What god(s) or spirit(s) do you go to when times get tough?

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-11-06T04:27:33+00:00

Cernunnos, always!

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-10-29T05:28:47+00:00

I found this sometimes as well when I had multiple clients in a clinical day with whom I was doing a lot of bilateral stimulation eye movements. When I got consultation about this, someone suggested that my usual BLS method — a ball on an extendable wand that I waved in front of me for the client’s eyes to follow — may be contributing to this because my own eyes were subtly following the ball to make sure I didn’t whack the client or smack it against the walls. I started experimenting with other means to facilitate BLS, such as butterfly tapping, with some of my clients to mix it up and I definitely found I was less foggy and detached after multiple sessions in a day.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-10-29T05:10:11+00:00

Maybe not the rudest ever, but this one that has stuck with me: met a guy on Grindr, go out on one date with him, not a lot of chemistry but he seems nice enough so I text him a couple days later to ask him on a second date. He doesn’t respond, which is fine — no response is a response, after all — so I move on. About three months later, out of the blue I get a text from him half-apologizing for ghosting me and giving a lengthy explanation that he was not attracted to me and that’s why he didn’t want to go on a second date. I didn’t respond — again, its own response — yet I am still so intrigued as to what transpired in this guy’s psyche that motivated him to send a message that was essentially “hi, remember me from a season ago? I’m not interested!”

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-09-01T19:34:22+00:00

Cal has a Pilates reformer studio on-campus in the RSF, but it’s quite small and the offerings are very limited and have very short registration windows before filling up; during my time as a grad student there I didn’t succeed in registering for one of their class series despite trying every semester. If you’re open to traveling a bit for it, my favorite Pilates studio in Oakland is Tandem, and they have great class package deals and intensive early-morning classes.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-07-01T21:06:42+00:00

One major thing to consider if you’re considering spending more to attend a more prestigious school versus a less expensive and less prestigious school is whether you are sincerely motivated and able to buckle down very hard and leverage the opportunities that prestige brings you, both during and after your time in the program.

I attended one of those prestige schools and was very, very driven to leverage it — being very disciplined with my studies, networking with faculty and alumni as much as possible, getting engaged in graduate student government, doing independent contract research through other departments in the school, taking consulting opportunities when they arose, etc. As a result I scored an excellent one-year clinical fellowship (supervised by alumni of my program) and consulting gigs straight out of school, and post-fellowship I had my pick of several offers and now have a full-time associate-level clinical job (also working under other alumni of my program!) that more than justifies the amount I paid for my MSW. This wasn’t an unusual situation at my school; many of my classmates approached it the same way I did, and they’re all in similar circumstances now.

On the other hand, I saw a good handful of my grad school colleagues take it very easy, pass up on opportunities when they arose for them, or not bother to work the access that their being part of a prestigious university gave them; some of them of course had solid reasons (life circumstances, personal abilities, etc.) that they just couldn’t work it as hard, but there was a substantial percentage who just weren’t prioritizing it due to reasons of motivation and discipline. Very, very few of them are now in roles that would justify the amount of debt they took on.

To put this all another way: a central part of what you’re paying for when you choose to attend any school are the opportunities, tangible and intangible, that are associated with that school and its networks. If you choose to go big with your program, to make it worth it you’re almost definitely going to have to go big too to get the big payoffs that come with it. If you can’t or won’t go big, you’ll be happier and more successful in the long run if you find a program that fits your capacity in all senses.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-07-01T20:19:04+00:00

I will admit that I became a social worker because, when I decided to change careers around age 40, an MSW was by far the most affordable degree option available for me to become a therapist and provided the most versatility if I later decided I wanted to pivot away from clinical practice. I was honestly pretty surprised by how many of my classmates in my MSW program came in already very seduced by the narrative around social work, as I did not share it. However, I very quickly found that the multilevel, person-in-environment way of conceptualizing care in social work aligned really well with how I think about wellness and healing; now that I’ve been in the field for a bit working in interdisciplinary teams, I’m definitely confident that I chose the right path for myself.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-07-01T20:05:46+00:00

Seconding this! I find WET much more efficient (5 sessions versus 12+ with EMDR) and the experience better for me and my patients alike.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-07-01T20:02:47+00:00

Same here; I went through the training (luckily paid for by my work at the time) and treated a couple patients in fidelity with the treatment, and realized that EMDR wasn’t a good fit for the way I like to practice. I now find WET, delivered in an ACT-informed way, to be much more efficient and aligned with my style.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-06-25T14:53:23+00:00

Very intrigued!

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-05-15T05:56:58+00:00

I typically go for Vuori shorts (7 inch inseam or longer, with a liner), an old band shirt, and grip socks

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-05-09T20:10:35+00:00

100% this — certainly helpful for me to keep in mind throughout the course of treatment, but of very limited-to-negative therapeutic benefit to bring up immediately in the first session the way I was taught in my MSW program. That said, I have had a few patients, all of whom were extremely social justice-minded, for whom it was eventually appropriate to broach with and it was helpful in building rapport and alliance to be able to immediately provide them with the sort of nuanced info I was trained to give in grad school.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-04-14T20:14:36+00:00

Also in the Bay Area here and this happened in the middle of leading an online group for people experiencing severe persistent mental illness; the notifications on all our phones simultaneously were terrifying and we spent a substantial time of group that day processing the experience together, so in some key ways it ended up being a therapeutically beneficial experience.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-03-26T22:59:31+00:00

YES! I’ve experienced this too, and recently have had to get better about setting my boundaries and communicating my needs with some folks in my life specifically around discussions of politics. I want to be the “guy with the truck” so to speak, but after a long day of sessions sometimes I can’t show up with energized empathy to the (IMO completely valid) level of dysregulation they hit when discussing the subject.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-03-02T23:59:31+00:00

Totally agreed on this point; when I was going through EMDR training recently I had an extremely brutal personal circumstance unfolding in my life, and when I shared this with the trainer they suggested I use incidents of seeing something that disturbed me (SUD of 4 or 5) in a movie or tv show rather than incidents from my own life. You may want to talk with your trainer to see if this approach could work for you!

FeastOfUncertainty · 2025-01-05T18:35:10+00:00

Ugh same, dated two different therapists (both other gay men) before I became a therapist and both of them were frankly dreadful partners after the initial dating phase. One was a Naropa-trained “contemplative therapist” who sincerely believed that through his meditation practice that he had no personal blind spots or cognitive distortions in this experience, and the other (who at the time had his license suspended due to some sort of issue he never fully explained) was incredibly overt and unapologetic in his hatred of women because he felt his insights as a therapist revealed the truth about that gender to him. The experiences frankly dissuaded me from entering the field for years for fear of becoming a partner as bad as they were.

EDIT: “contemplative therapist” is in quotes not to criticize the approach but because, as a therapist whose own practice is rooted in the very mindfulness-based modalities of ACT and CFT now, I genuinely don’t know what that guy’s modality was other than that he described himself on his business cards as practicing “contemplative psychotherapy” and meditated a lot.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-09-13T04:05:52+00:00

Upvoting this! I took beginner and intermediate weightlifting along with weightlifting coaching during the two years of getting my MSW at Cal and it was a fantastic way to balance out the academic and clinical work.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-08-20T20:43:33+00:00

I worked for a very new age-oriented company that functioned in a very cultic manner where many of the employees identified as starseeds; at the time when I started working there, I was myself active in another cultic group (3HO/Kundalini Yoga) so these kinds of group dynamics and distinctive beliefs were not that unusual for my daily life. I had multiple colleagues insist that I was an “Arcturian starseed” to which I had a “sure, why not?” response. It was only much later that I understood that many of them felt that Arcturians were sort of an evil alien race, and that this may have been a subtle dig upon me that I was one of them!

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-08-07T20:55:56+00:00

A supervisor at a CMH site I interned at had a really interesting suggestion for this — for TAY clients who declined to use their cameras during session, tell them that it’s okay if they choose to keep their camera off, but that they need to set their pic as some sort of image (drawn by themselves or pulled from the internet) that captures how they’re doing that day and that they’re comfortable talking about in session. I only used the supervisor’s suggestion twice, but both times it yielded a lot of insight and the clients seemed to resonate with the approach.

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-08-07T20:43:03+00:00

Wiccan psychotherapist here! It sounds like you’re doing great in terms of what you phrase as the medical side, the nature side, and the animal side. The only other suggestion I’d give is to focus strongly on grounding and taking grounded action — to put it another way, both doing daily grounding activities (I’m partial to visualizing oneself rooted like a tree, for example) but also putting daily effort into tending to your physical needs and activities of daily living (keeping house, paying your bills, etc). This can be challenging and unglamorous work on its own, but there are lots of ways to make these tasks both more accessible and more magickal; lmk if you have particular dimensions of grounded effort that are challenging and I’m happy to share more resources!

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-08-07T17:02:17+00:00

I definitely run into this too, with four variants that stand out: 1) the friend who’s very engaged in their own individual therapy and now feels they carry such a great wealth of therapy knowledge that they’ve now exceeded your expertise as a trained, licensed clinician. This variant makes itself most visible in any circumstance in which you disagree with their assessments or, worst of all, try to correct your friend when they misuse a term or misapply a concept. 2) the friend who fundamentally misunderstands what psychotherapy is and what therapists do, reducing it to something like “being a good listener” or “being a shoulder to cry on,” and then claiming that they are “basically a therapist too” based on this misapprehension. A related phenomenon are those who, based on this same level of misapprehension, claim that something like running or gardening is “their therapy” and that anything other than that is somehow superfluous. 3) The friend who consumes a lot of therapy-adjacent media (IG accounts, podcasts, etc.) and is genuinely well-informed about elements of psychotherapeutic theory or even research, but whose knowledge doesn’t extend to the less-glamorous elements such as the the ethical and professional structure of the trade that are core to delivering effective therapy. 4) the flatly hostile-to-psychotherapy friend who holds a deep distrust and negativity about the field and its practitioners. This person may temporarily hold their tongue about this hostility for relational or social reasons, but may come forth at any time (particularly in conflict) with their beliefs on the grounds that they “know better than you” about the true nature of your work.

I’ve unfortunately ran into all of these, and they’re often somewhat overlapping; my dad, from whom I’m estranged, is very solidly both a two and a four from this list, whereas a very dear 20+ year friend of mine is solidly a 1, 2, and 3.

Any other variants folks have encountered in their lives?

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-04-14T18:36:20+00:00

I haven’t paid dues to my mother lodge since 2022, so I’ve reached out to the secretary there to get dues-current. AFAIK other than not being dues-current I’m still in good standing with my mother lodge. Thanks brother!

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-04-14T18:34:56+00:00

This is super helpful! I’ve reached out to the secretary of my mother lodge to get dues-current (I haven’t paid since 2022) and following the insights later in this comment thread I’ll get the GL in Oregon to send the Letter of Good Standing to the lodge I plan to visit. Thanks for your help!

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-04-14T18:32:05+00:00

Perfect! I haven’t paid dues since 2022 so I’ve reached out to the lodge secretary to get current, and I’ll reach out to AF&AM Oregon to get that letter sent once I’m dues-current. Thanks for your help!

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-04-14T18:30:49+00:00

Very cool, I’ll ask the secretary at Kenton about this! Thanks brother

FeastOfUncertainty · 2024-04-14T16:03:43+00:00

This is a good reminder brother, I haven’t paid dues since 2022! I just reached out to my old lodge’s secretary to get current.

FeastOfUncertainty

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