I’ll Do The Talking
So here I am talking to you online, but as a blogger I’m aware its weird sharing a personality online and egocasting it the way I do.
I guess I DO have a broadcasting persona, but in real life I’m not that much of a talker. I joke around and I talk about things, but I don’t really carry a conversation as much as it carries me.
I have been dabbling in therapy recently - mainly it was because I’ve never been sure whether my depression was just a general disposition or environmental and therefore something I could address.
It’s mild - I have never missed a day of work or stayed in bed all day and I sympathise with people who have it that bad. It must suck like I can’t imagine, but given a family history of mental illness it’s something that’s worth looking at - a lack of happiness for no good reason over a period of weeks should ring alarm bells.
I would hate to get to fifty five and then do something about it and regret not having done something twenty years earlier while the kids were at home.
My psychotherapist was stunned by the fact that I could talk about things in my life that had happened in without crying. Well, sorry toots, but I just met you.
Her theory was that I had never allowed myself an outlet for my feelings and I was out of touch with my emotions, but I think it was more that I was out of touch with her, because I’d only met her once. That gave her cause to say I was in denial, and I was never going to win that one. So that was the end of therapy - it lasted about a month.
Was it the right decision? Ask me in twenty years.
(That was the cool ending to the post. The real answer is I’m not sure and we left on very good terms. It was enlightening, but life’s good now. I might go back, if it becomes a train wreck - sorry, locomotive malfunction - when therapy could be the mental five-a-day I need. You are what you eat, but you’re also what eats you.)
September 4th, 2008 at 9:37 am
An evangelist writes: if you decide to give it another shot, do investigate Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The benefit (and maybe for some, the drawback) is that the bulk of the work is down to you, and not your therapist. In other words, you are guided towards forming your own diagnoses, and your therapist tends to keep his/her own judgements to a minimum.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Thanks Mike - very thoughtful of you. She said CBT in my case would be “a patch” at best and wouldn’t be of much benefit. I’m not sure that’s what I needed to hear.
But that instilled in me a resilient defiance, although I’m not sure if either that’s what I needed or if it’s part of the problem.
Time’ll tell.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Have you ever considered one of those light therapy machines? It seems a lot of your down days come with the absence of light. Maybe that would help a bit. They sell them on amazon. just a thought I’ve had a while and couldn’t bring it up to ask because it seems so personal and this seems so public.
September 4th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I am glad you’re able to recognize and act.
September 7th, 2008 at 4:14 am
I HATE it when professionals demand we react in the way they need. They’re meant to be helping us, not demanding we fulfill their little fantasies of being the all-powerful healer.
We all process things differently and were raised to have different attitudes towards appropriate expression of emotions. I have friends whose families thought it was normal to sob disconsolately over a broken fingernail. In my home, you cried only if someone died and then you did that in private. Your therapist wouldn’t have seen me cry unless she’d pulled out my fingernails.
I hope, should you feel the need to seek therapy again, that you find someone who can allow you to maintain your own style of emoting during the process.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
LTRTSTT - Welcome and thanks very much for the comment. I really appreciate you coming out of the shadows, if you’ll excuse the pun. I’ll look into them.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Thanks Dawn and welcome. Your comment moved me to tears.
Not really! LOL!
Thanks for the kind message.