What is Reddit's opinion of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions?

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I agree with the other reply. Self-compassion is the answer to shame and guilt. A therapist can help you work through these feelings and develop self-compassion. If therapy’s not an option, I highly recommend the book The Mindful Path to Self Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts & Emotions. I’ve read a ton of self-help books and this is the one that clicked for me.

https://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Path-Self-Compassion-Yourself-Destructive/dp/1593859759

I don’t think you’re a lost cause. What you’re describing sounds like a major depression, and it seems like you’re suffering. Which totally sucks.

If money is tight, seeking counseling may be unrealistic; but luckily, honoring your feelings and offering yourself compassion is free

Here’s a book that changed my thinking, and you may find in your local library: https://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Path-Self-Compassion-Yourself-Destructive/dp/1593859759

Personally, what I find most helpful in cultivating self-compassion is a principle common to many religions, that I should not treat myself differently from others. Loving yourself and others equally is an obligation that is binding not just on people who tend to hold themselves above others but also on those who habitually value themselves less. You have an obligation to ruthlessly expose and repudiate whatever habits of thought you use to degrade your worth. This is a good focus for insight meditation. If you have a tendency to devalue yourself, then logical reflection will uncover many, many unsound and unfair ways you put yourself down.

Sometimes the most stubborn aspect of self-hatred is that it feels right and just. Hating ourselves gives us a comforting sense of self-righteousness. We might not do anything else right, but at least we can hold ourselves accountable for our worthlessness! No, this is wrong, this is a lazy and harmful self-indulgence that you must give up. You must treat yourself as kindly as you would treat anyone else.

For a more comprehensive guide, this is a great book: The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion. Of course mindfulness is not the same as Buddhism, but if I remember correctly, the book uses a lot more Buddhist concepts than just mindfulness.

Another part of helping yourself manage OCD is not beating yourself up. Along those same lines "The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion" by Christopher Germer is a great book for that. http://www.amazon.com/The-Mindful-Path-Self-Compassion-Destructive/dp/1593859759/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1392739207&sr=1-1 Definitely not a cure but not beating yourself up will make life a lot easier.

No sweat!

CBT is useful, but limited. You may want to look into mindfulness for self compassion. This book helped me.

My friend, you’re really far behind in the mental health world.

>For most illnesses this is not okay

I’m reading countless things on mindfulness as the path to healing with mental illness. Better to accept yourself than to live with shame.

https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/transgender-people-suicide/ > A survey of trans people in the UK found that a completed medical transition was shown to greatly reduce rates of suicidal ideation and attempts, in contrast to those at other stages of transition (imminently transitioning or beginning transition). 67% of transitioning people thought about suicide pre-transition and only 3% post-transition (Bailey et al., 2014).

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885 > For the purpose of evaluating the safety of sex reassignment in terms of morbidity and mortality, however, it is reasonable to compare sex reassigned persons with matched population controls. The caveat with this design is that transsexual persons before sex reassignment might differ from healthy controls (although this bias can be statistically corrected for by adjusting for baseline differences). It is therefore important to note that the current study is only informative with respect to transsexuals persons health after sex reassignment; no inferences can be drawn as to the effectiveness of sex reassignment as a treatment for transsexualism. In other words, the results should not be interpreted such as sex reassignment per se increases morbidity and mortality. Things might have been even worse without sex reassignment. As an analogy, similar studies have found increased somatic morbidity, suicide rate, and overall mortality for patients treated for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.[39], [40] This is important information, but it does not follow that mood stabilizing treatment or antipsychotic treatment is the culprit.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383812/ > A number of studies have shown that interventions focused on increasing clients’ mindfulness of psychological events can reduce experiential avoidance (Hayes et al., 2006), suggesting that mindfulness may be a promising alternative to suicidal behavior as a means of coping with seemingly intractable pain. In this article we review the theory and data that support the idea that mindfulness may be a means to target the common core process of experiential avoidance.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333999132_Health_of_Non-binary_and_Genderqueer_People_A_Systematic_Review > From a clinical perspective, as well as for transgender individuals [e.g., American Psychological Association (APA), 2015; Edwards- Leeper et al., 2016], an affirmative practice with NBGQ people is highly recommended, especially in light of the evidence that some NBGQ individuals have access clinical services for gender-affirming treatments ( Koehler et al., 2018;Taylor et al., 2018). Such a practice refers to a non-pathologizing clinical approach that accepts and validates all genders, rejecting the gender binary as a marginalizing social system, privileging some while oppressing others ( Austin and Craig, 2015;Bochicchio et al., 2019;Scandurra et al., 2019b).

I’m reading this book as well, which discusses many clinical case studies of people practicing self acceptance as a path to overcoming mental illness—for anxiety, you recognize the anxiety you have rather than try to ignore it. Then you try to adapt to it. Having trans folks “embracing the illness and adapting [their] lifestyle around it.” is what they’re supposed to do.

I tried to find reference to your claim about medication that “repress”es (I think you mean suppresses?) dysphoria. From the APA:

https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/expert-q-and-a > Many transgender people who take feminizing or masculinizing hormones report improvement of emotions as their gender dysphoria lessens or resolves.

So...yes, affirming is the correct, clinical action.