Challenging my first Negative Automatic Thought

I was reading something on the way to the tube this morning. It didn’t contain reference to anything particularly misogynistic, homophobic, racist, anything that took the piss out of disabled people, people who aren’t middle class (or whatever), people who may not be conventionally attractive…

It just reminded me how big the world is. How there’s so much to consider. And my heart sank. So my Negative Automatic Thought (NAT – something I have been told I should recognise in my CBT) was, “I can’t deal with all of this – there’s too much.”

I feel like to change the world (see previous post) I need to understand human nature perfectly. But how can I do that? I mentioned before that thinking about free will gives me a headache, and I avoid it as much as possible. The thing is, now I feel like I can’t continue to avoid it – I need to work it out.

Of course I don’t need to know everything. Things like free will, and everything else, aren’t known. In particular, still nobody knows, really, whether or not women are biologically different to men, or whether it is socially conditioned. Women still won the vote, we still have the legal right to the same pay for the same work.

CBT

Well, I had my second session on the CBT thing today. It was quite good, I think. There were goals to be set and such things.

One of the things that I sort of worked out is that I get low mood-y when I get pissed off about the state of the world. I do think there’s more to it than that, obviously. But I’m beginning to agree with what my mum said – maybe getting angry about the state of things is bad for me. I don’t think it necessarily is, though, but I think it’s related. What’s happening is that I am at a point where I’m feeling like there’s no hope. So then I get depressed.

I was pretty worried that the result of the CBT would be that I wouldn’t be allowed to campaign on things, wouldn’t be allowed to read the paper, wouldn’t be able to just be aware of everything that is going on. However, one of the goals I set is that four times out of five (I think – something like that) to talk to someone about/write about what in particular is upsetting me about it. I think it would be good if I was able to do this. The other day I was reading something or other about rape, and I was at work, and I was totally unable to do any work after that. I just sat at my desk in tears. Writing it down would hopefully help me to put it behind me, or, even better, work out something that can be done to improve it, write all that down, and then put it behind me.

Another thing I want to do, more generally, is read about people who have made a difference. I want to be one of them, one day. I couldn’t be if I was told not to campaign on things because it depresses me. So I really hope this works better.

So much to be done…

In this country we have got so much in the last century (or so). Pretty much everyone (I think excluding people in prison) has the right to vote. But how well is that actually working? Obviously better than in some countries (Burma and Zimbabwe, off the top of my head), but it’s still not all that democratic.

We have the NHS, which gives pretty much everyone in the country access to a minimum level of healthcare, regardless of ability to pay. The NHS provides a brilliant service, but it’s still not enough. People still have to wait too long for some treatments, or won’t get it if they have to live in the wrong part of the country. And don’t get me started on mental healthcare – it’s shit. But the whole thing is still better than I guess what most people in the world have access to.

We have free education for pretty much everyone up to the age of 19. But so many people are still leaving school not being able to read or do basic maths. Teachers are overworked and underpaid, pupils are overtested, a lot of people with special needs just aren’t given the support they need. But still, most of the time, it works well enough – we are really lucky in that respect.

We have a welfare state. To be honest, I come from a pretty middle class home, so I don’t really have any experience of that. But the welfare state exists – children who need it are given free school meals, for one thing. It’s not so good for asylum seekers, though, who live on around 70% of what British nationals on income support get (got my figures for that from the Newsround website). And there are other people in this country who are just missed out (a lot of homeless people, for instance). The thing is though, in other places people die because they can’t get clean water, homes are torn apart by war, children are forced to work because the family can’t afford for them not to.

Women in the UK legally can’t be discriminated against when they are applying for a job, they should get paid the same as men, there are services for women leaving domestic violence, they have (some) access to abortion. But still, two women a week are killed by partners or ex-partners, one in twenty women will be raped, one in four will experience domestic violence, the rape conviction rape is still around 5%. But does that even compare to female genital mutilation, foot binding, honour killings?

There’s so much more I could go into, but I won’t. The thing is, though, I don’t see how this is ever going to change. How are we going to improve things, either in the UK or throughout the world? There’s so much that needs to be done, but how can anyone even begin to do it.

I used to say that even if you can help one person, help empower one victim or rape, or a racist attack, that’s something. But is it? In some ways we seem to be doing ok here; in other ways, we’re really not – Boris Johnson is Mayor of London, the London Assembly has a BNP member, for Christ sakes! I am now allowed to fall in love with another woman, we can get a civil partnership, get IVF and have a child, but a registrar has been allowed to refuse to perform that ceremony on the basis of her religion. A right that was one for women over 40 years ago – abortion, has been threatened massively recently. We won, in the end, but there’ll probably be a Tory government in next.

I’m really terrified of what’s going to happen next – but the thing is, I’ve given up believing it can change. I used to think of these things and get angry, now I just get depressed. The thought of people changing all this stuff was the only thing that kept me going – but I just don’t feel like that’s going to happen.