Blog on the subject of an anxious, depression-prone, and at times a nihilistic
Written by someone who has buried his voice for decades and is fighting to find a reasonable (one in his own eyes) while also
attempting a (possibly futile) societally accepted balanced result while hoping for acceptance for those of us who suffer.


“… when I’ve been treating people with depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues, you know? It’s not just some psychiatric condition. It’s not just that they’re tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty, although sometimes that happens to be the case. It’s that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life and they’re not sure why it’s reasonable to continue with it.”


“…One client who’s a very brilliant artist and as long as he didn’t think he was fine because he’d go and create and he was really good at being an artist, you know, he just, he had that personality that was continually creative and quite brilliant, although he was self-denigrating. But as soon as he started to think about what he was doing, then, it’s like a drill or a saw, or something like that. He’d saw off that branch he was sitting on because he’d start to criticise what he was doing, even the utility if it, even though it was sort of self-evidently useful and then it would be very, very hard for him to even motivate himself to create. He always struck me as a good example of the consequences of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being. Divorced enough that it actually questions the utility of your being. And it’s not a good thing. It’s really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathy but also in social psychopathy and that’s this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of as [sic] crippled religions. That’s the right way to think about them. They’re like religion that’s missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along… that’s how it looks to me anyway.”
Jordan B Peterson: Biblical Series 1: Introduction to the Idea of God (lecture)


Wow, is what I felt after reading that. I am no psychologist. I have had no training in the field. What I do have is personal experience of, what seems to me, an extreme difficulty in getting along in this world and managing to be self-sufficient and has avoided addressing these problems since my teenage education. About 7/8 years ago, at the time of the financial crisis, my marriage fell apart, I lost my job, entered into a destructive relationship which resulted in an attempt on my life and “psychotic episode”. This was the catalyst to finally seek help through therapy which I spent 2/3 years in. Privately because my attempts to seek help through the NHS system failed. I felt let down. Abandoned in the no-mans land of being too suicidal for IAPT but not dependent enough on narcotics to be seen by the higher level of therapies provided by the other NHS mental health team. The result was that I spent thousands of pounds unravelling my feelings and history, learning root causes of my problems and was diagnosed with PTSD, not only from my traumatic relationship with a woman who was described as being the narcissist to my co-dependency, but also from the bullying I received in my teenage years which stunted my personal and educational development and went un-noticed and unaddressed even though I distinctly remember mentioning it at the time though obviously not strongly enough. I haven’t yet worked out why I had the personality which didn’t dare speak out loudly enough and complain. Instead, I mentioned it a weak manner which simply encouraged the attitude of those around me as something I should just ignore along the lines of sticks and stones will break my bones etc. The kind of thing that those who have difficulty in addressing the emotional needs of the sensitive person whereas my sibling apparently, who had a much stronger way of expressing himself from a young age, had one of my parents visit the dad of his bully.