Oh, go on then...

[j4]

Fill in the blanks:

I ____ j4.
j4 is ____.
If I were alone in a room with j4, I would _______.
I think j4 should _____.
j4 needs ______.
I want to ____________ j4.

I'd like to know who says what, but I don't really mind anonymous responses. Really I'd just like to see as many responses as possible, because it's moderately interesting and IT'S NOT ANOTHER BLOODY CLICKY-BOXEY AM-I-GOTH-OR-NOT QUIZ.

And I must say, actually, it'd be refreshing to see some honest-to-goodness dirty responses to this meme. Or is everybody too polite and too British to say things like "I want to fuck [whoever]", or "[whoever] needs a damn good seeing-to"?

Comments

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

I like j4.
j4 is always full of surprises and interesting opinions.
If I were alone in a room with j4, I would have long and interesting conversations, and get annoyed with myself for staring down her cleavage.
I think j4 should keep trying to find a therapist.
j4 needs to believe she's worth fixing.
I want to find a useful way to help j4.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I think j4 should keep trying to find a therapist.
j4 needs to believe she's worth fixing.

It's not so much that I don't believe I'm worth fixing, as that I am really very far from convinced that seeing a therapist is the way to fix me, and as such I'm reluctant to throw what is (to me) a noticeable amount of money into a "solution" that may (based on past experience) either do nothing, or actively make things worse. If it helped, then yes, it would be an investment; if it didn't, it would be worse than throwing money away on trivialities, because at least the trivialities make me happy at the time.

But I think we've done this... :-/

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The principal problem I have with the idea of seeing a therapist is that I'm far from sure that the value of normal for which they are aiming is one I would want to be. I strongly suspect that quite a lot of things that have hurt me and shaped me in non-standard ways are root causes of my writing, frex, and I should not be prepared to give up my ability to open up and let the stories and the people come to me for anything, and definitely not being "fixed" towards some more culturally standard version of healthy.

[j4.livejournal.com]

A good therapist will be aiming to get you to a point where you are happy with yourself, rather than trying to get you to some arbitrarily-defined standard of normality. ... Experience suggests that there are very few good therapists, and those that do exist require one to pay through the nose for the privilege of their services.

There are therapists who are recommended by the poly "community", but I'd be even more wary of somebody who was trying to turn me into what the poly "community" considers normal than somebody who was trying to make me go all mainstream. I've been mainstream, I have a reasonable idea of how to get out of that one now.

To be honest my karate instructor is better at the learn-to-be-yourself thing (with the sort of half-baked Zen you get from an enthusiastic former biology student who's now a 2nd-dan black belt) than a lot of the head-quacks I've seen. The thing I really, really love about doing martial arts is that the emphasis is always on helping you achieve your own maximum potential -- whatever that is, and however best suits you -- rather than competing against other people or measuring up to some kind of external standard. (Yes, I guess in practice you have to measure up to an external standard to pass gradings, but the point of the gradings is to give you an indication of the fact that you've progressed rather than to hold you up against a big stick and say "thus far hast thou gone, and no further".)

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

[...] but the point of the gradings is to give you an indication of the fact that you've progressed rather than to hold you up against a big stick and say "thus far hast thou gone, and no further".)

One of the things I like about the style I practice is the rather haphazard approach to grades. If someone turns up with the attitude that they want to reach a particular rank, chances are good they'll just get given it in the hope that they'll go away satisfied. The people who are interested in the training, and are doing it because they want to be better for themselves are the ones who actually earn the rank.

And you're right - the benefits of training are more than just learning physical movements. Your mind takes on aspects of the training and carries them on outside the dojo. Find a good club, as you seem to have done, and you learn a lot about your limits, your abilities, and how your abilities grow and change with your own focus. Having a solid grounding like that can make the world of difference.

Rambling stops now... martial arts can send me into 100k email territory ;)

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

This is what concerns me also; though I agree with j4 below that if a therapist tries to squash you into something they think is normal then they're a poor therapist.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

We have indeed, and now I'm going tot ake lnr's advice and stop trying to mend everything in a shortsighted fashion and getting up people's noses by doing it..

[lnr]

*hugs* I don't think I meant it in quite that way, I meant for your own sake. You've talked about needing to step back from relationship wibbles with mobbsy from time to time and just enjoy stuff, I think it applies to other bits of life too.

[j4.livejournal.com]

*hugs* I don't think it's shortsighted, I'm just not sure it's for me.