Facebook has broken ads all the time… for example, the following ad is clearly broken:

I took a few minutes to fix it:

Come one, come all to my apartment for a Thanksgiving feast! If you’re a FDRer living in Denver, come on by

[edit] nvmd

I was getting a slow but steady trickle of spam account signups to this blog and one day I looked around and discovered SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam.

It has lots of options but I primarily only use the CAPTCHA on the registration page… and I have not had any spam accounts sign up since!

I have so many thoughts and feelings about this day…

There is sadness for the countless GLBT people out there who must hide their identity for fear of punishment by others.

There is anger towards those who drive certain poor souls to suicide.

There is annoyance about there being a “day” for something like this. It seems that every cause has to have a “day,” and I recognize the need for people to change their minds about this… but whose mind has ever been changed by a day of observance?

You know how this all will change?

Reject bigotry in others.

Don’t associate with people who nurture those intolerances.

If you care about your relationship with them, then challenge them, try to help them if you can, but also remember that life is short and bigotry is not a position to be argued out of.

It is a sign of deep damage, an irrationality lodged deep within their history that only a lot of hard work on their part can dislodge.

The alcoholic all too often doesn’t stop until he hits rock bottom… so too must go the way of the bigot.

Show some compassion by having the courage to face up to the rotten people in your life.

I wrote a comment in response to Anger makes the world seem more threatening on PsychologyToday.com:

Anger? What About Rage?

One thing I notice about most popular articles on anger is that they fail to differentiate between anger and rage and often classify anger as an entirely negative emotion.

Anger is necessary and healthy–it’s part of our social immune system as it enables us to detect bad people in our lives. Rage, however, occurs when anger is not allowed its natural expression, which may be fight or flight. The purpose of anger is to alert us to danger and allow us to escape. How can this possibly be a bad thing?

Too often, rage is inflicted on children by their parents, teachers, and peers. These children then grow up unable to consciously differentiate from present threats in order to survive… and I feel that this is tremendously widespread and not relegated to a few isolated incidents.

I don’t necessarily doubt the results of this study, but I wonder if they controlled for people who have received therapy for traumatic childhoods or have gone through anger management training to see how their response differs–if at all–from your average Joe. I think that would be a much more enlightening approach.

The following is entirely my own opinion–however, I do believe I am correct in my opinion.

Looking for a therapist is a difficult thing. You’re looking for somebody that you can build a trust relationship with that can help you with your most difficult struggles, your most embedded thoughts, and your deepest feelings.

Knowing who to trust is really difficult if you have a history of being subject to untrustworthy people and have not been taught how to deal with such individuals.

One of the things I have noticed with some people on my facebook friends list is that they give Reasons X/Y/Z why they do not start looking for a therapist, and then say that self-therapy is the way to go.

For me, there is a considerable gap in their credibility.

The gap comes from a combination of my own experience with therapy and what I’ve observed about these people.

Throughout my adult life, I have spent considerable time and resources in therapy, looking for the right combination. All told, I have seen 6 therapists prior to finding my current therapist. They weren’t all entirely bad, but they were all more or less not very helpful in my goal of seeking healing and self-knowledge. The first 3 were sought out in my 20s and I ended up spending a lot more time and money with them before figuring out that they were not helping me (my family was also a tremendous impediment to self-knowledge). For the latter 3, I had access to FDR and was able to spend less time and resources on them because I had been doing some work on my own and had gained a little in the way of self-knowledge… but I still needed a good therapist, even after two and a half years of being around FDR.

From my own experience in therapy (almost at 10 months as of the time of this writing), I have experienced tremendous growth and am incredibly more relaxed and free to pursue my own life goals with the burdens of history lightened or removed. The depth of the work I am doing with my therapist, and the degree to which she is able to help me maintain presence in the sessions, is something that I just know I could never do on my own… and the main reason I know this is because I had not done this on my own.

Don’t believe my own self-reporting on my level of relaxation–ask my friends if I’m a better person to spend time around.

I believe that self-therapy ought to be a backup strategy if a professional therapist is not available… and by “not available,” I mean that you would be choosing between food and therapy, or you’re living in a country where finding a therapist in your native language is impossible, or some other extremity not covered here.

I also have absolutely no respect for the position that all therapists are corrupt, because this is simply not true. Either you have to explain how several people at FDR and elsewhere have found good therapists that they have found invaluable, or you have to admit that your standard of freedom from corruption is impossibly high.

Now, perhaps most therapists are corrupt… and this may well be true. Certainly the fact that I have spent significant time with 7 therapists throughout my adult life is a strong indicator of this fact, but I would hesitate to apply “corrupt” to every single one of them.

It so happens that I agree with Daniel Mackler on the point that many (if not most) therapists have unresolved issues from their own histories, but this is far from a reason to not seek out a therapist. I experienced this with 2 of the last 3 therapists that I saw prior to this one, and while it sucked, I got back on the horse eventually and found a good one.

Regarding religion and politics, the best therapist is one for which these things don’t matter. I don’t know what my therapist believes or how she votes (though I can take some educated guesses on these points), but the moral principles within the session are universal, logic and empiricism rule the day, and the art of the relationship is entirely open for exploration and discovery.

Be on the watch for absolute language which condemns everyone.

My particular absolutism was that any therapist I went to would reject me out of hand. The result of this was that I rejected all therapists out-of-hand… putting the onus on others for something I am doing myself is projection.

This is still something I struggle with, but I bring it up with my therapist, because it is a part of me that is self-rejecting, or is rejecting another part of me.

To sum up, my opinion on self-therapy is that it is a backup strategy to be employed if you are in an extremity where there are simply no other options. It is not to be relied upon as a primary strategy if you have not already spent time in therapy.

The effectiveness of self-therapy is severely limited until you have gained enough self-knowledge.

Today I attended my first-ever filming! I’ve been around cameras before, but more on the crew side of things (it was for an amateur wrestling league in northern New Jersey).

I was an extra–I almost had a line, too, but i didn’t quite speak up when I could have and thus lost the hustle… next time, I don’t think I will let that slip away from me.

More to come, watch this space (if you’re into that sort of thing ).