My Little Entp Has Depression. She Is Not Herself And I Want Help Her. I'm Trying My Best But Is Not

My little entp has depression. She is not herself and i want help her. I'm trying my best but is not enough. Any advices?

Hi nonnie!

I’m sorry that your friend is going through this. Depression is really difficult to beat or even manage, and sometimes it just spring up on ya and it’s just meh. But while you can’t solve it for her, there are things you can do to support her. 

Maybe the first thing about dealing with a friend’s depression is understanding it completely. It’s important to know that even when your friend may be acting like she’s not listening to you, or if she seems to be pulling away, it’s not about you. She’s just trying to deal. Also, know it can’t just be fixed by someone other than the person who is depressed (which makes it so hard to beat, my god). 

So as an ENTP who has persistent depressive disorder, I have a few tips that are actually like low-key super helpful for us. 

1. Make sure your ENTP eats

I find with the low Si, depressed ENTPs quickly forgo the small things required for taking care of ourselves. For me, it was food. I high-key just didn’t eat… and it wasn’t on purpose, I just didn’t care about anything and I forgot about food. My best friend began to ask me to go grocery shopping with her and she’d go out of her way to make me remember to get foods that I like– easy snack type foods that don’t require the effort (but keep me with sustenance). Other friends literally texted me to remind me to eat, and gradually I got back into the habit of eating all of my meals on time. But just eating takes away some of the burden of being tired already from depression. 

2. Invite the ENTP to exercise too

This take time because exercising literally isn’t fun (lol don’t @ me), but it’s good for you, and a great habit to get into to release those stress-reducing chemicals. Health health health hELPS. It really does. 

3. Be open to listening or even talking. 

So this depends on the person, but I found that for me, it realllllly helped me to talk about depression with people who had it before– I only learned this after a few months of therapy (which it’s hard to get to that point in the first place), but after therapy, whenever someone wanted to discuss depression, or its effects, knowing that you’re not the only one, and being able to share it with someone really helps. ENTPs really struggle with knowing what they’re feeling, and comprehending it, so the discussion kind of allows us (or at least it allowed me) to begin to process the problems that I was facing. 

4. Just be there!

This ties into literally all of them. But I have friends that randomly kept me in mind and invited me to random things, and it really helped to get me out of my head. There are up days and down days despite friends being around, and it’s hard to predict each day. But health is the first step because it helps sO much, and having a network of people around who she can trust is also wonderful. 

I really hope that your friend feels better, and she’s lucky to have you! Best of luck to you both. xx

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The “only have sex with people you are attracted to” discourse may be a reaction against women and teen girls (often lesbians in denial) being coerced into sex with people/men they didn’t want to have sex with, with their rapists not respecting “I’m not attracted to you” as a reason to refuse. So the logic is that if it’s a thing to have sex with people you’re not attracted to, that will be used as a weapon in lgbtq spaces to coerce/rape even more young women. Do you have thoughts on this?

Wanting to have sex with someone doesn’t require enthusiasm or attraction, but it does require want.

It’s up to the individual to decide if the desire to have sex with another person is rooted in expectations from others, or for personal interest.

I’ve had a lot of sex most of it wanted, some of it emphatically not, and some of it falling into an uncomfortable grey area.

I’m going to give examples of some of my sexual encounters, because humans are exceptional pattern matchers, and this is a very difficult and complex concept to express verbally. Usually it would be the kind of thing you learn from experience, first or second hand. So, here’s some experiences, second hand.

As an example of “enthusiastic consent,” there was a man I knew in college, let’s call him Kismet. Kismet and I had a very fraught relationship. We never dated, and in fact were rivals in our software development department. We had more shouting matches than not, about what constitutes meaningful fucking technical comments, primarily.

We also had a lot of extremely aggressive sex. We both looked forward to it at the end of long projects, and as I was something of a slut at the time, I enjoyed flirting shamelessly with pretty boys and girls in front of him as foreplay. When we fucked, it was with extreme desire on both our parts. We were hot college kids with a lot of emotions and shit. It was everything your entry level consent education courses say it should be: freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, explicit, specific.

I would consider that the kind of gold standard that a lot of people imagine, but it’s only one way to have consensual sex.

As another example of consent, I was a popular “practice partner” in school. I always happily agreed to let other queer kids use my body as a way to explore their own desires. It was fun. I wasn’t attracted to most of them, in fact I only remember two of them out of around a dozen. I doubt most of them were attracted to me, beyond the fact that I was representative of some kind of opportunity. We all had fun, learned about ourselves, and moved on. This is what consent looks like without attraction, but with enthusiasm.

I have long term partners, now. And lifelong disabling illnesses. Sometimes, we want to have sex, but it’s impossible to get the energy together to be excited by the idea of it. Sometimes, we have sex lazily or after taking my painkillers, to make the physical activity of it easier. This is what consent looks like, without enthusiasm, but with want.

I also do sex work. I was full service for a while, and that required a very different type of consent. I had no desire to sleep with my clients. Only one was even moderately attractive to me physically, and all of them were rude and condescending. But, I did want their money, and I was more than willing to provide a service to get it. So, by extension, I wanted to have sex with them, for reasons other than my own physical satisfaction.

It was the easiest work I’ve ever done, and if I hadn’t literally doubled my weight in the last 6 years, I would go back to it. Because it benefits me. This is what convent looks like with none of the trappings of desire. A choice made on the belief that it will benefit you. This is how you can want to have sex with a person, without wanting that person’s body or mind.

That’s where the bottom line of consensual sex lies for me.

Then there’s coercive rape.

That’s the name for the type of pressuring you describe. And I’ve been there too. Careless sex positivity that doesn’t adequately educate kids on what the bottom line of consent is, is one of the worst things that a victim of this kind of rape can use against themselves.

Sexual consent is, at its root, no different than contract consent or medical consent: if you’ve been lied to, or been pressured into signing, it’s not a valid deal. It’s just rape.

Knowing what consent looks like, in all its forms, can help keep kids from getting cornered into sexual experimentation they’re too young for, or too scared of, just because someone else tells them to.

But, so often, people focus on only a single form of consent, that gold standard one up there that I led with. And then every other consensual act on this list becomes a cloud of grey that covers up what consent can look like. And if you don’t know what it looks like, it’s too easy to get confused and end up lost and hurt.

The fault always lies with the rapist here (though in cases like this, many of them don’t even know they’re being rapists), but when you learn that you could have avoided it somehow, it’s very easy to say you SHOULD have avoided it, and wrack yourself with guilt.

The whole “nuanced discussions of consent will get more girls coercively raped” line of thought is fault.

By having nuanced discussions of consent, more men will realize that their behaviour is unacceptable, and more women will be given the confidence to explain exactly why it’s unacceptable.

These kinds of discussions benefit people.

If, after having been given all this information, a man still does not take “no” for an answer, then he was never operating in good faith to begin with, and needs to be kicked in the teeth and sent away until he gets his act together.

But, generally, people want to be good, and having a discussion about the myriad types of consent will help people be good.

If you’re one of those people who thinks executive dysfunction only happens for things we don’t like (school, cleaning,) then please consider the fact that I’ve been meaning to plug my phone in for 20 minutes and I’m now at 2% and still putting it off to write this post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Saw this somewhere else and felt the need to post it cause no one else ever really tells you this stuff

The “friend zone” and unrequited love are not the same thing. Unrequited love is, “I love you, you don’t love me in that same way, I am sad about that.” The “friend zone” is, “I love you, you don’t love me in that same way, you have therefore wronged me.”

Unrequited love is, “My unilateral crush is my problem.” The “friend zone” is, “My unilateral crush is your problem.”