Hello! I promised to update you on my therapy tales. I had my first session 2 weeks ago and it was so uneventfully boring I didn’t really have much to say about it. It was just going over what we’d be doing. He said a few times, “you fit the model so perfectly”, which I gather was meant to be reassuring but irritated me somewhat. I don’t want to fit any models but of course, we all do in varying ways. Especially us mental health bloggers who literally define ourselves by the set of symptoms we fit that all adds up to a few words on a doctor’s monitor and our entire lives.
There was a lot of diagram drawing on how thoughts and feelings and actions all interact. Talk of safety behaviours, and my biggest is keeping busy all the time, mostly by fucking about online, never letting that thought creep in, having my phone glued to my face until the very second I fall asleep. And it doesn’t work, because in the second afterwards, panic creeps in. And I have an awful tendency to use my phone to look up the things that scare me- cancer, death, cot death, death, death, more death.
Session 2 was yesterday. I wrote this for A Day In the Life, a website which gathers the stories of a day in the life of someone with mental health difficulties. You can submit yours too over at A Day In the Life. The stories are anonymous but I don’t mind outing myself for the purposes of this post.
26 August 2015
Today is Therapy Day. I had about three hours sleep, which isn’t good on Therapy Day. In the days before my baby was born, my medication (Quetiapine) would make me sleep for twelve hours straight. Now, with an internal Mum Radar activated, I wake up when he does (multiple times a night), although I’m pretty uselessly doped up from drugs and it’s up to my husband to feed him. The one time I tried I dropped the bottle and spilled milk all over the floor, mumbling dream talk, his crying from the end of a long, dark tunnel. So it’s pointless lack of sleep, but lack of sleep nonetheless. The baby, now five months old, has decided that 6am is a brilliant time to wake up, so I’m up too.
Despite being up from 6am, I’m still late for therapy. The hours in between are lost in a haze. I eat, too much, to try and muster some energy. A jam bun and some toast. In my sleepiness, I’ve forgotten my homework and worry all the way on the bus that the therapist will be pissed off at me for it. It’s just CBT- I say, “just” because it’s not the kind of therapy that plumbs your heart like a dentists’ drill. It’s functional, rigid, and thus requires concentration I can’t summon on so little sleep.
This is only the second session. The focus is on my anxiety about death. Or, as we find during the session of comparing, “Theory A to Theory B”, the focus is on my anxiety about my anxiety about death. The problem, the therapist says, isn’t that we’re all going to die. That’s true and has always been true. It’s that my anxiety about it is controlling my life. So we go through what happens when I feel anxious. About intrusive thoughts and how we shouldn’t try to control them. The more we try to control them, the more we think them. The aim, he says, is to accept them. To let them intrude.
Towards the end of the session he says we’re going to do something which may make me have a panic attack. It’s to feel where my anxiety is, to hold an image in my head and to focus on it. I try, but all I can focus on is the ticking of the clock coming to the end of our truncated session. I try to hold an image of myself panicking but nothing really happens. He then talks about how the more we look at an image, the more our mind will demonster-fy it. It might become interesting, comical even. I’m not finding this to be true, but I’m left with the instruction that the next time I get an intrusive thought or feel anxious to stay with it, examine it, and not try to suppress it. Good luck, me.
I leave and wander around the shops, thinking of lunch. I’m trying to treat these sessions as little holidays from my life, and take an hour afterwards to drink coffee or eat before I return to the baby, leaving whatever was in therapy scattered along the cafe tables. I get the bus home and exhaustion floors me. I can barely hold my head up and resolve to go to bed when the baby does. We’re all tired today, we forego any attempt at dinner and eat burnt creme brûlée that Robert impulsively bought from Tesco. I take my medication just after I put the baby to bed, and let it drag me into the blackness of sleep by 8pm. He wakes at 10.30 and I do too, stumbling with my pillow into the spare room while my husband feeds him. And then back to sleep. It’s just like the old days- I slept for 12 hours.
Filed under: Mental health
from The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive http://ift.tt/1K8afw7