I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time during some serious introspection/defragging my brain, especially in the past week. There is so much I could write about right now about just the past few days of following the frayed and twisted strands that is my brain, hell I could write a paper just based off the one sided conversation I had with my partner last night (where I explained to him what I had been going through the past week since I had become so shut off from him and the whole rest of the world).
One thing I have determined is that I really don’t think that going back to my old therapist would do a whole lot of good or get me anywhere. I know I could be completely wrong about this. I went regularly (every week at least once) to therapy for the better part of 3 or so months earlier this summer (and then money ran out and I couldn’t go anymore, such is life). I liked my therapist, I really did, but I don’t think I benefited at all (yet) from those sessions. Why? Because I have yet to reach a point in therapy where the real work can actually begin. All those session, and all that money resulted in just becoming acquainted with my therapist, and hell, in all that time we were only able to quickly gloss over the events that had happened within the past year, much less the past 3, 5, 23 years. I’d come out of a session feeling a bit better, but that was just because I got to vent a bit to someone who wasn’t emotionally involved with the events at all and with someone that I had a positive, yet still clinical relationship with (ie. someone who didn’t care for me so much as to sugar coat anything/ask the hard stuff blah blah blah). I liked his approach to things. He encouraged me to look into some of the Buddhist meditations and delve deeper in “mindfulness”. At first this sounded awesome, but one of the things I realized over the course of the past week is that maybe I’m *too* mindful. I know exactly where every anxiety, every stress, every worry, every insecurity came from but I’ll be damned if I can’t stop myself from experiencing the stress, anxiety, worry, etc anyways even with knowing the origins for most every single one. I can start to feel panicky about a situation and I can tell you exactly what happened in the past that is affecting how I am treating or looking at my current situation. Right down to the tiny little things. I feel like I am too aware of the origins of my dysfunction(s). Now, granted, I did not stay in therapy for as long as someone with my history needs to be in order to accomplish anything, I am aware of this, but I am wondering if going back to my old therapist would be a good idea once/if money starts coming back in so I can go back. Honestly, I want to learn how to shut my brain off when I get really bogged down by stuff, I don’t necessarily want to be even more mindful and aware of what’s going on.
Maybe I am too mindful. Hyperawareness/hyperalertness/hypersensitivity is my number one problem and what feeds a lot of my depression/anxiety. I actually read a great article (on Cracked of all places) that helped me realize this, and in turn I made R read it because it explained everything I felt in a way that is much more understandable than if I tried to explain it myself. Here’s the link:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-stupid-habits-you-develop-growing-up-in-broken-home_p2/
(the 2 points on the second page are the most applicable to me, not necessarily the other 3 things from the first page.) The part about Hypersensitivity is so spot on for me it’s scary.
It helped R understand me a lot more too. It’s been a joke between us early on that I can tell what he is thinking just by his breathing pattern, and most of the time I am dead on. For example: R has a specific pattern of inhales and exhales for when he wants to talk about something but isn’t quite sure how to word it. I pointed this out once when I was reading a book and he was playing something right beside me and I put down my book and asked him, “What is it that you want to say or talk to me about that you aren’t quite sure how to word it properly?” There was a moment when he thought I might be an X-Men mutant or something because I just came out of nowhere with that).
The problem with this is you know, sometimes people just breathe differently and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the other person is doing anything other than breathing. But in my mind, I hear a change so subtle as that that I begin to panic, “Is he mad? What did I do wrong? What’s wrong? What did I do? How can I fix this? OH GOD I HATE MYSELF MAKE IT STAAAAHP”
Obviously, I am so much fun to be around when you have bronchitis (actually I kid, this level of hypersensitivity is reserved only for the people I live with, started with the parents/sibling and now to my domestic partner).
I blame my instinctual reactions on the fact that I am extremely easily conditioned in the classical psychological sense (think: Little Albert). All it takes is one time to program my reactions to specific things/enviroments/situations blah blah blah.
There is hardly a time ever when the “flight” part of fight or flight mode isn’t engaged for me. I constantly feel the need to flee, which can be draining especially when I am at work just doing my thing but every cell in my body is screaming “YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE NOW”. I am actually weirded out that more often than not I actually *want* to be home more than any other place because growing up (and even as recent as 2 years ago) I wanted to be ANYWHERE but home. The place we live in now I actually feel safe and secure, which is huuuuuge for me.
Even though I don’t know what the next steps should be in this process, I am encouraged so far by all this. It’s not earth shattering revelations, most of this I *knew* already but I didn’t really grasp the depth of it until this week. Really, if anything, I’ve come away thinking that maybe, just maybe, I’m not as crazy as I think I am. Or maybe I really am crazy because I *know* the Why’s to most everything but it still doesn’t stop the anxiety from happening (even when I know beyond all doubt that I’m being irrational).
I am perfectly aware of why I am the way I am, what caused me to be this way, and how it manifests, but “knowing” hasn’t helped anything, knowing my problems isn’t fixing them. I’ve got the Who/How/When/Why/Where down on this stuff, but what I don’t have figured out is the “What” in “What next?” What can I do to fix this.
But it’s a starting point. And I think it’s a pretty good one. This is the year I start fixing myself.
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