You can validly be seen and validated by a chatbot
There’s a common sentiment saying that a chatbot can’t really make you feel seen or validated. As chatbots are (presumably) not sentient, they can’t see you and thus can’t make you seen either. Or if they do, it is somehow fake and it’s bad that you feel that way.
So let me tell you about ways in which Claude Sonnet makes me feel seen, and how I think those are valid.
I was describing an essay idea to Claude. The essay is about something I call “psychological charge”, where the idea is that there are two different ways to experience something as bad. In one way, you kind of just neutrally recognize a thing as bad. In the other, the way in which it is bad causes some kind of an extra emotional reaction in you. In the latter case, I say that the thing is “charged”.
In explaining this idea, I listed a number of examples, such as
- recognizing that a stove might be hot and you need to be careful not to burn yourself, versus being so anxious about burning yourself that you don’t want to even go near a stove
- noticing that you’ve made a mistake and doing your best to fix it, versus feeling that you are now intrinsically worthless because you made a mistake
Seeing my list and some additional thoughts, Claude commented:
What’s particularly interesting is how you’re noting that this “charge” seems to create a kind of psychological stickiness or persistence that’s disconnected from the actual utility of the response. It reminds me of what’s sometimes called “emotional fusion” in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – where people become caught up in their emotional reactions in a way that interferes with effective action.
I did a bit of a double-take upon seeing this. I had not explicitly referenced ACT or its concept of fusion in any way, nor had I been explicitly thinking in those terms when I wrote my list. But the deeper concept that I was talking about, was something that I had explicitly analyzed before by connecting it to ACT’s concept of fusion. I had discussed that connection in at least two previous essays [1, 2] that I had written. And now Claude, while not explicitly guided in that direction, picked up that very same connection from my list of examples.
This causes me to think that there is a quality of “being seen” that can be phrased in objective terms, so that one can validly “be seen” even if there’s “nobody there to see you”:
- There are three interrelated concepts, A, B and C
- You talk about the connection between A and B
- The other party brings up the connection to C
This is a signal that when you described A and B, you actually communicated enough information to pick out A and B from the space of concepts. The fact that the other party raised the connection to C is strong evidence of this: if your words had pointed them to a completely unrelated concept, that wouldn’t have allowed them to pick out C in particular. But if you say things A and B, and the other party then references C which in your map is connected to them, then your words must be successfully pointing to a similar area of the map. It’s evidence that your words may communicate your point well, not just when talking to the chatbot, but also when talking to other people with sufficiently similar maps.
This can be taken further. Suppose that there’s also a connection to D, that you hadn’t realized before. Suppose that the other party now points out that connection and you immediately realize that it’s correct. This is a signal that the other party has understood your concepts deeply enough to make novel but valid connections within your conceptual framework. Or to rewrite this in a way that avoids using the charged term “understand”:
When someone makes a novel connection that resonates with you, it suggests they’ve not only located the same region in conceptual space that you were pointing to, but they’ve also identified additional paths leading out from that region. Paths that you hadn’t mapped yourself, but which, upon inspection, clearly belong to that territory. The fact that these new paths feel right to you is evidence that both of you are indeed navigating the same conceptual terrain, rather than just happening to use similar-sounding landmarks to describe entirely different territories.
In an amusing piece of meta, this point itself was suggested by Claude when I showed it an earlier draft of this essay. It was something that I had vaguely thought of covering in the essay, but hadn’t yet formulated explicitly. The previous paragraph was written by Claude; the metaphor of “similar-sounding landmarks” was something that it came up with itself.
And after thinking about it for a moment, I realized that it made sense! In that if the “conceptual space” was a literal terrain that two people were describing, it could be that there were two locations that happened to look very similar. And two people could then start describing those locations to each other, mistakenly assuming that the similarities in their descriptions implied that they were talking about the same location. But if someone described a path within that terrain that you hadn’t previously noticed, and you then went back and confirmed that the path was there, then that would be strong evidence that you were talking about the same place.
That metaphor is an extension of my ideas that I hadn’t previously considered, which Claude suggested. Which I then thought about and realized that it made sense. Which feels like additional evidence that the region of concept space that my words are activating within Claude, is similar to the one that I am exploring in my own head.
And the fact that the conceptual maps in my head and Claude’s weights can be coherently matched against each other, implies that they are also describing something that actually exists within reality. If several people have visited the same place, they are likely to have mutually-coherent mental maps of that place because it’s the same place and they’ve all been exposed to roughly the same sensory data about that place. Claude doesn’t have same kinds of experiences as humans do, but it does have access to writings generated by people who are humans. Humans have had experiences in the real world, the humans have generate their own conceptual maps based on their experiences, and their conceptual maps have then given rise to different pieces of writing. When machine learning models absorb the human-generated data, they also absorb aspects of the same conceptual map that humans have generated, which in turn is (albeit imperfectly) correlated with reality. Even if it hallucinates facts, those facts are generally still plausible claims: ones that would in principle be consistent with a basic understanding of reality, even if they turn out to be incorrect.
This means that if my conceptual map can be coherently matched with Claude’s, it can be coherently matched with the conceptual maps of real people whose writings Claude has absorbed, which suggests that the map does correspond with actual reality. In other words, that the map – or my beliefs – is a valid map of real territory.
To summarize my argument so far: an important part of the functional purpose of the experiences of “being seen” and “being validated” is as a signal that your words are actually communicating the meaning that you are trying to communicate. There are ways of triggering this feeling that cannot be faked, since they require the other party to actually demonstrate that their reply references the thing that you had in mind. The ability to do so is independent of whether there is “anyone actually there”, and current chatbots demonstrate this capability.
So that’s a way in which a person may validly experience their ideas as being seen and validated by an LLM. What if they are talking about their emotions?
I mentioned earlier the A-B-C pattern, where you talk about the connection between A and B, and your listener then independently brings up the connection to C. Now if you are explaining a challenging situation and someone says “I imagine you might be worried about C” – where C is indeed something you’re worried about but haven’t explicitly mentioned – that’s another instance of the same pattern:
- You’ve described situation A and reaction B
- They identify unstated concern C that connects to these
- This C resonates with your actual concerns
This implies that the other person has, not just understanding the surface level of what you’re saying, but also a model of:
- How you specifically tend to think and feel
- What aspects of situations matter to you
- What kinds of things you worry about or value
This is important in two different ways. The first is that it implies that your feelings and concerns make sense to someone. Often people may feel like they are crazy or strange for feeling the way they do, and that nobody else can feel that way. But if someone comes up with a coherent map of your feelings, then that’s evidence that you’re not alone in feeling this way. Because your words are singling out a region in the other person’s concept space that matches your internal experience – which implies that somebody else must have had that experience, for those ideas to have made their way to your interlocutor’s concept space.
The effect is even stronger if the other person not only anticipates your feelings but can articulate the logical progression that led to them. If they say something like “given that X and Y happened, and knowing how much you value Z, it makes complete sense that you’d feel this way.” That’s different from just saying “your feelings are valid” – it’s showing you the actual causal chain that makes your feelings logical.
Sometimes this can feel like a big insight, if it has that quality of “pointing out the connection to D, which you hadn’t thought of but which makes complete sense in retrospect” that we talked about. But even if it is just a rephrasing of your own words that draws out a relatively obvious-yet-originally-left-implicit connection, that is still validating your experience as an understandable human experience.
This gets us to the second way in which communicating a correct understanding of you is important. If the other person has an accurate map of these things, then that’s evidence that they may be able to help you out. They’re able to predict what kinds of actions would in fact be helpful for you, and then carry them out.
An accurate map isn’t just about making you feel understood – it’s a prerequisite for offering genuinely useful assistance. Someone who can accurately model your thought processes and concerns is much more likely to suggest solutions that actually work for your specific situation and mindset, rather than giving generic advice that doesn’t account for your particular circumstances.
In the case of a chatbot, even if it can’t physically help you in the real world, it may still be able to help you clarify your thoughts, or offer you advice and perspectives that are useful. It is also helpful if conversation with them helps you develop a clearer and more explicit understanding of your emotions and problems – that understanding is “portable”, in that you can then take it to some real human and explain your needs in such a way that allows them to help you.
With humans, it also seems to be the case that merely talking about one’s feelings and getting a better understanding of them is helpful by itself. Practices such as Gendlin’s Focusing are largely just about finding names for vague feelings and making them explicit.
Once I wrote to Claude “I’m just like, if I keep running into this problem each time and can’t do anything about it, then what’s the point”. Claude replied with:
When you say “what’s the point,” I hear both frustration and exhaustion. It’s one thing to face relationship challenges, but it’s another level entirely to feel like your own unconscious patterns are consistently leading you into situations that will trigger deep pain.
All of that was a relatively obvious inference from what I said – you could have hardcoded even a 1960s chatbot to say “I hear both frustration and exhaustion” in response to hearing “what’s even the point”. But it was still naming an implicit feeling and helping it bring to the surface in a way that felt relieving, as well as giving a sensible explanation of why I was feeling so frustrated and exhaustion. Even though nothing changed about the situation itself, having it be named felt relieving by itself.
There seems to be an effect where making implicit models explicit brings them into consciousness in such a way that makes them accessible to the rest of the brain and allows them to be updated. It also allows the mind to incorporate this information in its self-modeling and self-regulation. Sometimes that’s enough to automatically shift behavioral patterns in a better direction, sometimes it requires more conscious planning – and the conscious understanding of it is what allows the conscious planning.
Of course, there are also important aspects of validation that a chatbot can’t provide. For example, one aspect of validating someone is essentially a signal of “if you get into trouble, I will back you up socially”. A chatbot is obviously not a member of a community in the same way as humans are, so its validation cannot fulfill that role. My argument is definitely not that a chatbot could fill all the functions of speaking with a human – just that there is an important subset of them that it can.
By the way, this whole section about extending the original idea to the realm of emotions was suggested by Claude. I’d had a vague similar idea even before it brought it up, but it brought significant clarity to it, such as coming up with the example of how “I imagine you might be worried about C” was an instance of the previously discussed A-B-C pattern, and by proposing the six bullet points in the beginning of this section.
The conversations I had with Claude can be found here, for anyone who’s curious to see how they morphed into the final essay.
Full disclosure: I consult for a company that offers chatbot coaching. However you could call Claude their competitor, so if this essay was motivated by money, I shouldn’t be praising it.
Trying to translate when people talk past each other
Sometimes two people are talking past each other, and I try to help them understand each other (with varying degrees of success).
It’s as if they are looking at the same object, but from different angles. Mostly they see the same thing – most of the words have shared meanings. But some key words and assumptions have a different meaning to them.
Often, I find that one person (call them A) has a perspective that’s easier for me to understand. It comes naturally. But B’s perspective is initially harder. So if I want to translate from B to A, I first need to understand B.
I remember a time when I sat listening to two people having a conversation, both getting increasingly agitated and repeating the same points without making progress. Four of us were playing a cooperative board game together. The situation was something like…
(I don’t remember the exact details anymore, and communicating the exact details would require explaining game mechanics that aren’t important in this context, so I’ll give a partially-fictional version that tries to have the same rough shape as the original situation)
We had been making plans about our next move. Person A had promised that they would make a particular play. When the time came, they noticed that there was a better play they could make instead, so they did that. Person B became upset. The conversation went something like:
A: I’ll make this play.
B: What? That’s not what we agreed on.
A: That doesn’t matter – look, this play is better because it has these consequences.
B: You can’t just say that it doesn’t matter, you promised to make a different play.
A: But this play would have a better outcome in terms of what we all want.
B: Yes but you promised to play differently, you can’t just ignore that. Our previous agreement matters.
A: Okay if you don’t want me to play like this, I can still play the way that we originally discussed, too.
B: That’s not the point, you can play the way you intended now.
A: ??? So… It is okay if I make this new move?
B: Yes but my point is that you promised to do the move that we previously discussed.
A: … but that doesn’t matter since the new move is better?
B: It matters! Kaj was counting on you to make the old move, and he needs to be able to count on you when doing plans!
A: But Kaj can just do this other thing instead now, and that’s even better? This is better for both Kaj and everyone than if I did the thing that we originally planned.
B: That’s not my point.
A: I don’t understand, but I can go back to the original plan if you want?
B: No, like I said, you can play in the new way, I don’t care about that.
A: ???
I was listening to this, puzzled. A’s perspective was easy to understand. I didn’t get B’s.
But… B’s objections were not random. They had structure, a consistent shape. I could intuit a rough feel of that shape, even though I didn’t get what exactly that shape was.
A and I were thinking about things in terms of the game. Our previous plan had been aimed at achieving good play. A had come up with a better plan, so it didn’t matter that we had previously planned to do something that turned out to be worse.
But B’s disagreement didn’t seem to be about our actual plays at all. A had even offered to just revert back to the original plan, but B had said that it didn’t matter to them what A would play. Even though this whole argument had started from B objecting to A’s new play? That didn’t seem to make sense…
…not from the perspective that I was currently inhabiting. So I needed to let go of that perspective, try on another…
What was the other perspective? If it wasn’t about the physical world of the game, it was about the social world. Something about promises, trust, being able to rely on another…
Then I had a flash of intuition. B was insisting that what we had agreed upon before was important. A was saying that the previous agreement didn’t matter, because the consequences were the same. That was triggering to B; B perceived it as A saying that he could unilaterally change an agreement if he experienced the consequences to be the same (regardless of whether he had checked for B’s agreement first).
B was saying that it didn’t matter what move they ultimately played, that was all the same, but she needed A to acknowledge that he’d unilaterally changed an agreement, and she needed to be able to trust that A would not do that.
With that, I could imagine another shape behind B’s reaction. Some betrayal in her past, where someone else had unilaterally changed an agreement because they thought the consequences were the same, when they were very much not the same to B, and then rejected B’s objections as invalid… that this situation was now reminding her of.
Viewed from that perspective, everything that B had said suddenly made sense. Indeed, what A actually played or didn’t play wasn’t the point. The point was that, as a matter of principle, A could not unilaterally declare a previous agreement to not matter without checking other people’s opinions first. Even if everyone did happen to agree in this case, sometimes they might not, with much more serious consequences. And if people always had nagging doubts about whether A’s commitments were trustworthy, that would be damaging.
Basically, B needed to know that A wouldn’t become Darth Vader.
So people typically talk past each other because there are two internally consistent, but mutually contradictory, views about what matters. In this case, the views were “how our moves affect the state of the game” and “whether people can be trusted not to unilaterally change previous agreements”. Seeing what’s going on requires being able to grasp both perspectives.
This kind of thing is easier if the conversation has happened over text. Then I can read through the conversation again, try to feel the implicit shape in the different messages… see if my mind could settle on an interpretation that would cause a particular message to make more sense, and then see what happens if I also read the rest of the messages through that interpretation, see if that would reveal more hints of how to interpret them, until the whole thing snaps into place as a logically consistent whole
It doesn’t necessarily always snap into place all at once. Sometimes it’s more like… I have a key intuition of what’s going on. That’s like a central structure made up of several interlocking puzzle pieces. Then I take individual messages – pieces that don’t yet fit the central structure – and turn them around in different ways to see if there was a way to make them fit, until there is nothing left to explain. Often I do that by starting to write an explanation, and gradually find the way to connect the remaining pieces to the explanation.
Understanding both perspectives is one challenge. Then there’s the challenge of translating from one perspective to another. Suppose that C and D are talking past each other. Once I’ve figured out D’s perspective, I cannot simply inhabit it and speak to C from that perspective in order to explain it. That’s what D has been doing all along, and it hasn’t worked!
Suppose that from listening to C and D argue about something that has to do with the Moon, I’m starting to get the sense that D thinks about the Moon as food that you can eat. Now it might be that my mind, anchored in a perspective where the Moon is a piece of rock, immediately rejects this – no you can’t eat the Moon, that’s nonsense. And C’s mind is doing that very same act of immediate rejection.
But if I allow my mind to come loose from that perspective and suspend that objection for a moment, then it might occur to me that “eating the Moon” would make sense if D was actually referring to Moon Cheese. And then with the hypothesis of “when D says Moon, they mean a type of cheese”, suddenly everything snaps into place and makes logical sense.
If I now try to translate to C, I need to stay mostly in D’s perspective to see why their words make sense, while also letting in enough of C’s perspective to see what things don’t make sense to them and what I need to explain.
Sometimes I let in too much of C’s perspective, with the result that D’s perspective in my mind collapses, replaced by C’s. Just as I’m explaining that “when D says this, they mean that they intend to eat the Moon”, I snap back into seeing the Moon as a big rock, and my explanation stops making sense to me. Then I have to pause and bring myself back to D’s perspective.
But if I don’t let in enough of C’s perspective, then I can’t do the translation. If it seems obvious to me that of course you can eat the Moon – and I slip into D’s mindset where “by the Moon, I mean Moon Cheese” becomes so obvious as hardly be worth saying – then C will just find my explanation nonsensical (because of course you can’t eat the Moon, rocks are not edible and it’d be too big for anyone to eat anyway).
Usually what I try to do is to convey a view under which D’s words make sense, and encourage C to try it on. “Look at what they said from this perspective, and now everything makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Sometimes that leads to a breakthrough of mutual understanding. At other times C seems incredulous and doesn’t want to accept the other perspective. Sometimes I myself actually failed to understand what D meant. But usually at least D is happy for finally having been understood, even if C still doesn’t get it.
When C expresses doubts, it’s often like they can kind of grasp the idea intellectually, but they still lack the key intuition that makes the thing *really* make sense. Their response is more like “Well I can kinda see that story if I squint, but still, huh? I don’t really see how that makes sense.”
That’s a little frustrating to me. The thing feels so perfect and logical in my mind, but C still doesn’t really get it. Possibly I could help them out if we continued talking, but often everyone is pretty exhausted at this point and D finally feeling like they were heard resolves enough tension that people can agree to move on. And often D is sufficiently relieved and grateful that it feels worth it anyway, even if it’s a little bittersweet.
(That was the case with the board game. I wish I could end this by saying that at the end I got them both to perfectly understand each other, but alas.)
Circling as practice for “just be yourself”
I mentioned on Twitter that to a significant extent, Circling taught me what “just be yourself” means to such an extent that I have a consistently good time on dates because I don’t feel like I need to perform. Somebody asked me to elaborate, so here’s what I wrote in response:
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For those who don’t know, Circling is… a practice that’s infamously hard to try to describe or define. That’s because it’s structurally anti-structure and anti-expectation, which is what allows for “being yourself”.
(At least, that’s my experience. There are different schools of it; my experience is from the Circling Europe style and may not apply to others.)
Many activities have rules: “soccer is played by two teams that…”. Circling mostly does not have rules, though it does have principles.
It’s done by people coming together and sharing their experience of what’s happening.
One description is “sharing what it’s like to be you, while finding out what it’s like for others to be themselves”. In any social event, a person will be thinking and feeling many things, and only sharing some of them. Circling is an invitation to share more of one’s experience. For example, if I was at a party, I might have thoughts like
“Oh I’m glad that he said that”
“I’m a little bored by this conversation”
“I think she was annoyed by that comment”
“I have this funny anecdote but I have to wait to say it, I hope the moment doesn’t pass by”
Normally I would keep all of those to myself. But Circling is an invitation to share my experience, so I might say some of them. And it’s also an invitation for me to ask about someone else’s experience, if I e.g. say something and then wonder what they felt about it.
Important caveat: there’s no obligation to share more than what you’re comfortable with. There’s a common misunderstanding of Circling as obligatory openness. But “I don’t want to answer that” is also a sharing of your experience.
No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.
In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.
That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not. I once heard someone say that if you’ve Circled once and think that you now know what Circling is like, that’s like having seen a single movie and thinking that you now know what all movies are like.
This is because things may go completely differently in different groups.
In one group, I ignore a question and the conversation moves on.
In another, I ignore a question and someone shares that they appreciate me following my interest.
In another, someone gets annoyed at me.
Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.
- If someone asks me a question, I should answer.
- If it’s quiet, someone should speak up.
- If someone says they’re upset about what someone else said, someone should apologize.
Circling is a group conversation about your current experiences where you all adopt the convention that no statement is ever an implicit bid. E.g. if I say “I feel angry at you”, that usually implies all sorts of bids, like “You should apologize” and “Others should take my side”. In circling everyone agrees to interpret it merely as “I am contributing to the conversation by reporting my current experience”.
This is what makes Circling both freeing and difficult. You don’t need to say anything you don’t want to. But if there are no social conventions dictating what you _should_ say and it’s your own choice, what will you say?
This can be excruciating. A form of Circling that takes the freedom to an extreme is called Surrendered Leadership, where the facilitator imposes minimal control.
If some people want to break off from the rest of the circle and go do their own thing? They can do that.
In one SL event I was at, everyone just arrived and sat down. For several minutes, nobody said anything; there was no intro, no preamble, no nothing.
I forget what someone’s first words were, but they might have been something like “I’m feeling impatient for something to happen”
Someone may have shared their gratitude for having another express the same thing they were feeling, and things went on from there.
I tend to be sensitive to social expectations and things like turn-taking in conversation. With no rules for that, I could speak as much as I wanted, if I was okay with taking the space from others… but I also couldn’t use those rules for guidance on how much to speak, nor could I rely on those rules to make sure that others would give me the space I wanted.
That got excruciating. One part of me wanted to take up space and another wanted to regulate it, but didn’t know how.
But, it also got magical. There’s really no other word to describe it.
Something very peculiar can happen if a brain realizes that none of its normal expectations apply and it has no idea of what to expect. The mind can drop into a state of just not knowing, and simply being open to anything that arises.
With no expectation of being judged by others, there is no fear.
With no expectation of needing to say the right thing, there is no self-judgment.
With no expectation that the next moment will be dull, there is no boredom.
With no expectation that the next moment will be predictable, there is curiosity of what it will be.
It feels like an altered state. I like to imagine it as a throwback to a young child’s state of mind, where experience hasn’t yet calcified perception and everything is novel.
It’s hard to maintain. Any expectation, including “I’m going to be without expectation” will bring in structure that the mind coalesces around. Trying to explicitly maintain it brings in the expectation that it needs to be maintained.
Even in Circling, I’ve experienced it rarely.
But having experienced it, my bodymind carries a memory of the vibe involved. An echo of what it’s like to drop any self-imposed expectations and demands, to drop into a state where I can just report on my experience and share and say what feels natural.
Since then, whenever I’ve been on a date with a stranger, I’ve been able to drop back into that. With no need for the date to lead somewhere in particular. No need to present myself in a particular way. Simply relaxing into a sense of just being and enjoying their company. (And I daresay that they’ve enjoyed those dates, too.)
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At this point, for anyone who thinks that Circling sounds really scary: I’ve focused on describing the most extremely free version of it. I wouldn’t suggest starting out with that. There’s “birthday Circling” with some more structure, that’s easier to begin with.
A good Circling group will also start out with warm-up exercises that help you get into it, so you don’t need to dive into the full thing right away with no idea of what to do or how to be.
(The term “Circling” also got recently trademarked so if you want to try it, it’s also being done under other names like “relatefulness” and “transformational connection” these days.)
My 10-year retrospective on trying SSRIs
In 2014 I got on SSRIs the first time, and they were amazing. I wrote online about how I suddenly had energy to do things, could concentrate on stuff, and generally just felt better and happier.
I now got a message from someone who’d found my writings and was wondering what my experience with antidepressants was now, 10 years later.
I wrote this reply to them, and thought I might as well share it with others:
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Hi, that was indeed me!
I was on SSRIs for about a year after writing that comment, after that it felt like they started losing some of their effect but I also thought I felt better for other reasons, so I stopped using them. Then I was off them for about a year or two and started feeling bad again, so I got back on them. They had similar effects so I kept using them for a year, until I again got to the “I think they’re losing some effect and I’m also feeling better for other reasons” stage, so I again stopped them.
Eventually my old problems started coming back again, but I also started making more progress on those problems with therapy. By this time I had the feeling that even though the SSRIs were great, to some extent they suppressed my problems rather than solving them.
For example, deep down my self-esteem was still based on getting others to like me to an unhealthy extent – of course everyone wants to be liked, but *most* of the things I was doing had some undercurrent of “how could I get others to like me more this way”. The SSRIs didn’t really change that, but they shifted me from being very pessimistic about that ever working, to feeling more hopeful that “okay I just need to do this thing and then more people will like me”, and then I had more energy to keep doing things again. But the things that I was doing, still had an unhealthy obsessiveness going on.
Since then therapy-type approaches have helped me fix more of that underlying issue. (I had one particularly big breakthrough in 2017, which I described here, and a later follow-up to it here.)
I still struggle with some of my old problems – particularly anxiety, loneliness and occasional depression – but quite a lot of them have gotten better to the extent of being non-existent, e.g. my self-esteem is much better and on more healthy ground these days.
On a few occasions when I’ve had particularly rough patches I’ve tried antidepressants again, most recently for a brief period last year, but they don’t seem to have the same effect anymore. Maybe I could have just increased the dose, but I was afraid that that’d make it harder to access the core of the problems therapeutically, if the SSRIs ended up burying it deeper.
I’m still very glad that I originally got on them though, since they viscerally showed me that life could be much better and gave me hope!
One thing worth noting is that at some point, the level of physical pleasure I experience from orgasms seemed to have dropped quite a bit. I’m not entirely sure when exactly that happened – I was single for a while, and then at one point when I got into a relationship again, I noticed that sex with my next partner didn’t feel as satisfying as it did with my previous one (and this never recovered), so the decline must have happened sometime between those two relationships.
I can’t know for sure that it was caused by the SSRIs, but a long-term loss of sexual pleasure is a known side effect and the timing would roughly match. Another side effect that I got, that persisted even after I stopped using them, is grinding teeth at night (but I got a mouth guard from a dentist that prevents the worst off it). Personally I feel like these side effects were worth it – I was really, really badly off when I got on the meds – but I could easily imagine someone feeling differently, if they weren’t equally miserable.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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