Now everyone can enjoy it!

Jamie:

Excellent! Thanks for your account. That movement from being a victim to being an agent is crucial.

Aside from my political disagreements with leftists, I find their non-stop focus, on making one’s victimization the meaning of one’s life, to be pure poison for mental health.

I was divorced at 23 and felt that my life was over – that I was as worthless as my ex-husband had told me I was, would never again find someone who would love me and whom I could love, would never amount to anything. My therapist helped me take control of how I was perceiving these feelings and how I acted in the real world – so that, for instance, I didn’t become either a hermit or a slut. I was in weekly therapy for about a year, IIRC, and found it incredibly enlivening to come in talking about my “failures” and have her help me examine my life as if seeing it from the outside. When I used my mind instead of my feelings, I could see that my “failures” (like arguing with a new boyfriend about boundaries, for instance, or not being able to afford a full tank of gas because I was putting myself through college for a second degree) were productive steps on the path toward an interesting career and a healthy and supportive relationship.

Two thumbs up. Like. Would recommend.

Oldflyer:

By all means. I did write in no small hope that what I said might reach a few who could benefit.

I don’t claim the final word on depression, but IMO for many, if not the majority, of people, depression can be the result of using the brain and body poorly.

Of course the system itself wasn’t talking. I quite obviously meant the people trained in that system of thought, who had bought into the philosophy that went with it, were the ones doing the talking.

Same for social media. Of course it’s the people who use social media who create content. However, the people running the companies were censoring dissenting views for the most part. That meant that many other voices who were not in line with the trans-kid agenda were not heard very much on social media, and minors going to social media to get information and read conversations got a false impression of “everything will be great once you transition.”

Nor am I excusing therapists, who had a role as well. But for the rank-and-file therapists it was mostly as a rubber-stamp, to talk briefly to the person and then to send them on their way with a letter recommending medical treatment. From there, the doctors and nurses took over, and they were responsible for giving the go-ahead to the more pernicious and often-irreversible treatments. Some more prominent therapists had a bigger role, in that they generated some of the philosophical and supposedly-clinical underpinnings of the movement.

As for parents, the Jennings family was very destructive to their child’s well-being, in my opinion. They are very high profile, but there are others like them. However, most parents involved in this are not of that ilk. Most are more reluctant and confused, and acquiesce because they are coerced by doctors and therapists into believing their child has a very high likelihood of committing suicide if the parents don’t give consent for medical treatment with blockers and hormones and surgery.

Some practitioners have indeed left the state or even left the profession. That means that the ones who remain – and definitely the ones who work in so-called “gender clinics” or who bill themselves as “gender therapists,” are the true believers who only affirm.

For a long time, parents did not understand the game and took their kids to gender therapists, not realizing all they would do was “affirm.” Now I’m hoping that parents are much more aware of the situation.

For the most part, the damage was done by these things: an education system that kept talking about gender as something one can choose, a social media that encouraged young people to think of themselves as trans, the porn industry that frightened young girls into thinking that they did not want to be women if degradation was the lot of women, and the medical profession that gave/approved the blockers and the hormones and the surgery.

The therapists initially involved with most of these kids merely “affirmed” what the kid was already saying – which is pretty pernicious and not what therapists should be doing, but was hardly the cause of the whole thing. To make matters even worse, in some states – California and I think Oregon and/or Washington – therapists are REQUIRED to affirm and not allowed to do what’s called “exploratory” (that is, regular) therapy.

So any later therapists who managed to help the person were certainly not just countering the damage caused by earlier therapists. They were countering damage caused by a huge interlocking system of which the earlier therapists were only a small part. If it wasn’t for the medical establishment, the whole thing would be reversible, at least. But because of the medical interventions, it often is not and irreversible physical damage is done.