Guest post: Locked into chasing the dragon
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on They don’t even get the initial euphoria.
Not that this hasn’t been discussed all along, of course, but still, learning that estrogen likely makes them more depressed than they already were…well, it can’t help the discourse much.
And so they get locked into chasing the dragon with ever increasing medical interventions.
That’s gotta cause some major dissonance. When I finally started getting real help for my social anxiety, the hope that my life would improve by itself gave me a sense of hope and elevated my view of myself, the world, and my place in it. I’m trying to imagine what kind of state I’d be in if the thing I believed was helping was actually making me worse. My tendency has always been to look inward for fault, hence the social anxiety, but if I were the sort to have an external locus of control? I’d be looking for someone, anyone to blame for my suffering. Which neatly explains the vehement hatred of anyone not on board 100% with the Genderist project, and it explains the obsession with making every nook and cranny of life conform to the ideology. “If transition isn’t making us happy,” they think, “then there must be something out there that’s preventing it from working, even if we can’t see it. We must find it and destroy it.”
Good analysis, NiV. Another factor (I don’t know if this fits your situation) is that the depression often seems to feed itself. I experienced that; terror of not being depressed and being expected to function ‘normally’ (i.e. like everyone else). I suspect I actively resisted my treatment without realizing it. Depressed was who I was. It was an identity. For a period of time in my early 30s, it was the only identity I had. (Yeah, pretty sad.) So it’s possible (maybe even probable) that the trans activists need the anger, need the stimulation that isn’t coming from anywhere more positive. They can get out of bed in the morning knowing somewhere out there the dragon is getting away and they have to catch it.
That would be the “rational” aspect of it. To lash out at anyone you’ve made a scapegoat for your own misery.
We can’t rule out though that these people appear to be literally brain-damaged and rationality is no longer a regular part of their skill-set.
Depression feeding itself is something I get. Being depressed makes it harder to do the things that actually make us feel good; e.g., trying new things, accomplishing goals, interacting with people you like. Instead of those things (positive reinforcers) we stick to those things that let us forget the depression temporarily (negative reinforcers). Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the latter category diminishes over time, leaving life kind of grey.
The boring rut is familiar, though, and we understand our place in it. What we’ve been doing, even though maladaptive, is less intimidating than what we know we need to do to feel better. It doesn’t help when anxiety disorders make us scared of the good, and even roleplaying the good in the safe context of a counseling session makes us shut down momentarily.
At least that’s how I’ve retrospectively interpreted things. Dunno if that’s what you’re talking about.
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. I’m dealing with that now. My father’s death, my upcoming retirement (though positive), and a lot of other things have left me barely coping. So what do I do? Stay home every chance I get. I know I like to go to theatre, but I can’t bring myself to go to the theatre. My agoraphobia doesn’t help that much, either.
But it’s also something about…all my life, I wasn’t cared about, noticed (except when it was time to inflict pain), or fussed over. I do think people need some of that, even if not in the doses we now seem to demand in our schools and other institutions. Suddenly, I was. People worried about me. If no one else would, at least the people that were paid to worry about me. That’s sort of a positive reinforcement that feeds into the depression, too. If I recovered, I would be back where I was, with no one to care.
I couldn’t see that people did care, they just didn’t know how to express it.