Atypical Trans Late Bloomer

Recently the most frequently misused term in the media has been "witch hunt" and it struck me: I really don't know much about the Salem Witch Trials . So down the rabbit hole I went, and I read about the trials, the accusations, the meagre justifications in law and process; and I came upon the story of Giles Corey , and his death by peine forte et dure , and I really related to him. Giles Corey was charged with witchcraft. However, the State was quite uncertain that they had jurisdiction for several reasons and so they artfully would ask the accused to enter a plea of guilty or not-guilty; by entering a plea, the accused accepted the jurisdiction of the court. By "standing mute" and refusing to enter a plea, the accused rejected the court's jurisdiction and the trial could not continue. Why did Giles Corey decline to enter a plea? If he pled and then was found guilty, his property would revert to the Crown. If he were never found guilty, his property woul...

Reading Healing Tasks: Psychotherapy and Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse by James I Kepner. Re therapy I'm often questioning whether what we're doing is what we're supposed to be doing, so I thought I'd do some learning about what the process is supposed to be. This is a good read. There are, admittedly, some pages I don't get - either they're too abstract, or I'm not catching the nuance/implications. It's not a self-help book, it's much more a book for practitioners. There's a lot of good lessons for me. One lesson is the notion that prior trauma causes you to over-react to challenges. I did just that in an interaction while I was reading it, and it informed me to ask: Am I over-reacting? Why? and there was value in that. Another two lessons that I'm still pondering are: Depression is the result of long-unprocessed, accumulated, compounding-interest grief that hasn't been mourned, which presents as a general sadness or malais...

I had a curious brush with suicide. I'd been quite suicidal in 2017, and then an experience with my friend TM pulled me out of that. I still think of it often and easily put it aside, and I would have said that I wasn't at risk for suicide any longer. I was in a marriage-therapy session and my spouse said somethings that I went off in response to. The state of where we left things was simply unacceptable to me, I couldn't tolerate the situation, and when we got out of the room and I was waiting in the common space for my spouse to use the bathroom, I said to myself (I heard the words in my head): "Well this is no good, I can't go on like this, time to kill myself" Walking out of the office suite I decided: end of the hall, staircast, throw myself down the stairs to the ground floor and that was my exact intention. Got to the top of the stairs, walked directly to the edge, and realized: there was no way between the landings and the layout that I was going ...