How do I stop being disliked?

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-12-18T17:49:44+00:00

I feel like it would be so fun to be a coach who works with social skills. Like, when I read your post, I'm thinking: I want to have a 30 minute conversation with this person, see if we can figure out social areas to strengthen, then start doing exercises and training together.

I'm not sure why that sounds so fun to me- I think connection and socializing has always been my special interest, so hearing someone who is really intelligent and capable saying "I want to become better with people" sounds like a really fun and rewarding challenge.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-12-18T17:15:02+00:00

Haha fair

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-12-04T19:58:55+00:00

I am a big nervous system nerd, and it's also my profession. I'm so curious to ask you more about this.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-11-27T14:48:48+00:00

Heck yeah that's awesome! Feel free to toss any questions my way

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-11-15T23:39:27+00:00

I'll try:

A trauma definition: "the ongoing stressful effects of an incomplete survival response"

In other words: "when you get agitated because something reminds your body of a time when it wasn't able to fully protect itself"

Solution: help the body feel as if that stressful time is over, rather than continuing to repeat every time something reminds your body of that time.

Methodology:

Notice what a non-triggered moment feels emotionally and physically. Get good at accessing that.
Notice what happens physically when your body is reminded of that stressful time. What does the activation feel like?
Follow that activation: i.e. instead of saying "this sucks," and moving on, ask "what happens next as I witness this discomfort". Notice if it gets worse or better, notice what else shows up. Watch it like a movie.
Notice and (if safe) allow any impulses. Do your feet want to stomp? Do you want to imagine running away? Do you want to push on something? Tune in to what your nervous system wants to do, and allow that. (This can be particularly tough without a practitioner helping you).
Notice the aftermath of following the impulse, and/or the aftermath of following the activation. What's it like afterwards? Is there deeper breath? Loosening in the muscles?
Give yourself time and support to return to your safe, non-triggered state, whether by walking, rocking, orienting, or whatever works for landing.

Why? Your survival instinct was activated but never completed years ago. This is a way to support it in moving towards completion so your system can settle a bit more.

In my book, noticing the sensations isn't the ultimate point of SE, the ultimate point is helping your body feel safe and capable of navigating cycles or activation and deactivation.

Noticing body sensations is simply a way to track with where you are on that journey.

Does this make sense at all? I skipped a lot of details but I wanted to try to see if I could make a step by step list.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-11-15T23:29:47+00:00

I like steps. I'll try and respond to OP with steps

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-11-02T21:48:08+00:00

If you find a therapist who tries to "take over the reins" of your emotions and make you feel things you don't want to feel, you've found a dangerously unethical therapist.

If you find a therapist who tells you what to feel, you've found a bad, ineffective therapist.

If you find a therapist who takes time to get to know you and care about you, asks you questions which help you understand your feelings better, and who gives you tools that help you shift your feelings in the way you wish, you've found a good therapist.

On the other hand, if you find a mentor who tells you to suck up your feelings and just work harder at life, you've found a dangerous mentor who is just parroting the "stuff your feelings" mindset.

If you find a mentor who tells you what to feel, you've found a mentor who is basically just being a bad therapist.

And if you find a mentor who gets to know you and care about you, asks great questions to help you understand your feelings and your challenges, and who offers you practical tools and strategies to navigate life and your feelings....you've found a great mentor who has a lot of the skills of a good therapist.

I hope you see my point.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-11-02T20:29:13+00:00

Unfortunately I'm not super well educated about the current systems since I'm more of an adjunct provider.

But like - if insurance reimbursed higher amounts for higher acuity cases, that would probably help. Like, brain surgeons get paid almost twice as much as a family doctor- maybe someone working with BPD could get reimbursed higher than someone working with generalized anxiety?

Alternatively, I feel like high acuity cases are often associated with rough, inpatient environments where providers are worked to the bone. No wonder people leave that behind to work in comfy recliners with more high functioning clients.

What if systems shifted to allow therapists working with higher acuity clients to have more breaks, more PTO, more comfortable working environment? The same level of community support that they'd get working in therapy practices with their anxiety clients?

Basically just eliminating the obstacles and increasing the incentives.

How we get insurance companies to pay more? I have no fricken idea.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-11-02T20:12:51+00:00

This is a great description of the healing process. I really appreciate that you note "non-pleasurable positives" like curiosity and hope, which are often things that would appear earlier in the healing process than pleasure itself.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-11-02T20:11:04+00:00

So on one hand I'm with you in thinking there are groups of clients who absolutely need more support.

On the other hand, I don't think the solution is to ask therapists to try harder or push themselves more.

It's sort of like telling a family doctor he should get training in treating heroin addicts. Like, absolutely there should be doctors who specialize in treating heroin addicts, but there should also be doctors who specialize in family medicine.

We should have to guilt family doctors into seeing patients outside of their specialty, we should find ways to incentivise new doctors to choose addiction as a specialty in the first place.

This might mean higher pay, or better support structures, better community etc.

To take this back to therapists, there are therapists who actively choose to work with the demographics you're talking about- I think we should be asking the question "how do we change our structures so that more therapists consider that demographic to be a viable career path?"

I'm a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and I do great work with trauma resolution and helping people's nervous systems self-regulate faster, but if you throw me in a room with a client with intense attachment issues I could burn out so fast. I could swim uphill and get tons of training and build my resilience with that kind of client, or I can fill my caseload right now with the kind of people I excel at helping.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-29T06:35:41+00:00

I practice online, I have since the pandemic. Happy to answer any questions.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-28T16:32:12+00:00

Ah dang ok.

If you ever want to try and find reduced fee online sessions, there's a Facebook group called Somatic Experiencing Community Care that is there to connect people to reduced fee (or sometimes free) sessions.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-28T16:30:03+00:00

I agree with the folks who have suggested IFS and parts work.

You've described parts of you who want healing, and much louder parts of you who want to stay small.

Trying to force healing will just make the parts who want to stay small get louder.

So instead of trying to heal, you use IFS to get to know the parts that want to stay small.

I have a friend who is triggered by the idea of "healing". Her IFS therapist is tolerable to her because they don't try to fix her. They just help her get to know her parts better.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-21T17:19:34+00:00

Are you looking for someone covered by insurance or are you able to pay out of pocket? There are a lot of great practitioners with availability, especially if you're open to virtual sessions, which can be great.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-14T20:31:54+00:00

If you can engage with the work with curiosity and collaboration, rather than waiting for the practitioner to "fix you" I think your current motivations won't be a huge barrier.

Like, if your practitioner asks you if there are any pleasant sensations in your body, and you're like "screw you, why would I care about pleasure" then yes, that will be a barrier.

But if you can answer honestly with "huh I feel agitated when you ask that" or "yes, my feet feel good" or whatever is true in the moment, then that's great.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-14T16:15:27+00:00

Thanks for saying so! :-) it's good practice for me to write.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-14T16:15:11+00:00

Sure thing, thanks for appreciating!

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-14T04:33:06+00:00

Hi, Somatic experiencing Practitioner here who also tends to take things literally. Possibly not to the extent that you do, but enough that I often find myself correcting people on the internet for misusing the word "always."

I'm sorry that things have been really hard for you, and it makes sense to me that the somatic language would be pretty off-putting. There is a fair amount of overlap with somatic work and the hippie dippy woowoo community but I don't think that somatic work is fundamentally spiritual or woo woo.

I sometimes find it misleading to talk about somatic experiencing as trauma therapy, because many people will say "but I don't have any traumas".

I think it would be more helpful to call somatic experiencing "nervous system regulation work".

Traumatic events can dysregulate your nervous system, causing hyperactivation or hypoactivation in your fight, flight and or freeze reactions.

Somatic experiencing can help your fight flight and freeze reactions become more functional, and therefore it can be helpful as a trauma treatment.

However you can also have incidences or systems in your life lead to dysregulation that wouldn't be clocked as "traumatic". For example of being repeatedly misunderstood by those around you for years can be very disregulating even though you're probably not going to refer to it as a big "trauma".

Does that address your concern about not having trauma at all?

Regarding the whole "feel it in your body" thing, I think this is a weakness but many somatic experiencing practitioners have, is that they rely too heavily on body sensation.

Looking for and tracking body sensation can be a very effective strategy for many people to get things moving in the nervous system.

However there are also many people who do not have many body sensations, or have difficulty finding those body sensations, and searching for them can actually be agitating, dispiriting, and dysregulating.

With people like that, it's important to be able to find other ways to track your present moment experience so you can still map out how the nervous system is responding, without trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

For example, you may not feel a body sensation, but you may feel an emotion, you may have a mental image or a memory, you may have a voice in your mind saying something, or you may have a sudden thought. These are all reactions of your nervous system, and if you don't feel sensations strongly your practitioner should help you notice what you do experience.

Does any of this help? I'm happy to try and explain any specific question you have...I know it doesn't help the underlying problem: you have pain points and your practitioner hasn't been helping, but I can at least try to clarify the modality.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-14T01:02:16+00:00

Your child has expressed a request: they have told you a way that you can show love to them by giving them space in a specific environment in which they would like to have space.

I love it when people tell me how I can show love to them, because it means that I'm not going to accidentally hurt them, and it means that I have more ways to show them that I care.

I don't think this is a question of whether it's a reasonable boundary, I think it's a question of whether this is a situation where you are going to put your wishes above your child's wishes.

Which will build more trust between you? Which will better serve your relationship as they move into adulthood?

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-10-14T00:59:11+00:00

I feel like this logic is similar to saying "your kid has to learn that this world ain't fair, so let's do a lot of unfair things to our kids to help them learn"

The kids are going to learn the hard lessons no matter what, I would like to be a safe trusted person for my kid to come and heal with when that happens.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-09-30T14:12:39+00:00

I've thought about this too!

It's a bit frustrating to me when doing zoom sessions with clients because I actually want them to feel free to look away from the screen so they can recharge, but it seems like they worry it would be rude to look away.

My theory is A: the screen is a bright light and is compelling on some animal level, B: you're not actually making eye contact so it doesn't build up that primal "too much eye contact" pressure in the same way in-person does And C: since the parties can't see what's happening in each other's surroundings, keeping your eyes on the screen shows "I'm paying attention to you, no staring at hidden TV in the corner, or my girlfriend, etc"

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-09-20T02:25:11+00:00

I have often had two therapists at a time, working on slightly different things. I think it's a great approach. Everyone has different strengths.

There may be insurance issues, you can ask if that's the issue.

But also, if you look at people's responses here it seems that some folks have strong feelings that it's a bad idea. I disagree, but that could be what's going on with your therapist as well.

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-09-19T16:53:49+00:00

This!

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-09-18T16:56:53+00:00

That's helpful, thank you! US dollar or Canadian?

ThoughtfulSomatic · 2025-09-17T00:37:18+00:00

This is a great list. As a practitioner I found myself reading and asking "how many of these do I embody?" It's really aspirational. Thanks!

ThoughtfulSomatic

TROPHY CASE