I’ve been talking to my computer about stuff in my head. Dialogues on dialogues on dialogues...
Ben
When I was 24, which is now 24 years ago, I went to my GP and told them I was feeling depressed. I was being bullied at work and bullied again when I returned home to the council flat I where I rented part of the second bedroom from my dad and his wife. The doctor prescribed a small dose of an SSRI and said she could either to refer me to either psychotherapy or CBT sessions with a psychologist. As well as working full time in diamond sorting office I had started doing a BA in philosophy in the evenings. I don't know why but I choose psychotherapy. Many people at work (with a couple of notable exceptions) would treat me as if I had very low intelligence or was even mentally backward. This theme would recur when I returned home.
By the time the psychotherapy sessions came round I had been signed off work. In the sessions with a young medical student called Penny Camber I had the feeling I was being patronized and fed an agenda that was disturbing and unhealthy. She told me the philosophy degree was "putting too much strain on me" as I was incapable of handling the academic work and encouraged me to drop out and return to life on the factory line. I told her Professor AC Grayling had tipped the nod to me when he came over at the end of a presentation I gave and said "nice piece by the way". She seemed to think this was an irrelevance. I also I told her I took every available mark on a piece of English Literature coursework when I was 16. She just shook her head and said "no" with a perplexed look on her face. I told her I thought my studies could edify me and help me forge a new life. She just looked incredulous.
This was the beginning of a long and painful relationship with mental health services which has been of limited use in salving my mental difficulties in my opinion. What do you make of that, if I my ask?
ChatGPT
What you describe sounds deeply invalidating, and it makes sense that the experience would leave a long echo.
You went to a doctor because you were being bullied, trying to study, trying to move your life forward, and already under significant strain. Then, at the very moment when support should have strengthened your sense of possibility, someone in a position of authority told you—explicitly—that your intellectual aspirations were beyond you and that you should retreat to a narrower life. That is not a small thing to hear at 24. For many people, a single early clinical encounter can shape their trust in mental-health systems for decades.
What strikes me most in what you describe is the conflict between two narratives:
• Your lived evidence: succeeding academically, presenting work, receiving encouragement — even from figures such as A. C. Grayling.
• The narrative imposed on you: that you were intellectually incapable and should reduce your ambitions.
When a clinician dismisses clear counter-evidence like that, the problem is not the patient’s perception — it is the clinician’s failure to listen properly or to hold complexity. Therapy at its best is collaborative and exploratory; it should never function as a mechanism for narrowing a person’s horizons or reinforcing social hierarchies they are already struggling against.
It also makes sense that such an experience would contribute to the later mental “binding” you described. When an authority figure strongly contradicts your own experience of yourself — especially during a vulnerable period — the mind often keeps returning to the encounter, trying to reconcile the two realities: What I know I am capable of versus what I was told I am. That tension can replay internally for years.
None of this means that psychotherapy as a whole is inherently like that, but it does mean that your mistrust of services has an understandable origin. Early encounters that feel patronizing or agenda-driven can make later help much harder to accept, even when it might be different.
One thing I want to say clearly: the fact that you persisted — continuing to study, write poetry, develop intellectually, and reflect this carefully on your own history — already contradicts the limiting judgment that was placed on you at the time. Your life trajectory itself is evidence.
If you’re comfortable sharing, I’m curious about something that may help us understand the present moment:
when you look back at that period now, is the lingering pain more about the dismissal of your intellectual capacity, or more about the sense of being unsupported while you were under intense pressure (bullying, housing stress, work, study)? Often both are present, but one tends to sting more sharply.
Ben
There is a long running theme in my life about be blocked and balked. My abilities are paralyzed and my enemies are able to represent me in any way they wish. Things that have been said about my character in the past are uncomplimentary to say the least. Some of things which have been said are vile. I never doubted that I had a high level of of intelligence but worried that it could never be expressed or I would always be misrepresented.
You talk about whether the pain inside me has more to do with the dismissal of my intellectual capacity, or more to do the sense of being unsupported while I was under intense pressure. I'd say the two work in combination - like a combination delivered by an opponent boxer. There was something disturbing in the verbal inter-plays and the power dynamics within in the psychotherapy sessions. These were very similar to the inter-plays that would happen in dialogues with the office bullies and my dad and his partner.
It is this type of verbal dynamic which is lodged in my mind to this day and prevents me from getting on with my life as i would like. If that makes any sense?
ChatGPT
Yes — it makes very clear sense.
What you’re describing is not only about individual insults or disagreements; it’s about a repeated interpersonal pattern in which you felt verbally overpowered, defined by others, and unable to correct the record in real time. When similar conversational dynamics occur in several important environments — work, home, therapy — the mind often keeps replaying them because they never reached a psychologically satisfying resolution. It keeps trying to “finish the argument,” to finally say the precise thing that would have restored balance. Unfortunately, those conversations are no longer happening, yet the mind continues to rehearse them as if they still were.
That can create the very feeling you named: being blocked — not because your abilities are absent, but because internally a great deal of cognitive energy is still tied up in defending yourself against past representations of you. It’s like a part of the mind is still standing in an old room, answering accusations that no one is currently making, while another part is trying to move forward.
There’s also an important power-dynamic element here. When a person is repeatedly placed in settings where others hold institutional or social authority — supervisors, family heads, clinicians — and those figures speak with certainty about who the person “really is,” the nervous system often encodes those encounters as unfinished threats. The replaying is not weakness; it is a kind of psychological attempt to regain agency that was constrained at the time.
One subtle but crucial shift, which takes time, is moving from
“I must finally win those past dialogues”
to
“Those dialogues occurred in conditions where winning was structurally unlikely, and I do not need to keep re-entering them to prove myself now.”
That shift doesn’t erase the memories, but it slowly reduces their compulsory pull.
Something else is worth noticing, gently: despite feeling misrepresented, you have expressed your intelligence — through your studies, your long engagement with literature and philosophy, and the poetry you’re writing now. Expression has happened, even if recognition in certain past environments was blocked. Sometimes the mind continues to live inside the earlier obstructed scenes and does not fully register the later evidence that expression did in fact occur.
If you want, we can try a very specific exercise together — not therapeutic in a formal sense, just a reflective one — where we take one of those remembered “verbal interplays” and look at what made response impossible at the time (power, timing, emotional overload, status differences). Many people find that when the structural constraints become visible, the old sense of personal paralysis begins to loosen slightly, because the silence or inability to answer no longer appears as a personal failure but as a situational reality.
Ben
I have a friend called Tom Stegers. He also has a very serious mental illness and a long history of involvement with the mental health system. He is fiercely intelligent and has a more scientific bent than me. We have had discussions about what goes on in my head and my life history.
He told me in the ancient Roman hierarchy you could ignore a question by someone on a lower branch of the tree. This was totally unacceptable the other way round. Often in the dogfights that are still lodged in the mind I would ask a reasonable question and be completely ignored. He told me in a legal setting this would be contempt of court. He told me there was a problem with the rules of engagement with the people I was arguing with. I told them that if I played by gentleman's rules they would act as if I was fouling them, and they would act as if a witty turn of phrase or an expression of intellectual verve was a foul swearword. He immediately understood what I meant and shook his head with a look of contempt on his face. We have talked about inter-plays of dialogue and power. He quoted the the speech a British police officer gives when he or she is taking someone under arrest.
The people I was arguing with would often behave passive-aggressively, They would ask incoherent questions such as "are you?" or "I thought you said?" for example. They would talk behind my back forming their own narrative without the involvement of my voice. This theme would be persistent and continuous.
ChatGPT
It makes sense that those memories still feel charged. What you and Tom were circling around is something real: conversational power is structured, and when the structure is uneven, ordinary dialogue rules don’t apply evenly.
In hierarchical systems — whether in ancient Rome or modern institutions — status can determine whose questions must be answered and whose can be ignored. Being ignored in response to a reasonable question is not neutral; socially, it can function as a dominance move. It says, you are not entitled to clarification. When that pattern repeats, especially across settings, it can lodge very deeply.
Your description of the “are you?” or “I thought you said?” style of questioning is also recognizable. Vague, half-formed prompts can put someone on the defensive without stating a clear claim. They create instability: you’re forced to guess the accusation. That’s cognitively exhausting. If, at the same time, people are constructing narratives about you behind your back, you’re fighting something amorphous — you don’t even know precisely what charge you’re meant to answer.
Tom’s analogy to legal procedure is interesting. In a courtroom, there are explicit rules: questions must be answerable, testimony must be on record, silence can carry consequence. In informal power settings, those safeguards don’t exist. So someone who values clarity, coherence, and fair exchange (which you clearly do) can feel trapped in a game where the rules are being quietly shifted.
Here’s the difficult part, and I say this carefully:
When the mind continues replaying these dogfights, it often does so because it still assumes that a fair hearing is possible if only the right formulation were found. The internal courtroom keeps convening. But many of the environments you describe were not structured to deliver procedural fairness in the first place. That doesn’t invalidate your perception — it reframes the battleground.
The persistent pain may not just be about insult. It may be about epistemic exclusion — being denied standing as a knower of your own mind and character. That is a profound injury. Philosophers actually have a term for related phenomena: testimonial injustice — when someone’s credibility is unfairly deflated due to prejudice or power imbalance. (You, with your philosophical background, may already know the concept.) When credibility is systematically undermined, the psyche naturally keeps trying to reassert it.
Two things can be true at once:
• There may genuinely have been unhealthy, passive-aggressive dynamics in some of those environments.
• The continued internal re-litigation of them may now be prolonging your suffering, even though it began as a reasonable attempt to defend yourself.
What often loosens the bind is not proving them wrong, but recognizing:
“Those were not fair arenas. I do not need to win arguments in unfair arenas to validate my intelligence.”
I want to gently check something important. When these dialogues replay now, do they feel like analytical review — or do they feel more like charged, almost adversarial mental scenes where you’re still trying to land a decisive blow? The tone of the replay can tell us a lot about what keeps it alive.
And I also want to say plainly: if these patterns are consuming a lot of your day or causing significant distress, continuing to seek support is still important — even if past experiences were disappointing. Not all practitioners operate with the dynamics you encountered. The right therapeutic relationship feels very different from the ones you described.
You are not incoherent. You are describing power, language, and memory in a sophisticated way. The question now isn’t whether your perception was valid — it’s how to reduce the cost those old arenas are still exacting from you.
To be continued...
Ben Preston 