Does popular, trite advice backfire for the mentally ill?

[Milarepa]

Standard advice is just that, standard. It's middle of the road and meant to "fit" everyone in the same way that a "one size fits all" article of clothing is purported to fit. In other words, it doesn't apply to everyone's situation.

Growing up in a C-PTSD-engendering family is like growing up in a distorted kingdom full of funhouse mirrors. In that kingdom, people construct themselves from the outside in, drawing behaviors and beliefs from the messed up environment around us that help us stay alive. When we start to get healthy, we engage in a long process of "moving house" from the distorted kingdom to the new one. We have to bring ourselves over, piece by piece,

Take the term "fake it 'till you make it." In the healthy kingdom, where people construct themselves authentically from the inside out, that term means, "intentionally and thoughtfully use this new skill you're trying to cultivate with all the confidence you can muster until it starts to feel more natural." So someone who is generally really healthy, but is socially awkward or shy in big group settings might "fake" approaching people at a party, making jokes, etc. with a bit more confidence than they actually feel until that behavior starts coming more naturally.

In a distorted kingdom, "fake it till you make it" really means "fake being the pretend person your abusers want you to be in order to survive." There is no opportunity to intentionally select something that you would authentically like to be better at for your own personal growth and then take baby steps to cultivate it. There is only the desperate fight for survival and the willingness to pretend to be anything just to make it another day.

When faced with popular, trite advice; I think you have to ask yourself how that translates into the rules of the distorted kingdom you came from and then try to evaluate the advice through the lens of the healthy kingdom you are moving towards.

[flookadelic]

Milarepa,

How's the tower building going?

(Buddhist joke)

I must say that I find your appraisal of the 'fake it til you make it' really interesting. The whole thing swings around the word 'fake'. Yes, we all had to fake and duck and dive and pretend...well, I had to. Faking confidence is entirely different to putting in place the causes for confidence. I suppose it's the sheer laziness of the phrase - 'fake it 'til you make it' and that it's probably written by a normal for other normals. We need more than platitudes that scan pleasingly and that work for non-traumatised folk.

[coda]

There is no opportunity to intentionally select something that you would authentically like to be better at for your own personal growth and then take baby steps to cultivate it. There is only the desperate fight for survival and the willingness to pretend to be anything just to make it another day. 

Wow.

Not to veer too far from the original, meaningful point of the thread, but this example summarizes so well why cliches can feel duplicitous and manipulative. They were code for pleasing both our unreasonable families, and to a very large (often terrifying) extent, making the "right impression" to others...i.e. the impression they insisted we make. Surviving them and surviving in a world we assumed was just like them had nothing to do with authenticity and everything to do with appearances. I know there was never any plan, never any learning curve, just the threat of humiliation if we didn't conform to Hallmark expectations.

[Milarepa]

How's the tower building going?

(Buddhist joke)

Come again?

[Gashfield]

I think maybe if you don't suffer with mental health problems, it's really difficult to know and show real empathy and therefore offer some meaningful support.  I'm not trying to make excuses for the kind of wounding nonsense those people spout because quite often, they don't want to learn or try and understand what it's really like.  And although it hurts to have someone flippantly dismiss the trauma I often find myself experiencing, occasionally, when my compassionate self is in the house, I like to remember how limited and small those people's worlds must be, that their minds are not open enough to listen to others stories and their imaginations are not wide enough to accommodate experiences they have never known. 

And I'm probably just as guilty of giving a glib response.  I did once respond to someone asking about my welfare with what I thought was a reasoned reply that I had good and bad days.  I figured that summed up the situation at the time without providing more information than was required.  I was told that everybody had those.  What I should have said was "oh really, did you have a nightmare so horrific last night you actually wet the bed?"  But I didn't.  I can never think quickly enough at the time!  So I am also going to try and remember the line used by Schrodinger's cat earlier. 

And I totally agree that fake it till you make it is not appropriate in every situation.  When I first started giving presentations at work, that advice was perfect.  It's totally pants as a value system however or a treatment because I fake my life every day.  Every day I get up and go to work and fake my way through numerous interactions, I come home and fake some more interactions with my family, I watch a bit of TV and might fake a bit of crying at that.  How can I know what I'm feeling when I've become so detached through faking it to know what the * I'm feeling.  But I can tell you what I'm supposed to be feeling if you ask me, because I've learned to fake that.  In fact, for a while, I fake so damn good, I forget I'm faking it and convince myself this is real until yet another "crisis" hits and the fake walls crumble and there's nothing real to grab hold of.  And that's all tooooo real!

G

[Whobuddy]

Wow, Gashfield, all that you wrote is so profound. The way you put the situation into words is not easy to do.

Faking it does seem appropriate at work. I try to delay my EFs until I can get home or at least in the car. Fortunately my profession is filled with empathetic, sensitive, compassionate people so tears are not that uncommon. People don't need to know that mine are from reminders of past traumas, they will think it was something that happened that day. Or the job pressure. Hugs abound as well. But there is a range of normal for both tears and hugs that one would not want to exceed.

I do admire and send hugs to those OOTSers that are healing while raising children or beginning or ending relationships. I kind of had to wait until I had more time and less drama at home to really work on my self-care. My kids are grown and doing pretty well so now it is me-time.

[Milarepa]

I think maybe if you don't suffer with mental health problems, it's really difficult to know and show real empathy and therefore offer some meaningful support.  I'm not trying to make excuses for the kind of wounding nonsense those people spout because quite often, they don't want to learn or try and understand what it's really like.  And although it hurts to have someone flippantly dismiss the trauma I often find myself experiencing, occasionally, when my compassionate self is in the house, I like to remember how limited and small those people's worlds must be, that their minds are not open enough to listen to others stories and their imaginations are not wide enough to accommodate experiences they have never known.

When Robin Williams died, I saw so many people on Facebook asking how someone so wonderful and talented and funny could also be so "selfish." I wrote my own status update in response:

Who among you has been in enough pain that you longed for anything, even death, to make it stop? If you have not, then you are not qualified to comment on Robin Williams and I kindly invite you to shut the f*** up.

I got responses from friends who had survived cancer, were dying of cancer, had been burned over large portions of their bodies, had recovered from massive bacterial infections, or had broken multiple bones on the side of a mountain and waited hours for medical care to arrive. Interestingly, I didn't get a single post from anyone suffering from a mental illness.

So in a follow-up comment, I wrote:

It is interesting to note that everyone posting who has responded thus far has suffered a physical illness or injury, something other people could look at and say, "my, that must hurt quite a lot." Now imagine how you would have felt if, on top of all of the pain, you received very little support and understanding from friends, family, and the general public (or even stigma) because your injury was invisible. Now imagine that any support you do receive chafes like sandpaper on wounded skin.

That's when I started to get comments from normies who were kinda sorta getting it. They could imagine the physical agony because everyone has experienced physical pain. They could imagine the isolation because everyone has experiences of being excluded. When they put those things together and amplified them, it was possible to kind of extrapolate how awful it is to have a mental illness.

So, anyway, that's how I help normies "get it."

I know what it is to fake your way through your days, to fake your way through time with your family, to fake your way through sex, through whole relationships, through friendships, through all of it while either numb or in agony. It's like living in * and every day they turn the heat up a little higher.

I'm so grateful that I found the right cocktail of meds, and the right mental health team, and the right people to surround myself with. Without them, my recovery would not be possible. I hope you have similar luck, Gashfield. <3

[Kizzie]

Last year I struggled with the impostor syndrome big time in my own career, lost confidence and ended up taking a leave of absence.  What I learned about myself in that time off through therapy, at OOTF and then OOTS and a change in medication that helped quiet my ICr a lot, was that I am very perfectionistic (surprize!), and I invalidate the skills and knowledge I do have when they are not 100% plus.  My perfectionism is fear driven, a relic from the past, a survival strategy for being attacked and made to feel small, humiliated, ashamed of myself as a child when I "slipped up" in one way or another. Fast forward to adulthood "If I don't make any mistakes I will never have to feel those feelings again.  Oh I'm feeling afraid, I must hide that, fake it to get through."

So as in your example Gash, when I give a presentation and inside my IC is having a really difficult time in the background with the danger of being exposed and slammed, I take that as a sign that I am just getting through the task by faking it (because I am not 100% confident, I am fearful, etc), rather than looking at it as part of me has trouble and lacks confidence (my IC), while adult me really does have skills that are solid.  It's only part of me that is faking it, hiding, but not it's not all of me - a bit of a revelation but it puts a slightly different slant on things that helps.   

When I went back to work in the fall last year I was really anxious, but I tried to focus on the authentic parts of me, the professional who really does know her stuff and on trying to soothe my IC and tell her it was OK if she was afraid, that I had this.  It helped a lot although I still have to fight the feeling that someone is going to swoop out of the sky and zing me for being less than 100%. My IC is very afraid of that but I keep plugging away at helping her to understand that no-one is ever 100%, it's just not realistic and that the reason she is so afraid is that my FOO used little mistakes to take out their anger and fear on me.  If any adult does that to me I can and will stand up for her (myself). 

Anyway, I hope I haven't muddied the waters here, but I faked it for so long I didn't realize there actually are very authentic parts of me and that if I can deal with the fear and process the trauma I will be able to be (and more importantly feel) more authentic, more whole and less stuffing down this poor frightened, traumatized IC and hiding her from everyone so that I constantly feel like I am faking it.   

I must say that coming here has helped her to pop her head out more often.  Oh look there she is now!     

[voicelessagony2]

Kizzie, thank you for sharing that. It sounds like you really do understand. I also have that perfectionism tendency, driven by fear.

Even as a toddler, however, my fear had another facet: rage and indignation. I think it has been manifesting throughout adulthood as a deep feeling of defiance, never acknowledged to myself until now. It seems I have been compensating for it with super-nice, super-performing, self-effacing behavior in the workplace, accompanied by passive-aggressive behaviors such as chronic lateness, criticizing other people's work, etc. 

I just realized today, that my IC has been so obsessed with the constant danger of being exposed as a fraud, that I have been exhausting 100% of my effort and energies into hitting it out of the park, always trying to climb the ladder two steps at a time, while in the meantime, the REAL problems (that I know of now, there could be more) that needed attention - issues with authority, and coming across insincere - have not even made it onto the radar.

I've suspected for most of my adult life, that I don't have the full set of social skills. Trying to identify exactly where I have been missing the mark is the most difficult undertaking I have ever faced. It would be easier for me to learn rocket science - I'm not even exaggerating. Even now, since I don't know how long this is going to take to fix or learn from scratch, I'm thinking I might be better off pursuing more solitary type of work where I can just be paid for what I produce, and, as much as possible, avoid work that requires interpersonal relationships.

[Kizzie]

Rage and indignation – definitely!  You're so right about hiding that too as it does not go over well in an employment situation does it?!  A foot stomping, door slamming  IC really does stand out. 

I feel a bit of embarrassment thinking back to times when my IC seeped out, took over the steering wheel and let loose but at least now I understand what was going on and feel some compassion for her – she really was trying to protect me in the only way she knew how. No-one ever showed us how to deal with anger and frustration in a healthy way, we had to stuff it down so we are stuck at a young age.

I do think Walker is bang on when he suggests we need to defuel the ICr and the OCr by angering, making room and freeing up energy to get that natural development started back up again so that we can express ourselves in an appropriate manner.   Easier said than done I know.  Some days it does feel like it would be easier to become a rocket scientist!   

[schrödinger's cat]

I found a text on popular yet backfiring advice. It's from a book I'm reading - The Verbally Abusive Relationship by Patricia Evans. She says that a LOT of popular advice that backfires when it's applied to abusive relationships. You don't even have to have CPTSD or PTSD. Something like "it takes two" is only really applicable to sane, healthy, unabusive relationships. Abusive relationships usually are so skewed, there's little or nothing the victim can do to escape. So "it takes two" then becomes misleading. - If you happen to come across that book, give it a try. The chapter on popular and backfiring advice starts on page 110.

[C.]

Interesting topic.  Yes, we are definitely influenced by our environment, culture, society.  I find most popular advice is much too simple and lacks compassion/empathy.  Just leave, don't take drugs, etc. etc.  Born out of ignorance and denial.

On the other hand it can be encouraging.  I like one in Spanish that basically says "I hope these difficulties pass through you like a cold and you feel healthy again soon"..."se te va a pasar como un resfriado."  much more succinct quote in Spanish lol  It just feels sweet, not minimizing, but reminding me that difficulties do pass.  True.

Great example about it takes two.  Does not apply with abuse.  Sounds like a good book Cat.

[voicelessagony2]

C, I love the Spanish saying, it does sound a lot more sincere.

[C.]

Thank you.  Yes the first time I heard that quote from a friend I felt very encouraged, it felt sincere.

I noticed a lot of trite advice is void of empathy...perhaps there's some formula for qualities of the quote that make it match up with recovery and healing or not! haha

[lonewolf]

Hi. I just want to say that I love this thread.

I actually once had a therapist push "fake it 'til you make it" and other trite advice on me as if it were therapy, and when I inevitably failed to fake it until I made it, I was shamed for not having tried hard enough and was eventually fired by the therapist! I had tried to talk about my past with her, and her attitude was like, "That's unfortunate, but we need to talk about the present." 

Sadly, I didn't know any better because I was young and she was my first therapist, so I believed that I was a bad person because I was not able to try hard enough to achieve results, and this intensified all the awful feelings that had led me there in the first place. So I have an enormous chip on my shoulder when it comes to all such facile suggestions.

I couldn't help but to respond to your post mourningdove. I was fired from a doctor once! It sucked. I figure in the end I was probably better off without her, but I didn't take to the rejection very well at the time as it was during a severe down slope.

But your story of that therapist also reminded me of when I took group therapy when I was 18 (after finally escaping home). I was in a very toxic/abusive relationship at the time. I did get out of it eventually, but not because of the therapy.  I'm not sure whether anyone has ever done group therapy (well, this was in the 80s mind you) but supposedly it can help because people in the room mirror your relations, which can allow for processing. However, it actually just traumatized. One woman, a replica of my mother, was abusive to me in the group. I ran for the hills!!!

To get back on track. I dislike these cliches. If I hear "let it go" and "move on" one more time ... and yeah, "fake it 'til you make it" is not helpful to someone who has a difficult time being themselves or knowing who they are. I agree with others that these phrasings can not only be very manipulative but dismissive too. Some of the top ones I dislike:

"Time heals all wounds"
"Forgive and forget"
"I love you more than life itself"