About Being Honest

Remember in my first post when I said I would call myself out when I wasn't being honest? Well, this is me calling myself out. Not for being blatantly dishonest, but for lying by omission...a lot. To be fair, if I hadn't left things out of my previous posts, those posts would have been incredibly long and probably ramble more than they already do. However, I chose to cut out things that probably shouldn't have been: my feelings. Not my thoughts, but my feelings, my emotional reactions to my experiences so far. Instead I stuck to a description of the events. It's something I've always done. I give you the facts and the description of the experience from afar, and then I let you, the reader, supply the emotion. (This may be why I enjoy reading Hemingway. He does the same thing.) Sure, I've said things like "I felt like" or "this made me feel" stuff of that ilk, but those weren't emotional reactions. They were cerebral.  I think the only actual emotion I mentioned in my last 3 posts has been fear. And then, I just barely touched on that fear and then backed off. That's not being honest with you, or myself. So, this post is about my real emotions, well, as much as I can admit right now.

Let's start with last week's post. Let's talk about my emotions during my first group session. I already mentioned that I was scared. What I didn't mention, though, was how embarrassed I was, too. Why was I embarrassed? Because the first time I opened my mouth to participate, I cried. Cried enough that I couldn't continue speaking. I took the tissue I was given and covered my face with it until I could speak again. I was mortified, I felt ridiculous and little. Not little like a child, but little like inconsequential, stupid, and silly. I don't even cry in front of my family and friends unless I have a really good reason, like when my niece died. (I've become very good at only letting one or two tears leak out while watching sad movies AND very good at wiping them away discreetly.) How could I have lost control in front of strangers? People whose names I don't even know. It's been a week, and I'm still embarrassed.

Something else I felt during the meeting was disgust and anger. I've already mentioned that I'm pretty sure almost half of the people in my group are only there because it's court ordered. How am I supposed to feel comfortable exposing myself to people who I had just heard in the lobby bad-mouthing the therapist and bitching that the court made them come? What were they going to say about me when I wasn't around. You see, I'm pretty introverted now. I don't spend very much time outside of my home. (Heck, I don't even talk to my friends very often anymore.) When I do spend time outside my home, I do everything I can to keep my contact with people minimal. If someone says something to me, I'm polite, but I don't do anything to keep the conversation going. I have been called stand-offish and stuck-up because of it. I accept that people say that about me, and I even understand why they think that way., but I don't think I could handle it if my group mates were saying those kinds of things about me when they are the ones who should know better than anyone why I sit off by myself in the lobby. (Because I will be doing that from now on. I can't bear to hear or feel the negativity they express while waiting for group to start. I'm perfectly happy spending my waiting time crocheting by myself, in a corner, on the other side of the room.)

Let's move on to the post about my intake interview. Like I said in the post, I don't remember most of the questions; however, I was dishonest about how I described what I did remember. Again, it was a lie of omission, not of fact. I told you what I remembered talking about, but not how it made me feel to talk about them. While I'm not yet ready to tell you about watching  my brother's accident, I can tell you what I didn't tell Joyce about it. I didn't tell her that my depression didn't start with this event, but it was most definitely escalated by it. I had nightmares about it for many years after it happened. I know what that means: PTSD. I learned all about PTSD while working on my Masters project. My project was about Ernest Hemingway's treatment of PTSD and gender in his novel The Sun Also Rises. I also know people who have been diagnosed with PTSD, and I, though I exhibit symptoms, don't feel like my experience deserves that diagnosis. It makes me feel like I'm trying to grab some stolen glory, some of the PTSD spotlight. It makes me feel like a fraud. So, whenever I get anywhere close to admitting that I have indicators for PTSD, I back off...way off. Do I have PTSD? I don't know. Maybe. And maybe I shouldn't feel the way I do about thinking I might have it, but that's not the point. The point is that I do feel this way, and I'm not ready to figure out why. (Honesty, man this shit is hard.)

--Oh yeah. I should have also told you that I curse...a lot. I'm pretty good at keeping it under control when it's appropriate to do so, but this is just another form of me not being honest about myself, isn't it? I'm not going to NOT curse anymore. I will, however, keep it to a minimum and only curse when I feel to not do so would be dishonest.--

I guess now I'll tell you about my niece. She died on September 9, 2008. She was exactly 2 months shy of turning 12. I'm not any more ready to talk about her life and death than I am to talk about my brother's accident, but I should have told you that I'm still devastated by her dying. I still ugly cry when I think about her. I still get angry at her for not letting me see her one more time before she left, and I feel guilty for feeling this way. I cried when I mentioned her in my interview, just like I'm crying as I write this. It's been 7 1/2 years, and I still grieve like I did the night she died. I should have told you this is how I felt when I mentioned her.

These are some of the things I omitted in my previous posts. There's more, but I'm too tired to go on. It's time for me to use some escapism (Netflix) to bring my anxiety back down. 

The Depression and Anxiety Support Group

Hello again, and Happy St. Patrick's Day! I can't believe it's been a week since we've spoken. Several times during this week I've wanted to hop online and write you a note, but I didn't have anything to say except that I've missed writing. Well, I'm sure I could have gone on some political or activist-type rant, but that's not what this blog is about. I will only talk about those things as they relate to my disorders. In other words, I won't force my opinions on you, just the feelings they create in me. Sometimes that may require I do some explaining of the problem, but I will never proselytize. You, in return, must never turn my comment section into a political or activist debate, either. Deal? Awesome!

In the last post I said that I would start my posts by talking about things I did the previous week outside of therapy. Well, let me start by telling you what I have been doing every day of every week for the last year-and-a-half or so.

I wake up when I wake up (usually sometime between 6 am and 9 am,) make a cup of coffee, go to the home office and get on the computer to read the news and my Facebook feed. I'll play some computer games and watch some Netflix and wait for my brother's business phone to ring, make some business phone calls for him, get his financial stuff done. (I used to spend time job searching and entering applications, too, but no one ever responded, so why bother?)

Sometime during the afternoon, I go to the kitchen and clean up before cooking dinner for myself and my brother. I eat dinner in front of the computer and then do some more kitchen clean up...if I feel like it.

At 7 pm I move to my bedroom, turn on Netflix and either crochet or play more games on the iPad Grandma gave me. (It was a gift to her, but she didn't like it, so she gave it to me. Does that sound like I'm justifying being on Medicaid and having an iPad? I think it does. I'm just stating a fact, but it sounds like justifying to me. Maybe apologizing for having one? I should talk about that more later.) I used to turn the T.V. off around 9 pm and read, but I haven't felt like reading for a couple months, and that makes me sad. Anyway, my day usually ends between midnight and 3 am. See, I have to stay awake until my eyelids are literally drooping and have a hard time keeping them open. If I don't do this, my brain won't let me go to sleep. (It sucks, but it's been like that for as long as I can remember.)

So, that's a typical day for me. In future posts, I'll just talk about the stuff that doesn't include my usual routine. I think that'll be better all around.

This last week I had dinner with my mom. My dad is a truck driver, so she's alone most of the time. Her brother in Washington state is really sick, and she's having a hard time right now. We live in Colorado, so it's not like she can visit him. It's making her feel really bad, and I thought she would like a little pampering. So, I made dinner for her at her house on Monday, and we watched a movie together. It was a very nice evening, and she seemed to enjoy the movie, too. We watched The Good Dinosaur (I thought it was okay, but I wasn't really all that impressed, which surprises me. I'm a pretty pro-Disney-movie kind of gal.) I then did most of the dishes and went home.

Once I got home, I followed the after 7 pm portion of my previously mentioned schedule, with one addition.  My new schedule, which I just started on Saturday, includes spending about half-an-hour listening to some kind of wordless, or non-English speaking, soothing music in corpse pose right before I try to fall asleep. Why wordless or non-English speaking you ask? Because if I can understand the words, I focus on them instead of on my breathing and relaxing my body. Next question: Has it been working? I don't know. The first two days seemed good. I woke up the next morning feeling like I had actually slept instead of like I had spent the night running. But that hasn't been the case for the last 3 mornings. I'll keep trying, of course, but I find that I'm having a really hard time making my mind go quiet. I'll be focused on my breathing, in...out...in...out, then a random thought will pop in screw it all up. Soooo, then I'll try harder to concentrate on the breathing and my upper body will tense up. I noticed that I'll lay there breathing in and out for several minutes before I realize that my body is not relaxed. Soooo, then I'll start over. Yeah, corpse pose is turning out to be more difficult than I thought. Maybe the next pose will help. I think I'll see if my knees can handle the child's pose.

I'll let you know next week. (BTW-I'm not going to replace the corpse pose with child's pose, I'm going to do both. The goal is to create a daily relaxation routine utilizing several poses.)

And now on to my first group therapy session. Wow. Not what I expected. What did I expect, you ask? Well, I expected to be with a group of people who wanted to get better, like me. to be fair, there were people in the group like that, but there were a few who gave me the feeling that the only reason they were there was because the court said they had to be there. Since it's a very small group, those few equaled almost half the group.  It scared me a little. When people are somewhere they don't want to be, they're more likely to be judgmental and non-helpful. Also, it seemed like those same people resented the new therapist leading the group. (While we were in the waiting room, they were very vocal with each other about how much they disliked her.) Perhaps they were just upset because the previous therapist left them, and they were taking it out on the new one. I don't know, but I rather liked her. (AND I remember her name. It's Connie. Yay, me!) I think she is someone I can talk to. The trick will be whether I become comfortable enough with the rest of the group to talk to them.

So, what did I learn in group therapy? I learned about cognitive distortions or assumptions. What are cognitive distortions or assumptions? Well, they're tricks our brains play on us to make us feel like crap.  Here's a list of the ones we talked about:

·          All or Nothing Thinking

·          Over-Generalizing

·          Mental Filtering

·          Disqualifying the Positive

·          Mind Reading

·          Fortune Telling

·          Catastrophizing

·          Magnifying or Minimizing

·          Emotional Reasoning

·          "Shoulds"

·          Labeling/Mislabeling

·          Personalization

·          Maladaptive Thought

·          Compensatory Misconceptions

She gave us general overviews of each of these distorion, and I've realized that several of them apply to me. I won't go into each one right now, or even talk about the ones that apply to me. Instead, I'll do some private research on each of them and post about them later. Otherwise, this post would be the length of a magazine article instead of a blog post. Besides, the information I was given in group was really very basic, and I'd like make sure that I understand the distortions before I explain them to you. Something to look forward to. Hmmm?

We also talked about being emotionally "tipped-over" and how to bring yourself upright again. What is being emotionally tipped-over? Well, we human beings use both reason and emotion to evaluate situations and make decisions. Being emotionally tipped means that the emotion side of our brain has taken over. For example, excessive crying, irrational anger, that kind of thing. The reason side of our brain has taken a back seat, so to bring the balance back, we need to switch from emotional thinking to reasonable thinking by focusing on a task that the reasonable mind usually takes care of, like counting. Remember when your mom told you to count to 10 when you're angry? Well this is why. Apparently, you can't think emotionally while you're counting. Of course, stopping at 10 may not work. Connie advised to just count until you feel better. This is just one example, and may not work for all people and/or all emotions. There are lots of reasonable thought processes that you can use, though.  Things like grounding yourself by focusing on sensory input: sounds, smells, sights, and textures or even, wait for it...writing. (Hey, now! How about that? I'm workin' the reasonable thought processes. Go me!)

Next we talked about anger and sadness being based on feelings of helplessness. Sounds legit to me. When do we usually get depressed? When things happen that are beyond our control: death, divorce, children leaving the house, loss of a job, illness, etc. How do we feel when these kinds of things happen? We feel like we have no control over them. We feel helpless. People with depression and anxiety tend to focus on that helpless feeling and compound it by thinking that we will always feel that way, or that we deserve to feel that way. (I do that.) Connie told us all to create a list, a gratitude list, of things we feel are positive about us.  Here's mine:

I truly love my family.

I learn new things quickly.

Yeah, that's as far as I got before I started to come up with things that had qualifiers. You know, things like "I have a good singing voice, but not as good as it used to be" or "my friends tell me I'm a really nice person." This is a really hard list to create, but I'm going to set a goal for myself to come up with 10 nice/good things about me that don't contain qualifiers for next week. You can do it with me if you like.

The Intake Interview

I think I've got the format of this down. It might change, but for now, I'm going to start out with writing about what I'm doing in my everyday life, and then move on to what happened at my most recent appointment, be that medical or mental. If this works, I'll keep it. If it doesn't, I'll try something new. Can't be afraid to try something new or none of this, the therapy or the writing, will work. Also, I was thinking I would make this a weekly blog, but how about if I make it an "at least" weekly blog? That way you know, and I'll know, that there will always be at least one new entry every week, but if I need to talk more often, I will. Oh, and if there is anything you would like me to talk about, let me know. Like I said before, I'm pretty good at research. And honestly, helping others makes me feel good.

I said it in the last post, I'm repeating it now. I'm terrified of what I'm getting ready to do here, and writing about it makes it that much scarier. Be prepared for a lot of deflection by way of humor and sarcasm. (Yeah, I already know most of those psychological terms I'm sure I'll be hearing in therapy. You learn a lot about psychology when you get your bachelor and master degrees in English.) Humor and sarcasm have been my go-to coping mechanisms my entire life. I've gotten pretty good at them, and I really have no desire to get rid of them. Hopefully, my therapist will be okay with me keeping them, too. (I would be okay with losing them as a tool for deflection, though.)

Sooooo, I went to my intake interview the day before yesterday. Of course I was really nervous, so I took along my crochet project to calm me down before my appointment. I started crocheting about eight years ago to help me quit smoking. It didn't work. I started smoking again, but I liked crocheting so much, I just kept doing it. It really is very relaxing for me. Aaaaaand, drum roll please, I did actually quit smoking November 19th of this past year. This time, along with using my crochet as a stress relief, I also used a vapor pen to stem the cravings.  I'm getting pretty good at not using it now, too. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes, I am proud of myself for doing this, but to be perfectly honest, sometimes I miss it. Not the smoking, but the act of smoking. The putting the cigarette to my lips, inhaling, and then blowing out the smoke while people watched. I miss the "screw you" feeling I'd get for thumbing my nose at an ever increasing health-oriented society. Yeah, I know that's not a good attitude, but I did mention I was starting therapy, right?

Anyway, back to my intake interview. I went into a low-light room with a perfectly delightful woman...whose name I can't remember. That's part of my problem. I keep losing memories. Usually details, but not big picture stuff. Names go by the wayside, but my experience with them remains. Normally I don't know why that happens, but in this case, I'm sure of the cause. Blind terror! Yup, nothin' scarier than knowing that you are about to make yourself utterly vulnerable for attack, but not sure what sort of attack is coming. Of course this attack was all about asking questions, and I did know this was going to happen. What I didn't know was just how personal we were going to get in this first interview, and that had my knees knockin'.

So, my (interrogator? questioner? inquisitor? No matter what word I use, it sounds negative, so let's just call her Joyce.) So, Joyce begins by asking me basic health questions. Always a good place to start, but it had me wondering why I was being asked all of the same questions I had answered at my medical appointment last week. Now that I look back, I think the purpose may have been to ease me into the questioning, help calm my fear. It helped, a little. What helped more was when I asked if I could crochet while we talked. She said yes, so I pulled out my project and started working with shaky hands. As we went along, the questions became more personal, but my hands became less shaky.

I wish I could remember all of the questions she asked, so that I could give you a heads up, but that memory thing happened again. I do remember talking about seeing my brother getting hit by a car when I was 17 and talking about how hard it has been for the entire family since my niece died in 2008, but all the rest kind of went by in a blur. Except for one particular thing. I found out that Joyce and I are both HUGE Doctor Who fans. This happened relatively early in the interview, in fact, not long after I pulled out my crocheting. Here's a picture of what I pulled out:

Yes, that is my version of the scarf the 4th Doctor wore. We then discussed our favorite Doctors. (Eleven, you gangly, new-born giraffe, you will always be my Doctor.) After that, it was better. It was still difficult being open and honest, but I felt a little more like I was talking to a friend than a counselor, and that helped. (I had to rip out everything I had crocheted during the appointment later, though. Understandably, I had made a lot of mistakes while we were talking.)

One of the things I realized while we were talking, though, is that my family and I really don't have much in common. Joyce asked about familial/cultural inside jokes, and I couldn't think of any. Besides mutual love for each other and military service, we're really very, very different from each other. Some of it has to do with the fact that I was the first person on either side of my family to graduate from college, but most of it is because pretty much everything I enjoy doing is a sit-down and/or inside kind of thing, like crocheting, reading, watching movies, cooking, while they all really enjoy camping, fishing, hiking...I feel a little like a freak in my own family. (Apparently, that's something I'll be addressing with my actual therapist.)

The very last thing we talked about was that Joyce wanted me to start restorative yoga, She wanted to know if I was okay setting a goal to learn one new yoga pose every week over the next six months. I'm sure I seemed a little hesitant about this, because she then said that just researching yoga would work for the first week. Then she mentioned the corpse pose and Yoga Nidra and said that I could start with those. So, that was my homework for this week: research Yoga Nidra and restorative yoga in general, and the corpse pose specifically. I've  posted links to a few things I found at the bottom of the blog. I want to put them there instead of in this post because I want them to be available for quick reference at all times. I'll add more links there as we go along. In the meantime, I will post a picture of corpse pose here:

 

courtesy of yogaoutlet.com

I think I can do that. How about you?

The First Step

I am terrified. I'm an overweight, middle-aged woman with physical and psychological disorders. I have never been married. I have never had children, nor will I ever have children as I recently had a complete hysterectomy with an oophorectomy (they took out my ovaries and fallopian tubes.) I am unemployed and living off the charity of my younger brother.  I do have a college education, but I am unable to get a job with it. In short, I feel like the biggest loser alive, and perhaps I should make room for someone more productive. But wait a minute, children all over the world are starving to death, and I'm over here complaining that I feel bad about who I am. How narcissistic and insensitive can I be? Enter guilt. Lots and lots of guilt. (First world problems, you say? Why, I've got loads.) Apparently, though, that's my disorder talking, and that's why I need help.  

Maybe you understand and feel the same way I do, maybe you don't. Maybe you stopped by because you have a loved one who is like me, and you want to understand him or her a little better. I will try to be as honest as I possibly can. But you have to understand that those of us who have depression and anxiety are beautiful actors. We're very good at telling you just enough about what's wrong with us to make you think we're going to be okay. Believe me, there is so much more that we aren't telling you. We're afraid that if you knew the rest, you would be repulsed. Not afraid of us, but repulsed by us. I honestly don't know why we feel this way. It's something I want to explore, and I will probably write about it a lot. 

This isn't going to be easy for me, but I promise to call myself on my bullshit as soon as I can. What does that mean? It means that I'm going to re-read my old posts frequently. It means that as I progress in my therapy, I will reference what I said in my old posts and point out when, and hopefully why, I was dishonest at the time. For family members reading this blog, I hope my journey will help you understand your loved one. For you who are like me, you're not alone. If you promise to try to remember that, I promise I will, too.

I guess, now that I've introduced myself,  it's time to talk about that first step on my journey.

Last week I had an appointment with a Primary Care Physician(PCP) in a health group whose mission is to treat the mind and body as a whole. Yes, that means they specialize in primary care and mental health. Why did I go there? Because I need a PCP who understands my mental issues. I say issues rather than disorders because I have not yet been diagnosed, but I am an intelligent woman who is very good at research, and I know I have depression and probably some sort of anxiety disorder. The appointment went well, I think.

Let me tell you a little secret now: I don't like doctors. My adult experience with them hasn't been good. With one or two exceptions, they have been know-it-alls who don't listen to what I tell them about what is happening to my body. In fact, most of the time, they have made me feel like I was either a hypochondriac or doctor shopping for drugs. Here I am telling them that I have joint pain and would like to know what I could do to minimize it so that I could exercise without feeling like my joints were grinding glass, and they assumed that I was asking for Percocet. My last doctor actually looked surprised when I declined her offer of narcotic pain medication for my joints. It's like she didn't understand that I wanted help treating what was causing the pain, not just the pain itself. *SIGH*

Don't get me wrong. All of the doctors were very nice, they just didn't listen to me. Well, actually, they only partially listened to me. They listened as long as they needed to to form an opinion of what was wrong with me, and then they tuned me out. For example, when I was in the Air Force, I went to sick call because I had been having severe back pain every time I drank a lot of anything. (Usually that was alcohol.) The doctor I saw heard the words "back pain," and rather than look at where I was pointing or listen to how I was describing the pain, she diagnosed me with weak abdominal muscles and prescribed some strengthening exercises. Flash forward two years and there I am having kidney surgery just in time to save the darn thing. If the first doctor had actually listened to what I was telling her, I might have avoided two years of pain, and maybe not have had to have been sawed in half to save my kidney! (Yeah, I'm still bitter 20 years later.)

Anyway, as I said earlier, last week's appointment went well. I actually felt like my new doctor was listening to me, as well as being really nice and interesting. He asked me questions. We talked about the Air Force, which we both served in. He took a lot of notes. I had some blood drawn for a lot of tests. In short, I feel pretty comfortable with how the medical side of my treatment is starting. As terrified as I was when the appointment first started, it ended really well. I felt good about it, and that is very rare for me.

Next week I'll see my PCP again and find out the results of all the blood work. I really, really, really (honestly, I can't say really enough about this) hope we'll find out why I'm so friggin' tired all the time, and why my joints hurt, and why I can't control my emotions, and a bunch of other stuff. In the meantime, I get to start the really scary part of my journey back to health. This week I have an intake meeting for the mental health side of the clinic. But that's a story for another day, and I'll tell you all about it in my next post.

So...I guess this ends my first post about my journey back to health. I hope I can keep up with it, all of it: the therapy, the healing, the writing, the moving forward with my life. I hope that this truly is the first step towards finding myself again. And I hope you find your first step.