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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I’m a therapist who works almost exclusively with men. Here one pattern I’ve seen often:

    • Man is conditioned from a young age not to identify, process or express his feelings
    • Man doesn’t share his feelings with anyone - friends, family, partners - for years
    • Man sees woman as safe, caring and validating
    • Man confides in woman only and continues not sharing feelings with others
    • Woman becomes overwhelmed, resentful, dismissive
    • Man gets the message that he never should have opened up in the first place

    It can be true both that men need to open up more and should not treat their partners as therapists. We all need support systems because no one person can always be available to give us everything we need. It’s not wrong to confide in a partner, but if that partner is the only confidant it’s precarious for both. And I want to emphasize this is not the fault of a man, or men as a community. This is the result of generations of conditioning from both men and women, and both men and women play a part in the solution. I also want to recognize that many of us don’t have a network of people we could open up to even if we wanted to, and many more can’t afford therapy.

    If anyone reading this can afford therapy, I highly recommend it. It’s a place to undo some of that conditioning, to sit with someone who’s committed to listening, caring, and not judging.


  • young people feeling depressed and isolated is the least of your problems.

    Children are the future of EVERY country. The future is looking bleak for young people in the US. Where do you live? Are young people unaffected by social media or what?

    Out here in actual civilization though, tik tok youth drama is not representative of reality whatsoever.

    That’s the thing though. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around sometimes, but for lots of young people, social media IS their reality. This became even more true during the pandemic. We asked young people to go to school on a screen and pretend it was the same as doing it in person. Why wouldn’t they have the same mindset about chatting, hanging out, flirting, dating, etc.? They don’t see it as simulated socializing, it’s just how they socialize.


  • I was there. The organizers were sending updates to anyone who RSVPed. I don’t like the idea of RSVPing for something like this, but I did. They announced before the event that they had cancelled any elected officials who were planning to speak. They also said something like, “If you are told that the event is cancelled, that is just a rumor.”

    Several officials did speak and they were pretty epic, honestly. I don’t know if they announced the cancellation as a red herring and had everyone speak as planned, or if the speakers I saw were the late replacements. IMO this was a much bigger crowd than the first Hands Off protest.



  • To be clear, I voted for Harris, and I implored everyone I know to vote for Harris, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. I will always vote for the farthest-left candidate in the general, full-stop. I’m not arguing that both sides are the same, or that Harris wouldn’t have been a better choice for 100 reasons outside of the genocide issue. I’m arguing that Harris gave no indication that she would defend Palestine or even recognize the genocide at all. She might well have done those things, but she didn’t campaign on that, so I don’t know why anyone is defending her on the issue. Establishment Dems can’t seem to get it through their heads that progressive policies are popular, so we keep getting general elections between an absolute monster and a neolib Dem saying, “Vote for me or you’ll get the monster!” That might be the reality, but it’s not a platform.

    I live in a blue state, and I had people around me arguing that whether they voted third-party or didn’t vote at all, they would be able to sleep at night knowing that A. they didn’t vote for genocide and B. the state would go blue anyway. I don’t agree with that position at all. I want third parties to be represented in the US, but that starts at the local level and in the primaries. By the general election it’s too late and we realistically have two options. I also believe that shutting down any criticism of the Dem candidate (e.g. a now-banned user told me to kill myself) is a good way to alienate people and discourage them from engaging with the process at all. The right has banned nuance from their discourse, and I refuse to allow the same thing to happen around me.



  • Oh I don’t at all support what Meta has done, and I don’t trust any company not to harm and exploit users. I was responding to your comment by saying that talking to a chatbot doesn’t necessarily indicate that someone has “bigger problems.” If they’re not in a crisis, and they have reasonable expectations for the chatbot, I can see how it could be a helpful tool. If someone doesn’t have access to a real therapist, and a chatbot helps them feel better in the meantime, I’m not going to gatekeep that experience.


  • I’m a real-life human therapist (honest!) and while I don’t think it’s a substitute for talking to a real person, I’m happy that some people get some benefit from chatbots. I had a client who used Rosebud Journal in between sessions and found it helpful. I tried out Rosebud myself and I was very impressed with how it replicated the basics like reflective listening and validation. It was even able to reframe my input using various therapy models when I requested it. I didn’t use it for long because I’m not big on journaling, but I wouldn’t dismiss it completely as a tool.