July chitchat

[agate]

You were kicked out for that reason? Must have been a very demanding course. Some potatoes are hard to peel, particularly if you're a perfectionist who tries to peel the potato entirely with one peeling motion. I never aspired to that skill level.

[Prot]

Yes.That was the reason.I was treated very badly by mental health professionals for many years.

[agate]

I've never taken a cooking course but I would have done badly at it. In high school many students (mainly girls at the time but girls outnumbered boys 7 to 1 at that school) took a course called Foods that taught them how to cook. I avoided it because I despaired of being any good at cooking after watching my mother beat cake batter 350 times by hand and finding that difficult myself.

[Prot]

It was definitely OTT. 3 course meals, when you were going to get a pittance to live on when you left hospital. Missed my video appointment. Didn't receive the link on time. It's time for the therapy to end. It's basically been an attempt to get me to adjust to how things are due to past mistreatment.Cognitively it's an understandable approach given that the damage can't be reversed. Emotionally and morally it's more than mildly dubious.

Given the underwhelming result of the latest genealogy report,I'm not sure I want to pay another £250 for further research. My closest match has not been in touch since I shared details of the previous report.

[agate]

Somehow I would expect therapy to focus on getting the person to remember any positive parts of the time when the bad stuff was going on--and then build on them, even if all the person can come up with is one brief time on a bright day when there was a fleeting appreciation for how nice a day it was.

I've read a few accounts by people who survived the concentration camps during WW2, and they clung to little moments like that--and my impression is that they remembered those moments many years later.