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You can absolutely work on yourself. You can journal, read books, learn about your patterns, sit with uncomfortable feelings, ask yourself hard questions, change habits, and take responsibility for your choices.
That stuff matters.
But there’s a reason therapy isn’t just “thinking really hard about your problems.”
1. Unwanted intrusive thoughts are normal and do not mean you are a bad person (yes, even intrusions of sexual/religious/moral themes).
By definition, these are thoughts that are unwanted bc they go against your own values and highlight what you don’t want to do (eg, a religious person having unwanted blasphemous images pop into their mind, or a new parent having unwanted sexual thoughts about their new baby).
However normal these thoughts are (over 90% of the population), the moral nature of these thoughts mean that often people experience a lot of shame and take many years before they first tell someone about them.
1. “Maybe you can treat yourself like a person and not like a project.” It changed my life. I’d been treating myself like something to fix, and seeing every little problem as evidence that I was a failure and a terrible person. I learned to give myself the same benefit of the doubt as I’d give any other human I met on the street. Humans make mistakes, including me—that doesn’t mean there’s issues to fix, it means I’m a person.
