Quote from: F_P_M on May 06, 2019, 01:06:40 PM
She's trying to convince me that i'm "just depressed" or "just stressed" and that i'm wrong and honestly i'm a bit offended and also very surprised.
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and she's telling me to seek out "cognitive behavioural therapy" which sounds an awful lot like expecting me to go have conversion therapy huh?
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I feel kinda attacked. Like my own introspection and my knowledge of myself isn't good enough you know? I couldn't POSSIBLY know myself and my heart and soul.
Have you got your own gender identity therapy or counseling going on? It would be a good idea, because you've got a lot of changes and issues on your plate at the point of embarking on transition. Obviously, you would need a therapist who is familiar with gender identity issues. Many general-practice therapists would be totally out of their depths dealing with the specific issues that will be coming up in your life.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a well-established and very effective mode of approaching a range of behavioral problems like irrational fears or anxieties (like phobias), bad habits, or some types of irrational behaviors caused by obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). CBT would be perfectly useless in resolving a fundamental gender identity misalignment. Also (contrary to what your friend seems to think), CBT is not particularly useful in treating depression or stress.
You may very well be experiencing depression. It's fairly common among trans folks. My own opinion (I'm certainly NOT a psychologist!) is that depression is often a PRODUCT of the unresolved gender misalignment that exists at the core of our personalities. Though I was never clinically diagnosed with depression, looking back on my life before transition, I was clearly depressed trying to grind through life in a male mode that didn't fit. Transitioning to female mode may have caused all sorts of chaos and disorder in my life for a couple of years, but when I came out on the other end of the process, the depression was gone.
You reported most folks in your life are responding to your news on a range from indifference to support. I think that's fairly typical. Most folks will think it's up to YOU to make the right determinations for YOURSELF about YOUR OWN identity, even if they may have a hard time understanding it.
But there are some people who are so wrapped up with defending a binary and absolute dividing line between the sexes that they just can't let it go. This is THEIR problem, not yours. Don't let them make it your problem.
You have lots of issues and lots of problems to resolve. Take a deep breath, don't panic, and take all the time you need to think everything through to work out the right course forward for yourself. Don't worry about people who shriek at you from the sidelines. They're not living your life.