#Exposure Therapy For Social Anxiety

[hplonesomeart]

Stabby stabby time 😌✨

(Original meme audio source can be found via this YouTube video!!)

[mirage-of-the-virtuoso]

Alright, I need input on something, just to get closure, and I feel like I am driving myself crazy over something that probably isn't that big of a deal. The reason why I make this poll under the cut:

Some time ago, like in the last year, year and a half maybe, I had joined a strike through lfg for OLC, and the only thing that the comm had listed was for the players to be experienced.

To me, experienced meant "knew the mechanics of the fight" and "unlikely to die if something got messed up via weirdly timed mechanics"

So I joined. This commander was complaining about people joining and ditching on the first wipe they got. Felt a little sketch, but I was still relatively new in terms of joining lfg for daily strikes. So I thought I was imagining things.

As someone who's still new and relatively inexperienced (and frankly horrible at build crafting), I thought just knowing the mechanics and following the commander should have been enough.

With this comm, apparently not.

The moment we started, they were demanding to know what my comp was in the middle of the fight. Maybe I just can't multitask in these types of games, but I cannot type and fight at the same time, because any moment spent typing is less dps I'm outputting. So I didn't respond.

I got told after we wiped that I should go back to the training tab in lfg (which, even if I agreed - which I didn't - no one was doing once a strike had been out for a couple of months, and therefore no chance of improvement otherwise, considering my schedule), and had rattled off numbers that I had zero knowledge of knowing. (According to what they were rattling off, I was apparently doing 3k dps on a very poorly built virtuoso, which I was quickly corrected by a trusted friend where the fault was. That's what happens when you put a soloist with no prior experience into endgame content, who also was unaware of certain etiquette with joining squads)

Am I crazy for blocking and reporting that person for being what I thought was misleading in their lfg post? Because, if experienced meant "must have a meta build" even though I barely had resources to even have ascended armor (which turned out to be the wrong stats), then not a lot of people are going to get the experience of endgame content like that (obviously in regards to people who want that experience)

Edit: for further clarity, this was for daily normal run OLC (priority strike that day I think), so idk why this comm was so worked up over a fairly new-ish player not being full meta 30-40k dps, esp someone who was never into endgame content before

Edit 2: Don't be afraid to tell me I'm in the wrong. I made this poll to get perspective for myself. I have since grown from this, and while it was a hard experience for me to go through, it was an important lesson for me - as a newer endgame player - to get a better understanding of the endgame community and the expectations

[darklight-owl]

Snow Review from girl who has only experienced snow for a few hours:

Good things about snow:

Makes crunchy noises when i walk!

It falls on my hair and looks so cutes

I get to use a winter hat for its intended purpose and I look like a model on a postcard

Looks pretty on the plants n stuff

Shaking it off said plants is very satisfying

Bad things about snow:

When it melts it turns into Slime. I do not like the Slime.

Winter hat means i can't wear headphones- actually i changed my mind no more snow

[basilsbestpainting]

Y'all better watch out because I'm going to be unstoppable once I can go outside and talk to people by myself

[pleastrop]

one thing I can actually thank my chronic pain for is that it really helped with my social anxiety, like I just HAD to go to so many appointments and see so many different people that I started getting good at it, and it gave me the confidence to be social in other aspects of my life too, and while I'm still dealing with it, it got A LOT better, it did what years and years of therapy and specialist after specialist couldn't, let's go exposure therapy I guess!!

[nebulaedaniel]

the suffering of not having friends as invested in today as you are and also too scared to talk to people directly

[raincamp]

anyone else with sm ever get that thing after you finally open up and speak a few words somewhere you finally feel comfortable, or after putting all your effort into masking, where you go home and have this sinking feeling of intense dread and hatred for yourself, where you want to throw up or punch a wall or punish yourself, because what you said was so embarrassing and shameful that you want to eradicate yourself from the face of the earth, or never talk or show your face anywhere ever again

[mlobsters]

(src)

so the other thing i could do in project learn to stop worrying and love the cringe is paint the nice quality photo from NEDavis Photos - nancy on bluesky

[fella-lovin-fella]

i described social anxiety to my friend who isn't plagued by it as if "im always in an improv class with guns pointed at me in every direction" and i just felt like that was really accurate

[kirdoodl]

Me? Creating a self insert for a peice of media? Never. Instead of doing that like a normal person would I just imagine my sona appearing to my blorbos like a hallucination and giving them advice, then disappearing. Whether they take that advice or even interact with my sona is up to the type of character that they are but honestly in any scenario it's pretty funny

[voids-ideas]

You know something I'm afraid of? Myself

Multiple times in my life I'd said "i don't like when i do this or this happens" and then proceed to fucking prescribe me therapy and the person in charge was me. I was like "Hmmm, this could be fixed with exposure therapy. Uhh, cognitive therapy for this one"

Wtf dude, you're not licensed. Stop it

[stradakiev]

Turned myself into a character and made this drawing to ask my friends for help with exposure therapy for phone anxiety 🤍 making it cute turns it into bold and exciting self care!

[pricelessemotion]

going to a party tonight and the only person ik is the host… pray for me pls

[victorborkowski]

on board the marauders, there can be plenty of downtime when they're lucky. or not so lucky, depending on who you ask.

sometimes when the sun starts to set and there's nothing to do, st. john heads up to the bow and smokes. it's a nasty little habit, he knows it, but there's this thing called resurrection now. even if he kicks the bucket, he knows he'll get brought back right in the end. a fresh start with a fresh pair of lungs. (they'd already risked it by bringing him back once, anyway; he figures the least they can do is give him a freebie.)

but sometimes bobby joins him, too. and bobby doesn't smoke, has probably never put a cigarette in his mouth until being stuck on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a man who's coping with life by poisoning it little by little. bobby asks for a cigarette, always does, and they both know all it'd take is the lighter st. john keeps tucked away in his boot for safekeeping to light it.

what st. john does instead is lean over, coax the heat in his own cigarette to burn brighter and hotter, more tangible, just for a few seconds, to light bobby's cigarette. for those few moments, they feel more tangible. then he leans back, snuffs the flame down again, and just like that, it's over.

bobby has only ever inhaled once, the first time they did this. he coughed up a lung and then never inhaled again. the cigarette is now instead always plucked from his lips, then remains perched between two fingers, as much as them remains perched and untouched.

so they just stand there together, watching the sun set.

st. john poisons his new life, and bobby complains about secondhand smoke exposure and how st. john's hands smell like ash and how his mouth tastes like tobacco, and then he ices the butts of the cigarettes once they're mostly burned-through to make everything come full circle in the weirdest way (because st. john is a writer; he can pick out narrative threads in his life), and just like that, it's over.

[selectivechaos]

goal of treatment of sm

the goal should not be to get the person to speak (or to prevent them going mute in situations through exposure therapy and desensitisation). it should be to reduce the anxiety as this is the actual problem. behaviourist approaches like exposure therapy try to desensitise people to anxiety - even as they still experience this. just because a person is desensitised does not mean the anxiety is less physically and mentally debilitating. again, treatment should not be about solving what is the biggest problem for OTHER people (ie the person being mute).

some people do not want treatment, and just want to be accommodated. we need more respect for this; sm is rarely fully ‘cured’, and partial recovery to a place where the person is no longer suffering or marginalised, is an acceptable and admirable goal. this is not a one-sided negotiation, where a person must reduce their symptoms so they are acceptable to others; it must involve some change in circumstances or attitudes of others.

i argue for a combination of medical and social models of disability here, because sm is a problem for me when i can’t communicate my needs and feel anxious (medical model), but it is not a problem for me when others marginalise and mistreat me because i have sm (social model), and neither goes away solely be treatment of the other.

🌹🌹

[iridescent-x-pixie]

I miss london sm :< wanna go bk lol