Free therapy (take it or leave it) (Dippy Dingus)

When small children are placed in a dangerous/scary/intense or abusive situation it activates their "fight or flight" response... only a small child isn't able to choose either of those options, silly, which is why two more options were added: "freeze and fawn"

Let's talk about the fawn response.  This is the way most small children react to an abusive parent or adult in their life: they attempt to appease them, calm them down and/or somehow put them in a better mood.  This is done as a defense mechanism and a way to protect themselves and survive... as a child.  When that child grows up the fawn response matures along with them and influences that person to become a people pleaser.

What do people pleasers do?  They seek approval from others.  They want everyone to like them, so they change who they are and adjust themselves so they can act the way that they think the person they are interacting with wants them to act.  They base their value of themselves on how others think of them.  They believe that if they are nice to others and help other people that this will ensure that they are loved, cared for and understood.

This is a false paradigm.

What if a boy gets made fun of and bullied for being to feminine?  How will they respond to that?  They might try to act more masculine, while actively repressing their feminine tendencies.

What about a girl that gets told she is too boyish too often?  She might try to repress her masculine tendencies while trying to act more feminine, like the girl she is supposed to be.

Or, it could go the opposite direction.  A girl who is a tomboy might grow to resent femininity and therefore act more masculine and repress her femininity.  A feminine boy might be raised by a single mother who smack-talks Daddy a bit too often and encourages the boy to lean into his feminine qualities while repressing his masculine qualities.

This is called compartmentalization.  When a person compartmentalizes their masculine or feminine qualities into their own separate corners of the brain - isolated from one another - it creates an individual who feels polarized between the two extremes of their masculine and feminine qualities.  When you repress one gendered aspect of yourself in favor of the other gendered aspect of yourself you will encourage the feelings associated with gender dysphoria to manifest within you.

The answer is to stop trying to please others and stop trying to be either masculine or feminine only.  It is better for one's mental health to integrate both their masculine and feminine qualities together into the whole and complete individual that they are.  Everyone has both feminine and masculine qualities.  Both gendered aspects of yourself work together to make you the unique and amazing individual that you are... they don't have to fight each other.

It isn't about being a good person.  It isn't about being a nice person.  It isn't about being a person that everyone likes.  It is about being an authentic person.  Because when you are authentically you, you no longer need to fix anything.  You no longer need to seek approval and do things to please others while neglecting yourself.  All you have to do is be you 

So be you.

(End of session)

Another free therapy session (take it or leave it)

Around the turn of the twentieth century, members from two very wealthy and influential families: The Rockefellers and The Carnegies, were able to successfully shut down almost every medical school in the United States, in order to replace them with much more expensive medical schools and introduce a brand new approach to medical practice called Allopathy.  Allopathy is synonymous with "modern medicine", and it is based in the philosophy that "there is a pill for every ailment". Instead of curing medical conditions, allopathy seeks to treat medical conditions with prescription medication, which is what allowed the pharmaceutical industry to flourish and become as huge and influential as it is today.

I don't like Allopathy, and I don't like the ways in which therapy follows the same philosophy of finding "treatments" for mental health conditions instead of finding cures. Therapy seeks to pathologize the people who seek help from it in order to then diagnose them with a disorder and prescribe the best treatment for it. When you look at it this way, it isn't hard to understand why gender therapy is all about pathologizing the patients gender identity issues into a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" : the disorder which they then prescribe the treatment of medical transition i.e. an extended course of several medical procedures accompanied by a lifelong dependency on the pharmaceutical industry - or what they call "the affirmation method": the belief that the best course of action is to alter the physical body until it matches up with the way that the mind perceives it to be. Well, this is the "anti-affirmation method": the belief that all of that can be avoided by encouraging the patient to think their way out of their gender identity issues entirely.

Before getting into that, I want to address the criticisms my last post received: that when the brain believes the body shouldn't be the way it is i.e. there are body parts that are missing or body parts that shouldn't be there or both, then simply "thinking one's way out of it" isn't a viable option. **I want these people to know that the things I say are meant for a large target audience, but that I know not everyone will find this to be beneficial or helpful.  I'm curious to know if anyone out there believes that gender dysphoria can have a neurological basis in a similar way to "Body Integrity Disorder". If gender dysphoria can have a neurological basis involving errors in the brains body mapping process which creates the intense discomfort of phantom limbs and/or wanting parts of the body removed, then I would support medical transition as the best treatment, just as I support amputation as the best treatment for BID as a neurological disorder (which there is currently far more evidence for then there currently is for GD as a neurological disorder, if I am not mistaken.)

Therapy pt II

Many people will already know what the terms autogynephilia and autoandrophilia are describing, but for those who haven't heard of these terms they describe a phenomenon of becoming sexually aroused at the thought of being a member of the opposite sex, or having primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the opposite gender.  

What you might not have yet heard is that someone (not sure who) recently coined two similar terms: autogynephobia and autoandrophobia. These terms describe the intense fear, disgust and hatred (or any such negative associations) with being ones AGAB. These new terms are wonderful because they have the potential to help so many people put a specific word to one of the core issues they face as well as the root of their gender dysphoria.  

Autogynephilia and autoandrophobia can be experienced separately or together in biological males, and experiencing both is quite common. I can't say if the same is true of biological females experiencing both autoandrophilia and autogynephobia, but I'm sure that it happens. From what I have observed in online discourse amongst trans people, autoandrophobia and autogynephobia actually seem to cause the most distress and dysphoria, as well as being a far more powerful and perhaps more common catalyst for transitioning.  

I want to point out three things which predict gender dysphoria and medical transition:

- Autogynephilia and Autoandrophilia/Autohomoeroticism

- Autoandrophobia and Autogynephobia

- Gender Envy

Gender envy is very common amongst people who experience gender dysphoria. Gender envy often involves the desire to have the sex characteristics of the opposite sex, but it also often involves the belief that they are unable to be the way they would like to be because of the expectations of their assigned gender roles. This means that men feel like they are unable to be feminine, while women feel like they are unable to be masculine. At the same time, men feel resentment at the idea that they are required to be masculine while women feel resentment at the idea that they are required to be feminine. What this often results in is the attempt and effort to fulfill the expectations of their assigned. gender roles while repressing any desire to fulfill and experience the gender roles of the opposite sex.

The reason that gender envy has become so prevalent in our society is because of the subtle encouragement of black and white thinking as well as encouraging beliefs that are polarizing. One example of a polarizing belief is the belief that one must choose to be either a democrat or a republican, and must strictly adhere to the beliefs of their chosen political affiliations. This discourages such possibilities as being fiscally conservative and supporting a less powerful centralized government, while also being pro life and supporting gay marriage. This would be an amalgamation of both conservative and liberal ideals, a concept which many people do not even consider, and instead they convince themselves that if they are pro life and pro LGBT, then they also have to be against the second amendment. The online trans communities have a tendency to promote the idea the being conservative is inherently transphobic. 

Well, in the same way as politics encourages polarization, gender ideology also encourages polarization. Thoughts such as "well it doesn't matter if I would like to wear makeup and a dress, because I am a man and men can't do that" or "it doesn't matter that I would rather wear no makeup and jeans and a t-shirt, because I am a woman and women can't do that." These beliefs encourage gender envy and also encourage people to isolate their femininity from their masculinity. Overtime, this leads to the feeling of polarization: a person who is being pulled in two directions and feels like they are two different people. The feeling that they can't be the way they would like to be as the person who they are, and the idea that they must become a new person entirely to be the way they actually would like to be.

Well, the problem then becomes that after changing their entire identity and starting over as a new person of the opposite gender, these people realize that they actually didn't hate everything about their old lives, after all. They realize that being the opposite gender comes with it's own list of problems which they failed to realize before because they were idealizing the life of a person of the opposite sex because they saw it as the answer to all the things they didn't like about the person they had grown up to be.

I think that some people could actually benefit from being told that they can't just start over as a new person to resolve all the parts about themselves that they don't like. The better solution is to embrace all of the person that they are, including the parts they don't like. The ugly parts. All these parts work together to make us each the unique individuals that we are, and they must all be embraced if one wishes to live as the person who they authentically are. Because the truth of the matter is that we all have quirks about us that we wish we didn't have. We enjoy things that we wish we didn't enjoy, so we repress these aspects of ourselves. When we do this, we repress part of our passion and drive and become dulled and less alive. All to try to appease the expectations of others. All to try to be liked by others. When we do things for other people at our own expense, we aren't helping them but we are hurting ourselves. The only person that you should really care about liking you is you. If you can't accept yourself then you can't expect to ever be accepted by anyone else.

The truth is that every single person has both a masculine and feminine gender identity. People don't nearly fit into expectations of their biological sex; people have feminine qualities and masculine qualities. So instead of isolating these two parts of ourselves, we should integrate them into ourselves and authentically become the biological men and women who we naturally are. And fuck the rest and whatever they have to say about it. You aren't living for their approval, so allow yourself to be whoever you want to be, and start living for the person who you authentically are.

(END OF SESSION)