How I learned skills to live better: books + instruction

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Hi,

I was depressed, sitting on computer for 4-6 hours daily, isolated, doing nothing week after week. Now, I only check email, and work full time, go to school full time, go to meetups, play team games, pool at my college, even gone on dates with four girls, one wanted to take me home, and got a second date with three of them. Had fun! I am much happier, I smile at people, feel like I can do things. Depression went down from a 5/10 to a 3/10. So my guide to learning this skill set is below. Please do not post negative, discouraging, self defeating, pessimistic comments that discount my points. Keep it positive here, deal with the negativity with a professional therapist who can help you (I can't). If you don't want to learn from me, don't obstruct others from doing so by clogging this thread. (Sorry for sounding like a dick, I don't mean it in a bad way.) This thread is only for people who want to learn these skills to feel good, do more, and have fun and feel better about yourself and less depressed, or to share how they improved and their method. Also, I think that not many people will read or reply to my post as not a lot of people are ready to put the time effort into "working at it" and changing. You will probably not know how to go about it even if you follow my steps. Frankly, this could also go in the dating thread, as being down is a big downer sexually. If you follow these steps, you might eventually figure out how to date too and be successful at it!!

So this worked for me:

#1 Work/Volunteering/Classes/Regular Group meetings aka STRUCTURE that you dont have the skill to make for yourself now, so you need an outside source such as a job, a weekly Anime Watching group to do it for you.

#2 Support Group - a group that meets every two weeks where you can talk about your worries and what's making you depressed and learn to think in new ways and share skills with others, have a group that feels like home and that they are your friends

#3 CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy) - either with therapist, or by yourself, or both.

#4 Read these books:

Feeling Good by Dr. Burns
by Gary Karp - Disability & the Art of Kissing

Therapists have observed that depressed people do not want to change and be happier - they feel scared and ambivalent when faced with a possibility of feeling good for the first time in years. For me, I feel much safer when I am stuck in my depression - "happy as a pig in shi*" But, slowly, by putting time and effort, without overwhelming myself, but working at it several days a week, putting time and effort month after month, I nudged and now I have come a long since this summer. Right now, I am getting my licence and planning on driving around picking up girls and driving them as well as my friends from my support group to places. Will be fun!

They all sound like good suggestions. My personal issue with learning to be more successful socially is that it still exhausts me to interact with people and I think that is a neurological thing and not easy to change. I have been interested in CBT. Can you give examples of what kinds of issues it addresses and how it's done?

B_MA, you're 23 and feel you've discovered the answers to life's troubles. That's great (I applaud you and wish you only great happiness), but alternative viewpoints aren't necessarily naysaying for the sake of cultivating defeatist attitudes. Perhaps those with a few more years under their belts, who went through similar positive phases at 23, might be better equipped to simply advise you of the realities you may expect to encounter along your path, so that when you do encounter them you don't have to be taken off guard and feel as though you've been hit by a truck.

You sound like you're doing great and you should absolutely keep that up - the skills you're acquiring will serve you well, whatever you may experience in future. And now's the time to develop them, while you've got the energy to expend - because it does take more energy and resilience for those with ASDs, as we learn social skills by trial-and-error, rather than by observation and osmosis.




I hope that's not true - very sad for anyone who won't bother to make the effort. Personally, I can't imagine how anyone gets through life without making those changes at some point, it's really the only way to survive. The only alternatives are homelessness or being cared for by family, or institutionalization for life and who would choose any of those?

There's a book by singing comedian Steve Goodie called "Achieving Happiness Though Lower Standards". This is kind of my philosophy especially on relationships. Samples of chapters are available online here Steve Goodie's Book

I haven't actually read this book other than what's online. Here's a sample

Lowering Standards is all about updating your perspective. You’re susceptible to being miserable only when your perspective is bad. Take me, for example. My most miserable time was in high school. I got lousy grades, and I felt that I was blowing it. Having no perspective, I presumed that failure in school was failure in life. Now I’m out in the world, and the only high school lessons that I still use are my driving skills. Every other useful skill I happen to have is something I picked up when it became necessary. Squeezing the juice out of a can of tuna without getting the tuna all over the sink. No one taught me that. I figured it out on my own. Mounting a phone on the wall. Recording a show on the VCR. Balancing the checkbook. Eating with chopsticks. Filling out tax forms. Sex. Well, I’m still working on some of these. And now that I think of it, eventually I probably could have figured out how to drive on my own.

The point is, if you feel you’re a failure, it’s almost certainly a lack of perspective that’s making you feel that way. Good perspective brings Lower Standards, and vice versa. Being an adult, the importance of my high school grades has dropped below zero. So the grades remain the same as they always were (it’s a bit late to change them now), but the relevance they once enjoyed has been replaced with apathy bordering on ridicule. Who cares if I failed calculus - twice?! Who cares?! Nobody cares! It’s got no bearing on real life, unless you’re working for NASA, in which case you probably aced calculus. But for me it’s contentedly forgotten.

Yes. It's better if you read Feeling Good by Dr. Burns and do the written exercises. Automatic negative thoughts are so fast, that you cannot process CBT mentally - you need it on paper.

Example:

You think "I am totally alone. I don't have anyone. I go to my parents on Thanksgiving and I am the only one without a girlfriend."
CBT: "Totally alone" is an exageration. There is a continuum from zero to a hundred and you are not at point zero, you are somewhere in between. You are thinking in black and white - either you have a girlfriend to take to your parents on Thanksgiving and have fun socializing OR you are totally alone. You can do things with and around people - talk to your parents, go for a group walk on meetup.com, volunteer at an animal shelter, post on the forums, talk in a chatroom, etc. "Tottally alone" is also a label. You are also using emotional reasoning. You feel "totally alone," so you think, if I feel it, than it must be true. Well, feelings are often not true about reality, so you cannot think with your feelings.