someone by a tweet. Just don’t. It’s really poor form.

Psychiatric disability is not a bludgeon to attack people with. You can say Trump is completely out of touch with reality, that he’s surrounded himself with yes-men and he’s high on his own supply, that he’s full of shit, that he is a hateful person - all of these things are true. But there’s no need to play armchair psychologist and do this faux-diagnosis routine.

In my professional experience, it’s deeply unprofessional for someone qualified in psychology or psychiatry to do this sort of thing but, in my professional experience, people with these qualifications are trained not to do exactly this because it casts their professions in a bad light and, at worst, they can face repercussions with regulatory agencies. I find that it’s usually someone who works in a paraprofessional role who makes vague references to their “profession” to imply that they have special insight into these matters, despite lacking qualifications, because this area of work has a serious problem with a culture of deeply ingrained ableism.

If your intent is candor then why speak beyond what you know for a fact and if your intent is clarity then why confuse a professional diagnosis from someone qualified to do so based on clinical observations with gut feeling based on a tweet?

Don’t piss on my boots and tell me it’s raining.

Fate seems to be dragging me back into gardening. Planted these badboys as bulbs just the other day and they’re already taking off.

Shout out to the homies in the Tohono Oʼodham nation for cultivating these. Your efforts have made an impact that spans the globe and I am grateful for it.

https://youtu.be/Qag2bOBUVfQ?t=1m9s

It’s a good development but it’s far too deterministic and idealistic for my tastes. Any sort of uprising is much more than merely a mathematical equation and libs love to vulgarize the work of Chenoweth by trotting out that mythical 3.5%, as if to say that all you need to do is to sign up that percentage of a population to an idea and suddenly change becomes a political inevitability.

I really wish it was that easy because then I could go door knocking instead of grappling with theory.

Probably full of imperialist brainworms and “Castro bad” but…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ycv-ZIx-1-c

HaLow might be able to achieve this sort of neighborhood network but idk, I haven’t really looked into it. I suppose this is only good for an extended LAN but running an ISP covers a different aspect.

Good idea!

If you ever need more tomato, you can add fairly thin wedges of fresh tomato when serving it.

Indian food isn’t pretentious like that, especially home cooked Indian food, and you can kinda chuck whatever in and it’s almost certainly going to work because it’s just spices and chickpeas. (Technically this sort of garnishing is done in fancier settings with Indian food often because it adds brightness and freshness to the dish but whatever, it’s not about trying to live up to restaurant standards - it’s about enjoying what you cook.)

Thanks for the tip. I was looking to do a layer of straw to try and stack a few functions: moisture retention, breaking down some high carbon material fairly quickly to develop a better top layer, and then if I actually get anything I can harvest out of it and/or if it colonizes deeper into the pile then great.

I figure there will already be fungi deeper in the pile that prefer the horse manure, especially if I’ve got the right aeration and moisture levels, but if not then it won’t hurt. Chances are that my best bet at getting more high carbon material will be cardboard so the oyster mushrooms will be happy on that anyway.

As for wood chips though I’m not banking on getting any anytime soon and if they sit at the bottom of the raised bed acting as bulk that’s fine and if they break down or the oyster mushroom mycelium takes over then great but it’s not a critical part of the plan. I think I’d need to buy spores or spawn for wine caps because they’re not that popular here and shipping costs are absurd (just checked and it looks like it would cost me well over $50 to get some spawn 😬) I’m opting for oysters because they are easy and it’s not that hard to buy some fresh ones and I know I can get a good level of success out of a diy low tech cardboard spawn - all in all I should be able to get more spawn than I need by spending maybe $5 and I’ll be able to eat most of the mushrooms that I pick over, so if I don’t get any success then the venture will only cost me pennies; even if the straw doesn’t get broken down because all my spawn attempts fail (hard to imagine), the straw is still going to make for a good amendment or mulch anyway.

I suppose if I’m going that far I could price up some bulk straw and maybe run a few buckets of oysters for harvesting and to make use of the spent straw afterwards.

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately we don’t have free soil testing here except for if you have agricultural land.

I have clay soil where I am so that kinda fucks me with regard to mixing soil in for drainage lol. I could potentially tear down a bed and turn the composted manure into biochar but I’d need to do sort out a lot to get to that point - I’m not opposed to it by any measure but it would take a fair bit of work.

We have a chip drop type service that would be ideal but they say you get what you’re given and potentially you can get an absolutely absurd amount of wood chips so as much as it would be ideal, I’m really reluctant to end up with a mountain of wood chips in my yard because it would create more problems than its worth.