Hannibal S3 Special Features Masterpost

he is on another level 🕺

steve getting grabbed by the tie 🙈

LET THEM EAT CAKE

black cat eating a whole rotisserie chicken while Mamma Mia by ABBA plays in the background

14 seconds of oscar and logan being adorable buffoons

how to pick a therapist

A friend recently asked how I found my therapist, who I absolutely adore. I was in a bad place when I first started seeing her, and she has helped me completely turn my life around. The fact is that I saw a lot of bad and mediocre therapists, then finally got lucky. That said, now that I know what a really good therapist is like, I do have some advice for finding one:

Do interview sessions with multiple therapists and take notes on what you like or don’t like. It’s not high maintenance or pushy to ask a lot of questions. You’re a customer looking for someone to provide a service - an expensive service, possibly for a long time. This is someone you will trust with your secrets and your health. Sometimes, your life.

If you’re in a dark place while searching, try to find a level-headed friend or family member to help you interview. The most frustrating thing about mental healthcare is that patients are often too vulnerable and ill to self-advocate and, as a result, often tolerate unacceptable behavior from their mental healthcare providers. Bad providers will blame patient dissatisfaction on patients being unstable. There is little accountability for their performance. If you can’t stand up for yourself, it helps to have a trusted third party that can either come with for interviews or, at the very least, who can talk with you after about your concerns and options. If a therapist asks why you want to bring someone with, simply say, “I’m not mentally able to self-advocate at this time. I am more comfortable having someone with me for support.”

Look for someone who does holistic therapy and/or who talks about using a variety of methods, depending on patient needs. Ask what types of methods they use and if they prefer one over others. A big part of therapy is teaching you a variety tools that will help you cope with stressors. You should expect your therapist to have more than one tool in their arsenal as well.

Ask their opinion on medication. I have met therapists who don’t believe in medication at all and some who won’t even work with patients that aren’t willing to medicate. Personally, I feel the only correct response is, “Medication is an important tool for some people, but it’s not the answer for everyone.”

Ask them what successful therapy looks like to them and what they think the most important things are to be successful in therapy. You want someone who talks about how different patients need different things. For some people, stability is the goal. Others have more specific objectives. The worst sort of therapist is one that uses the same structure for every patient because they’ve decided it’s the “right way.”

During interviews, you do want a therapist to mention that a patient has to be willing to change and give effort. However, you don’t want them to spend an excessive amount of time going on about how YOU have to do the work and “this won’t work if you’re not willing to give it your all” and blah, blah, blah. That is the sign of a therapist that will see therapy not working and immediately say, “Ah, not my fault. They weren’t doing the work,” absolving themselves of any extra work or creative thinking.

The final item is tricky to spot in an initial interview, but it’s crucial. Therapy requires a delicate balance. A good therapist can guide a session and push their patient without being domineering or dismissive. You can spot the domineering therapist fairly easily: they will tell more than they ask, make you feel uncomfortable or self-doubting, and will minimize your wishes or concerns about therapy. The lazy therapist is much more common. They’re not as harmful or obvious as the domineering therapist, but they probably won’t help you. They let you guide therapy, don’t ask many questions, and don’t challenge you. They will let you use therapy as a venting session or allow you to rehash the same handful of traumas without doing any work to process them in a new way. If you find yourself with a domineering or lazy therapist, fire them.

What has made my therapy successful is that my therapist is flexible, adaptable, and willing to try new things and new methods. There were periods where I was actually too ill to do any work, but she never addressed it like, “Ah, She Won’t Do The Work.” She just scheduled us for very frequent sessions and kind of quietly came up with things to keep me busy and stable, monitoring my state for safety until I reached a place where I was able to do the work.

When something didn’t work, it was never my fault, and she never spent any time lamenting that it hadn’t worked. She would just immediately say, "Okay, not this, then. I have something different planned for us to try next week.” Just like that, we were talking about what we were going to do next instead of thinking about the thing that failed.

The mental healthcare world, at least here in the US, is pretty fucked up. For a time, it was definitely doing me more harm than good, and I have trauma from my experiences with bad mental healthcare providers. I think it’s important to talk about patient self-advocacy and provider accountability. I hope the list above will help someone avoid bad providers and get the help they need. If you would signal boost this, I’d really appreciate it.

no words just Oscar piastri cursing the safety car

(miami gp 2024)

Lando telling Oscar “please stand up” ??? Lando moving to hold Oscar’s microphone before the presenter takes it ??? Lando staring at Oscar with a big smile as he accepts the award ????

They make me SICK

my moonpaw!!

an apprentice who drank the moonpool for some saving starclan prophecy reason and is now haunted by a catsonification of the moonpool. it's very new to mortal life having only previously experienced whatever the hell the medicine cats and leaders are up to and they have to learn to work to gether and kiss