How programming skills can allow to save the mind of a loved one or “From programming to psychotherapy”
Good day, good day!
In this brief essay, I will write about how programming skills gave me the opportunity to help my loved ones get out of deep depression, while others live a social life despite paranoid schizophrenia.
A little about me. My life was made by one book, which was somehow given to me on my tenth or eleventh birthday. It was a wonderful comic released by the Latvians - “How Petya Beysikov taught Tony Soobrakalin to programming”.
')
Maybe there are people who have somehow come across it? But she plunged me into the incredible world of algorithms, block schemes. I still remember how they were drawn in history lessons on the last pages of the notebook. From the block diagram of "How to make a hamster" to "how to get acquainted with a girl." Then there was Basic, Pascal, Cobol, Prolog, Delphi, C ++ Builder, PHP. With some of them I had a nodding acquaintance, others even maintained my bydlokoding, and with some it did not work out at all.
I can hardly be called somehow, except bydlokoder. Yes, I have projects, they bring money. They are not one and not two. Alive and healthy for more than 6-7 years. I did not bother to refactor myself (well, almost), put crutches and worked quickly. Looking back, I'm not at all ashamed, although those guys who work under my command now happen to be grumbling. Now I am in charge of the department of programmers of a fairly large company, and I also have a small online business that is dripping.
In my education, I stopped somewhere at the level of procedural programming and somehow did not go any further. OOP is used more as a decorative chip. But the flowcharts from that first book were hard-pressed into my young brains. And even now it happens, I’m drawing them in the process of thinking about a new project. And probably this skill played the main role in the main drama of my life.
My mother was a teacher at the university in the wild nineties. It was one of the first private institutions of higher education in our small republic. And since then, only those who had their money paid money, and then very strange people had money. My mother came under pressure: "We pay - it means we are the boss here." The story was terrible: the students intimidated and harassed her, and in the end she became downtrodden and quiet. I often heard her cry. I saw a control, in which it was written in pencil: "... and so that everything is good with you just put the top ten (we have a ten-point system), and then erase what is written in pencil ..." She began to be afraid to leave the house. Father got cold and did not support her then. And her quiet depression, meanwhile, was degraded into paranoia and two years later into schizophrenia with auditory and visual hallucinations. Exacerbations with hospitalization - twice a year - autumn and spring. I experienced a wild shock when I realized: “Everything. Nothing more can be done. Schizophrenia is not treated. This man will not be returned. ”
With great resistance, we began to take a new mother. The way it is. And try to love her, not the ghost that was left in the past.
It took about nine years. Life began to get better and better - I had a small freelance desk, my beloved wife. We just got married a year. And then - my first bad business project. Began to share the skin of a not dead bear with the co-founders. Laziness, hope at random and immeasurably grown ChSV have done their dirty deed. The result - twelve thousand euros of personal debt at interest. It should be understood that at that time our other family incomes did not exceed $ 400 per month. It was like a bat hitting the solar plexus. The spirit and the ground from under my feet completely knocked me out. Everything started to crash around. Sand castles were scattered and friends and relatives dissolved. And only his wife stayed close.
I was able to return the money within two years. Probably only thanks to the support of his wife. And at that moment when I wanted to shout:
-URAAAAA! Slavery is over. You can begin to live. I noticed that my wife was quiet and somehow stopped leaving the house. Increasingly began to occur tantrums, which always ended in tears. It was getting harder for us to meet someone. And the shadow of the past hung over my family again. But this time I did not want to give up. I didn’t want my loved one to become a zombie-stuffed tranquilizer. Because of my cowardice, I did not want to lose the shine of her eyes and her laugh. And then the preservation of my family became the most important project in my life.
At that moment, I had a couple of NLP (Practitioner and Master) courses and a bit of Ericksonian hypnosis behind my back, which provided some basic tools for working with the unconscious. In any case, I could bring a light trance and lead me. For what and how I needed it - a topic for a completely different post. By that moment, I felt like a monkey with a bunch of tools in my hands and felt the depth of my ignorance.
But when did this ignorance bother me? By that moment I was already experienced. And in programming, I often and successfully overcome such obstacles with the help of search, perseverance and intuition. And I decided to use my “intuition” in this case. Since the “model of the world” was desperately lacking, I accepted the existential model of psychotherapy, as I adore existentialists in principle, and always read Sartre and Heidegger with pleasure.
It should be understood that in psychotherapy, each model of the world sets its own rules of the game. For example, Jungians explain everything through archetypes, "Gestalt" - through "here and now", behaviorists - through behavioral patterns, humanists - through the integrity of a person and his desire for personal growth. And when you accept a certain model of the world, you automatically accept the rules of the game of the world where this model operates. (Hmm, of course I simplified everything to disgrace and for a better understanding.)
All this reminded me of the languages and programming environments with which I had to deal. If you learn the rules, you can stick my flowcharts everywhere, the ones I learned from the first book on programming. So for me, existential psychotherapy turned out to be a simple (only new) programming environment with simple adequate and very clear rules.
There are four basic existences (a unique human experience): Responsibility-Freedom, Isolation, Death, and Meaninglessness. And each neurosis appears at the junction of a collision with one of the existences.
The algorithm is simple:
With the help of ordinary logical induction, and sometimes by the method of elimination, we are trying to calculate with what fear a person has met. For example, the reluctance to leave the house can be caused by the fear of death and confrontation with meaninglessness. The most important thing to see is the reaction to the leading questions. Any reaction means you are close to your goal. And since there are only four existences, it is almost impossible to make a mistake:
int diagnoz () {(for (int i = 0; i <4; i ++) {if (detect_reactia_existent (i)) return i;})}.
It must be understood that the detection of a reaction is a function (skill) that is honed over time. Microcallibration skills are needed: dilated pupils, faster breathing, the appearance of small ticks, and so on.
But if you once learned to look for bugs in your code, then believe me - you can learn how to microcalibrate. At this stage, you are testing the code of unconscious, plus conscious performances, values and beliefs. By and large, you have an error behavior on the output, which is triggered by an internal bug. A bug can be triggered in an existential model only by the fear of a collision with one of four existences.
At this stage you should give a person a chance to comprehend his problem. Pull her to the light and the depths of the unconscious, denial. The goal is that he can tell himself what the problem is. One word is enough. Indeed, sometimes it is too lazy to be reduced to the fact that a person sabotages his growing up, since “Adults are dying”, and in this way he can live forever. Sometimes laziness is the fear of death. And it is important that a person can face his death. After all, life is exactly that and gorgeous, that it is small and it is finite. The most valuable is always small, and it can only therefore be valuable.
At this stage, an implicit collision with existence must become an obvious experience, so that a person can have a chance to fight back. We can fight / accept only what we see in front of us. A person should have a choice.
This time, in the place where the undocumented error had previously popped up - the red table with the error number would now pop up. And in order to fix this outrage, you can contact the developer. The person will have time to look at this error. Maybe laziness for him is not such a big problem as long as the illusion of eternity exists. At such a moment, your task is to subtly troll: "Some of us live as if they will never die, but they die, as if they never lived."
What you always do, for example, on the pages of mysql support, so that they quickly fix the bug with auto-increment inside the stored procedure. Your task is not to let the problem go back to the unconscious. Let her forever flash before your eyes. The person must wake up the wine to himself (existential wine) for the fact that the problem has not yet been solved. It should hang in the top of the unsolved problems. The main thing is not to push, but to remind. And to remind in different ways and in different ways, so that there is no desire to “just turn off the alarm clock”.
This is the stage of direct confrontation of a person with his fear. He should be able to see behind him, those buns and livers that he will receive as a result.
You must help him see what it means to live without the fear of death. To understand that death is the apogee of life, its culmination. Death is where the river of life leads us. And living all your life thinking about death is as if you are every day of a vacation, instead of relaxing, grieving that your vacation will ever end.
To understand that freedom is primarily a responsibility, and by accepting responsibility, we receive freedom. And fleeing from responsibility, we give it along with our freedom to someone’s hands. And we become slaves. And we must give someone else's responsibility back to its owners. And only then will the opportunity to breathe freely ... really freely.
Insulation. Yes, the man is alone, he is just so free that he is the only one. And it is impossible to merge with anyone enough to lose yourself. Insulation is first and foremost an opportunity to realize yourself, to separate and love. And how can you hope that someone will love you, even if you can't be alone with you? Gosh, you should be a nice companion.
Senselessness. The scourge of our time. With meaninglessness is not so simple. May and Yalom insist that there is meaning in human life, and that a person without a meaning of existence quickly falls into despondency and depression. The meaning of life is that BUSINESS (read hobbies, work, addiction), which a person chooses for himself (the Work of Life - every word with a capital letter). In order for his life to be meaningful - a person must merge with his work, become a master of his craft, a creator. Only then the problem of meaning for the individual disappears.
Sartre and Heideger, however, say that there is no “Meaning of Life”. And by and large it is very good. After all, a person can then choose for himself any one he likes.
You must incline the person to refactor the code of the unconscious. To deep changes in values. Maybe even porting the application to another operating system. If he makes this decision, then you should be near this whole process. Someone should help him catch new bugs. And yes ... you will be testing.
Initially, new pieces of code (beliefs, values) will be perceived as black boxes, introjects, alien entities within our Self. They will conflict with the established order. It takes time for our I to digest everything. Divided everything into small components and figured out how it all works. And recreated these functions again without your participation. At this stage, possible attacks of psychological "vomiting". Due to the large number of internal conflicts, all new convictions can simply be rejected and discarded at one moment. And your presence causes nausea and irritation.
At the very beginning, when you start refactoring and stumble upon a huge pile of unforeseen problems and work, you often have a desire to return everything as it was. And this redone / unfinished version to erase and forget that it once existed.
Your goal is to give a person a "smect". The support that will help him to digest everything himself. It's all quite individual. But just support him humanly. At this stage, clever and direct is not worth it, just hold out your hand.
Let's go back to my story. I was able to help my wife, myself, my mother, my friends, and eventually even a certain number of complete strangers. Probably, in psychotherapy, I remained a bydlokoder, as in programming as a whole. But I feel that crutch programming is my calling. This is what has become the meaning of my life - to put crutches in order to enable fractures to grow together.
In this brief essay, I will write about how programming skills gave me the opportunity to help my loved ones get out of deep depression, while others live a social life despite paranoid schizophrenia.
A little about me. My life was made by one book, which was somehow given to me on my tenth or eleventh birthday. It was a wonderful comic released by the Latvians - “How Petya Beysikov taught Tony Soobrakalin to programming”.
')
Maybe there are people who have somehow come across it? But she plunged me into the incredible world of algorithms, block schemes. I still remember how they were drawn in history lessons on the last pages of the notebook. From the block diagram of "How to make a hamster" to "how to get acquainted with a girl." Then there was Basic, Pascal, Cobol, Prolog, Delphi, C ++ Builder, PHP. With some of them I had a nodding acquaintance, others even maintained my bydlokoding, and with some it did not work out at all.
I can hardly be called somehow, except bydlokoder. Yes, I have projects, they bring money. They are not one and not two. Alive and healthy for more than 6-7 years. I did not bother to refactor myself (well, almost), put crutches and worked quickly. Looking back, I'm not at all ashamed, although those guys who work under my command now happen to be grumbling. Now I am in charge of the department of programmers of a fairly large company, and I also have a small online business that is dripping.
In my education, I stopped somewhere at the level of procedural programming and somehow did not go any further. OOP is used more as a decorative chip. But the flowcharts from that first book were hard-pressed into my young brains. And even now it happens, I’m drawing them in the process of thinking about a new project. And probably this skill played the main role in the main drama of my life.
My mother was a teacher at the university in the wild nineties. It was one of the first private institutions of higher education in our small republic. And since then, only those who had their money paid money, and then very strange people had money. My mother came under pressure: "We pay - it means we are the boss here." The story was terrible: the students intimidated and harassed her, and in the end she became downtrodden and quiet. I often heard her cry. I saw a control, in which it was written in pencil: "... and so that everything is good with you just put the top ten (we have a ten-point system), and then erase what is written in pencil ..." She began to be afraid to leave the house. Father got cold and did not support her then. And her quiet depression, meanwhile, was degraded into paranoia and two years later into schizophrenia with auditory and visual hallucinations. Exacerbations with hospitalization - twice a year - autumn and spring. I experienced a wild shock when I realized: “Everything. Nothing more can be done. Schizophrenia is not treated. This man will not be returned. ”
With great resistance, we began to take a new mother. The way it is. And try to love her, not the ghost that was left in the past.
It took about nine years. Life began to get better and better - I had a small freelance desk, my beloved wife. We just got married a year. And then - my first bad business project. Began to share the skin of a not dead bear with the co-founders. Laziness, hope at random and immeasurably grown ChSV have done their dirty deed. The result - twelve thousand euros of personal debt at interest. It should be understood that at that time our other family incomes did not exceed $ 400 per month. It was like a bat hitting the solar plexus. The spirit and the ground from under my feet completely knocked me out. Everything started to crash around. Sand castles were scattered and friends and relatives dissolved. And only his wife stayed close.
I was able to return the money within two years. Probably only thanks to the support of his wife. And at that moment when I wanted to shout:
-URAAAAA! Slavery is over. You can begin to live. I noticed that my wife was quiet and somehow stopped leaving the house. Increasingly began to occur tantrums, which always ended in tears. It was getting harder for us to meet someone. And the shadow of the past hung over my family again. But this time I did not want to give up. I didn’t want my loved one to become a zombie-stuffed tranquilizer. Because of my cowardice, I did not want to lose the shine of her eyes and her laugh. And then the preservation of my family became the most important project in my life.
At that moment, I had a couple of NLP (Practitioner and Master) courses and a bit of Ericksonian hypnosis behind my back, which provided some basic tools for working with the unconscious. In any case, I could bring a light trance and lead me. For what and how I needed it - a topic for a completely different post. By that moment, I felt like a monkey with a bunch of tools in my hands and felt the depth of my ignorance.
But when did this ignorance bother me? By that moment I was already experienced. And in programming, I often and successfully overcome such obstacles with the help of search, perseverance and intuition. And I decided to use my “intuition” in this case. Since the “model of the world” was desperately lacking, I accepted the existential model of psychotherapy, as I adore existentialists in principle, and always read Sartre and Heidegger with pleasure.
It should be understood that in psychotherapy, each model of the world sets its own rules of the game. For example, Jungians explain everything through archetypes, "Gestalt" - through "here and now", behaviorists - through behavioral patterns, humanists - through the integrity of a person and his desire for personal growth. And when you accept a certain model of the world, you automatically accept the rules of the game of the world where this model operates. (Hmm, of course I simplified everything to disgrace and for a better understanding.)
All this reminded me of the languages and programming environments with which I had to deal. If you learn the rules, you can stick my flowcharts everywhere, the ones I learned from the first book on programming. So for me, existential psychotherapy turned out to be a simple (only new) programming environment with simple adequate and very clear rules.
There are four basic existences (a unique human experience): Responsibility-Freedom, Isolation, Death, and Meaninglessness. And each neurosis appears at the junction of a collision with one of the existences.
The algorithm is simple:
Step 1. Diagnosis
With the help of ordinary logical induction, and sometimes by the method of elimination, we are trying to calculate with what fear a person has met. For example, the reluctance to leave the house can be caused by the fear of death and confrontation with meaninglessness. The most important thing to see is the reaction to the leading questions. Any reaction means you are close to your goal. And since there are only four existences, it is almost impossible to make a mistake:
int diagnoz () {(for (int i = 0; i <4; i ++) {if (detect_reactia_existent (i)) return i;})}.
It must be understood that the detection of a reaction is a function (skill) that is honed over time. Microcallibration skills are needed: dilated pupils, faster breathing, the appearance of small ticks, and so on.
But if you once learned to look for bugs in your code, then believe me - you can learn how to microcalibrate. At this stage, you are testing the code of unconscious, plus conscious performances, values and beliefs. By and large, you have an error behavior on the output, which is triggered by an internal bug. A bug can be triggered in an existential model only by the fear of a collision with one of four existences.
Step 2. Understanding
At this stage you should give a person a chance to comprehend his problem. Pull her to the light and the depths of the unconscious, denial. The goal is that he can tell himself what the problem is. One word is enough. Indeed, sometimes it is too lazy to be reduced to the fact that a person sabotages his growing up, since “Adults are dying”, and in this way he can live forever. Sometimes laziness is the fear of death. And it is important that a person can face his death. After all, life is exactly that and gorgeous, that it is small and it is finite. The most valuable is always small, and it can only therefore be valuable.
At this stage, an implicit collision with existence must become an obvious experience, so that a person can have a chance to fight back. We can fight / accept only what we see in front of us. A person should have a choice.
This time, in the place where the undocumented error had previously popped up - the red table with the error number would now pop up. And in order to fix this outrage, you can contact the developer. The person will have time to look at this error. Maybe laziness for him is not such a big problem as long as the illusion of eternity exists. At such a moment, your task is to subtly troll: "Some of us live as if they will never die, but they die, as if they never lived."
What you always do, for example, on the pages of mysql support, so that they quickly fix the bug with auto-increment inside the stored procedure. Your task is not to let the problem go back to the unconscious. Let her forever flash before your eyes. The person must wake up the wine to himself (existential wine) for the fact that the problem has not yet been solved. It should hang in the top of the unsolved problems. The main thing is not to push, but to remind. And to remind in different ways and in different ways, so that there is no desire to “just turn off the alarm clock”.
Step3. Acceptance (Absorption)
This is the stage of direct confrontation of a person with his fear. He should be able to see behind him, those buns and livers that he will receive as a result.
You must help him see what it means to live without the fear of death. To understand that death is the apogee of life, its culmination. Death is where the river of life leads us. And living all your life thinking about death is as if you are every day of a vacation, instead of relaxing, grieving that your vacation will ever end.
To understand that freedom is primarily a responsibility, and by accepting responsibility, we receive freedom. And fleeing from responsibility, we give it along with our freedom to someone’s hands. And we become slaves. And we must give someone else's responsibility back to its owners. And only then will the opportunity to breathe freely ... really freely.
Insulation. Yes, the man is alone, he is just so free that he is the only one. And it is impossible to merge with anyone enough to lose yourself. Insulation is first and foremost an opportunity to realize yourself, to separate and love. And how can you hope that someone will love you, even if you can't be alone with you? Gosh, you should be a nice companion.
Senselessness. The scourge of our time. With meaninglessness is not so simple. May and Yalom insist that there is meaning in human life, and that a person without a meaning of existence quickly falls into despondency and depression. The meaning of life is that BUSINESS (read hobbies, work, addiction), which a person chooses for himself (the Work of Life - every word with a capital letter). In order for his life to be meaningful - a person must merge with his work, become a master of his craft, a creator. Only then the problem of meaning for the individual disappears.
Sartre and Heideger, however, say that there is no “Meaning of Life”. And by and large it is very good. After all, a person can then choose for himself any one he likes.
You must incline the person to refactor the code of the unconscious. To deep changes in values. Maybe even porting the application to another operating system. If he makes this decision, then you should be near this whole process. Someone should help him catch new bugs. And yes ... you will be testing.
Step4. Integration (Digestion) -New patterns of behavior
Initially, new pieces of code (beliefs, values) will be perceived as black boxes, introjects, alien entities within our Self. They will conflict with the established order. It takes time for our I to digest everything. Divided everything into small components and figured out how it all works. And recreated these functions again without your participation. At this stage, possible attacks of psychological "vomiting". Due to the large number of internal conflicts, all new convictions can simply be rejected and discarded at one moment. And your presence causes nausea and irritation.
At the very beginning, when you start refactoring and stumble upon a huge pile of unforeseen problems and work, you often have a desire to return everything as it was. And this redone / unfinished version to erase and forget that it once existed.
Your goal is to give a person a "smect". The support that will help him to digest everything himself. It's all quite individual. But just support him humanly. At this stage, clever and direct is not worth it, just hold out your hand.
Let's go back to my story. I was able to help my wife, myself, my mother, my friends, and eventually even a certain number of complete strangers. Probably, in psychotherapy, I remained a bydlokoder, as in programming as a whole. But I feel that crutch programming is my calling. This is what has become the meaning of my life - to put crutches in order to enable fractures to grow together.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/201678/
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