Ooh! Law! Cool! There needs to be more Therians in law.

Fact is, like most personal issues, the right approach to your problem is the approach that works for you. I don't think anyone is going to be able to tell you how to deal with it - although there are some people that might be able to help you work through it but they're going to have to be pretty accessible to you. What works for me is "just do it". There's an art to letting go and it's not as easy as it sounds, but if you can get the hang of it, it can work wonders.

Therianthropy, by mundane standards, is weird - but I know of absolutely no rational basis for considering it shameful. If you can work through what's causing you to feel that it's shameful, I think you'll see that it's pretty flimsy and maybe that will help.

And although I absolutely do not think that meditation is a good tool for self exploration, it's a great thing for calming your mind and spirit so you can rationally address issues like this.

Usually problems like that are associated with a lot of self talk, most of it self-deprecating. If that's a problem, if you can train yourself to be more positive as to what takes place in your head when your not thinking deliberately, you might be a lot way toward cracking the problem.

Heh, I can  certainly identify with the lack of sleep thing. I'll be glad when I retire and can get my biological clock set up right.

I don't repress my therianthropy much at all and I'm an apartment dweller. You'd think my neightbors would complain about the growling and low level howling and occasional very loud snarls when I stump my toe and such but I've been there for 15 years and my neighbors and landlords seem to like having me live there.

I know what you mean about self-acceptance problems. I have them too. I have this tendency of shaking my head and saying "was my life not looking hard enough that I have THIS too?" It actually made me push it away as much as I could, which was really hard for me, because my aunt is OBSESSED with wolves and has them EVERYWHERE, so they're very much seen as her thing. It also made it very disconcerting growing up, and I think I have to admit that this is the first time I've talked about it...ever, online or otherwise.

Unfortunately for me, I think I just got thrown out of the therian closet, because the Chovihani is visiting, and she's been staring at me and dropping hints and attempting to pull phantom tail, and she's been in private discussion with my Dat and Grandmother for hours.

So no, you are not alone. For me it's been a private struggle. How have you dealt with it, if at all?

I notice that a lot fo Therians have a "wanting to fit in" problem but I hope that's going to deminish after the Therian community gets better established and it becomes more acceptible to be a Therian/Were - one thing I (and other Therians) am working toward, and one reason I'm not secretive about my therianthropy.

WolfVanZandt wrote:

I notice that a lot fo Therians have a "wanting to fit in" problem but I hope that's going to deminish after the Therian community gets better established and it becomes more acceptible to be a Therian/Were - one thing I (and other Therians) am working toward, and one reason I'm not secretive about my therianthropy.

I don't think it's ever going to be accepted as 'normal'. I've only told 2 people about it in the years I've known... before that I guess other people just wrote it off as a peculiar 'quirk' about me or somesuch. Even the people I told were a bit... sceptical about the whole thing. But like all things that defy scientific explanation (for now) I think it's going to be rejected as a whole by mainstream 'normal' people.

Oh hey, this looks like an interesting discussion...

You should talk to Savage from the old Werelist: I seem to recall her saying something about her "inner mountain lion" being "evil" in a thread about eating roadkill...

*Reads through the rest of the thread...*

Mmm it's not that I find my were-side evil, though, I'm just angsty and emo about the fact it's there at all, and I'm 'ZOMG SO DIFFERNT'.

Shouldn't suppress it, I guess.

I was forced to eat my words, WVZ, when today I picked up a mainstream magazine here and it had a sensitive and thought-provoking article about Otherkin that had a little mention of therianthropy. It seems exposure is happening, albeit slowly.

Yeah, there was a 3-page discussion about Otherkin in this month's Fortean Times, a British magazine about weird phenomena. They also had the alleged 200-year old preserved body of a genuine adult lycanthrope "homo lupus" and a supposed preserved werewolf foetus this month, with pictures. No idea what to make of it, article was very unbiased, either a very cool hoax or something more intriguing.

I must stress it was mainly discussing otherkin such as unicorns or elves and only had the briefest mention of therians but the article was so sensitively written I was genuinely impressed, given how outlandish the whole scene appears to mainstreamers.