#act therapy

[butterflyfault]

Here's a comment I wrote somewhere about dysphoria recovery. I've said basically the same things in a lot of different places, but I figure that I say it a little differently each time - especially as I keep working through my feelings - and that sometimes it might click for different people that way. -

I'm a detransitioner after ~8 years of T. I have a couple of posts about dysphoria recovery linked in my pin under detransition, plus a dysphoria recovery tag with a bit of other stuff. I also really recommend looking into ACT therapy and IFS/parts work. You can start doing them at home. ACT therapy is about thinking about and doing other things in your life that align with your interests and values. So, leaving the house, playing music, drawing, socializing - healthy stuff you can do that doesn't make you focus on your body. It's showing really promising results in early studies. Import note: the point is not to bottle up your feelings about your body and bury them under distractions. The point is to have other focuses. There's a reason so many people became trans during the 2020 lockdowns while they were trapped inside with nothing to do except bounce around inside their own heads. IFS/parts work is about talking to your parts; either metaphorical parts (like your anxiety) or literal parts (like your body). You decide what part to talk to, externalize it, listen to it, speak to it compassionately, make a plan together for what to work on if needed (or just tell the part you will keep trying and that you love it), and then reintegrate (remind yourself that any positive dialogue between you and the part was self-love and that the part is you). I'm working on a longer post about how I personally do parts work that I might put up eventually. In the meantime, I've talked about it a tiny bit under #parts work. It's also very important to remind yourself that you are your body. You are not trapped in it. You are it. Everything beautiful about you - your compassion, your love for others, your creativity, any positive traits you can think of - all of that is your body. There is no secret soul locked inside a flesh prison. There is just you - perfect and whole.

Finally, start learning about your body and about being female, especially from a radical feminist perspective. This is a normal part of gentle exposure therapy - learning about the thing you are afraid of. For example, one thing that has been really helpful to me lately is reading about how the vagina is NOT a hole. It is not emptiness, it is not incomplete, it is not waiting to be filled. The vagina is the parts that are, not the parts that are not. Nothing is missing, you are complete. It might not sound like this would make a big difference, but growing up learning to treat part of your body as void is not compatible with having a healthy view of it. (Whole, not hole.) I dug up a bunch of resources about this recently that I still need to read before I can post them. This is a work in progress for me, but it's already helping. And as always, please remember that every new thing you try IS tough and potentially traumatic, and you deserve to take it slow and care for yourself after. Part of why relearning our bodies as ours is so hard is because you are reopening emotional wounds by trying. We've been traumatized inside of our bodies. So, when you first try something new (like massages, reading about your body, talking to your body, anything) - set a little time limit for trying it. Once the time limit is up, close gently - pull your hands away slowly, set the book down and pat it like it did a good job, say "goodbye for now, we'll talk again later, love you" to your body. Then do something that feels like self-care. Watch a favorite video. Curl up in the blankets. Make a hot drink. Color with markers. Whatever soothes your system. This teaches your body over time that trying to accept it is not harmful, not a threat - it is part of your love and care for yourself. Your body's entire regulatory system is shaped by how you treat it, both physically and mentally.

If you say unkind things to yourself, if you do things that hurt it - your body learns fear. It learns that it does not matter. You can flip this. Tell yourself kind things. Touch softly and gently, not roughly. Give yourself the healthy nutrients you need. Take warm showers. Go out in the sun. Kind treatment makes your body - and thus makes you - feel like it (you) matters. This makes a huge difference. A lot of us who identify or previously identified as trans try accepting our bodies in very harsh ways - because that's all we were taught. Take it gently. Be kind to yourself. You are fully capable of loving and accepting yourself exactly as you are. It's tough, because we've spent our whole lives being treated as lesser for being female... but you are whole and lovely, and you are allowed to start seeing that. 🩷

[jojadoja1]

[bansheebeez]

how I live most authentically

[system-of-a-feather]

My therapist diagnosed me with "ACT therapist" cause apparently I do it naturally perfectly by just following my principles that are rooted in Buddhism

So apparently I'm a specialized ACT internal therapist and Riku is a CBT internal therapist and Lucille is a DBT internal therapist.

We got a good set up here I think

-XIV

[chronic-this]

“Acceptance is a constant work in progress, but when you have the right tools, that process becomes a bit easier.”

- @chronic-this

[autisticjoy]

i think one of the bigger obstacles i’m running into with this trich treatment is that i can’t out-logic myself like i could with the depression treatment

cause like with depression my brain’ll be like “none of your friends care about you and you could disappear and no one would notice”, and i can counter that with (something along the lines of) “i don’t know that for sure, and evidence suggests the opposite, so let’s just text a friend anyway”

but with trich my brain tells me that if i pick at my eyebrows or scalp, i’ll feel better. which is true, because it gets rid of the awful itchy feeling of wanting to pick, and it calms me down. i have evidence and proof that picking does help in the short term. so i have to find a different approach, which is all well and good to say, but in practice my brain only cares about the action and its immediate short-term consequences, which is difficult to work with.

[ub-sessed]

I’ve been doing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for about a year, and I find it very helpful. One of the steps in one of the exercises I find most useful is “Accueillez les émotions” (I’m in Quebec, so my therapists are francophone). This involves what they call “expansion”, where you try to figure out where in your body you feel the emotion, and then make space for it, welcome it in. I find it super effective, but it often results in my crying. Which would be fine if I lived alone, but is actually a serious problem because I live with my 12-year-old daughter, so I end up almost never doing one of the most effective parts of the therapy because I think it would be disturbing for her to, say, walk in on her mother crying over the laundry.

[autisticjoy]

trich post #0

so because the 10 times at the trich/derma treatment group are over i decided to blog about my recovery (?? is that the word? continued treatment but left to my own devices?) as a way to hold myself accountable for the next couple months until the followup and see how it works. because i literally have a blog for mental health stuff i figured why the hell not do it here.

(note: this is mostly just for myself to keep notes and hold myself accountable for keeping up with the work we’ve been doing in these group therapy sessions, i don’t really want or need any interaction.)

SO idk how to really set this up because it’s been verbal before (and in swedish), but i’ll try to structure it by answering these questions:

how often and (roughly) when have i wanted to pick? in what situations do these cravings appear, how am i feeling at the time, etc.

how often and (roughly) when have i picked? on purpose vs automatically, situations, feelings, etc.

have my strategies for noticing and/or stopping myself worked? if not, how can i adjust them to make them work?

how has the work with accepting the craving to pick worked? have i done the exercise consistently? have i been able to stop myself from picking? have those strategies successfully been carried over to “natural” picking situations?

have i been keeping up with doing ~10 mins of mindfulness per day?

with however much or little i feel like saying. i’ll try to keep it so i update on sundays, just to stay consistent with the weeks.

and if anyone else with bfrb wants to use this template, feel free, and i might also go into more detail about how to start off the treatment, because it’s important to keep in mind that this is my routine after ten sessions spread over almost three months and a lot of help from professionals, which is a lot of time.