Help offered by friends for medical problems can become as toxic to that relation money between friends.
ROUGH AND UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT
Testing, one, two, three, four. Testing, one, two, three, four. Good evening from Pahrump, Nevada. It is 12. I don’t know, fifty in the morning, my insomnia of 30 plus years continues, but I. So many people that have it so much worse than I do, I recognize that that’s why it’s very. Difficult to talk about my problems when. Other people. Have. Greater problems. There’s a woman next door over who’s dying of cancer, my brother has now let’s leave my brother out of it.
He’s a private person. And I’m going to be speaking a little more slowly. Tonight, so that the bot’s transcribing this will be able to keep up. Everybody wants to help. But that. Everybody wants to help you with a mental illness or a physical illness, everybody wants to help. Everybody has their own idea on what will work. And your brother, your sister, your mother, your dad, they all have ideas and of course, the therapist, the psychologist, psychiatrist, they all have their own ideas based on their own experience about what will work.
Unfortunately, aside from the medical. Profession. If somebody close to you. Suggests something, they’ll get resentful if you don’t try it and if you do try it and it doesn’t work. Quite often this person will think that you just didn’t try hard enough. The blame comes back to me. I get. I didn’t ask my problem to begin with, that’s understood, it was a traumatic event that came completely out of nowhere, literally, I did not ask to cause it and.
I can play the victim card. This was an event I had absolutely nothing to do with, so that when. This person’s favorite technique or something they heard about on the Internet or it helped Uncle Joe when it doesn’t work with me and they yeah, it comes back to me. You didn’t try hard enough. And they can’t figure out why it didn’t work. This is very common with lay people or people that think they’re somehow have medical training or holistic people, you name it.
Uh, the. So I’m the one to blame now because it doesn’t work, I didn’t you know, I didn’t want to I didn’t try hard enough. I don’t want to sell self and not want to get. But we tend to be a blame society. We. Want to, we really want to. Figure out how we can assign. How we can assign the blame for something to somebody. Can’t be us, can’t be the person that gave the advice, they’re far too smart, and so this failure of a person to not get better obviously has something to do with them and not the person making this suggestion.
And this is just it’s extremely common and everybody’s well-meaning. So you can’t get too terribly angry at the people that are making the suggestion. But they can’t relate. They really can’t relate. That’s the verdict that goes to the medical profession as well as you don’t wish the ills of yourself on the psychiatrist or the psychologist, but they just they don’t have any idea what I’m going through, no matter how often it’s spelled out. I think they only seemingly the only connection I get.
Yes, if I lay out a nightmare that happened and. I’m. Pretty good at relating these nightmares and the. And I think they understand my suffering somewhat when. I described these horrors, I get some sort of human to human connection at that point, but it doesn’t help. It’s like, oh, I was once in a circle of people discussing anxiety. We were all anxiety sufferers. I’ve been I’ve had terrible anxiety since third grade and interesting.
But they all had panic attacks. That’s right. They had panic attacks. And I really don’t ever have them. And I really couldn’t relate to them. And of course. We don’t have any solutions, we’re just talking this out. As if it can be talked out, I’m not convinced at all, but if I say that I don’t want to get better, right. So but I if it could only work. It’s interesting with nightmares how if you dream analysis, classic utter failure with nightmares, because what happens is that all of the professionals don’t understand this until it happens.
Uh, uh, if you’re asked to keep a dream diary or such or recognize, you know, backing up, though, I never had violent nightmares before this event. So if I did have some traumatic incident in the past that caused them, that sort of sort of produced them before I was almost 30, but I never had a violent nightmare before my problem. Uh, but getting back to suggestions, the first thing, the psychiatrist or psychologist, you get a new one.
The first thing they want you to do is stop drinking or stop alcohol. I mean, stop alcohol, stop caffeine. And, um, you know, if you don’t, then you don’t want to get better. It’s your problem. It’s so early on. One psychiatrist, one psychologist. I was it it’s common. You see a psychiatrist for drugs and the psychologist for talk therapy. But she said you have to stop drinking. And I said, fine, stop caffeine.
Fine. So I went without alcohol or coffee for a year because I wanted to prove to her that I wanted to get better. And it just killed a lot of my socializing and it was extremely uncomfortable. And I love coffee. And that was all gone for me and caffeine at the end of the year. We’re getting ready to I was getting ready to discuss the results of the year, and that week leading up, I had nightmares that were.
That’s as bad as when they first started. There was absolutely no benefit in alcohol, caffeine. Uh. Killing that for a year absolutely did not work. And what was her? Opinion of this whole thing. Well, let’s try another year. And that’s why I refused I, I, I. Again, socializing that I enjoyed being able to. Come home after work, put up my feet, have a drink that was important to me having coffee in the morning, that was important to me.
But more important, of course, was that it did not work. And yet that is the first thing that medical people will do with a lot of problems is stop drinking. Well, so much for that, and I have given up alcohol deliberately, voluntarily, for health reasons in years past recent years passed and now it hasn’t helped. As I’ll be there, but. Again, she was she had no plan B. All she could say is, uh, another year, try harder, it’s on you, and that just makes me feel.
I didn’t want any of this to happen. And yet people are coming at me saying, well, you’re not trying hard enough, it’s your problem. No, it’s not it just because your solution doesn’t work doesn’t make me. Responsible for that failure. Let me pause it right now, I think I’m going long.