….this must be a therapy day.
Today’s session went okay. Not a lot of anxiety beforehand, which was nice.
I’ve been getting anxiety attacks before sessions lately. Not severe ones, but bad. I never got them before Covid [1] but I get them now.
I think it’s because it involves the phone. I do not get on well with the phone. For someone with severe social anxiety like me, the phone allows people to, in a sense, sound an alarm then “barge in on me” when I least expect it and demand I pull myself together and function socially, thus shattering my little socially isolated haven.
And making a phone call is even worse. Because then it’s me “barging in:” and demanding people’s attention and I always feel like I am imposing on them and wasting their time and that they wish I’d just die.
I am not saying that’s how it is. Of course that’s not the reality of the situation. FRom an objective point of view, it’s clearly insane.
But it is nevertheless how I feel. That’s the stark truth of a mood disorder like depression : it makes you emotionally delusional.
You feel things that aren’t there. Your interpretations of reality are utterly deranged. You think people who love you hate you. You think people are laughing at you when they don’t even know you exist. You think you’re the most horrible misbegotten hunk of steaming human refuse ever shat upon an unsuspecting world when to the rest of the world, you’re just some person like anyone else.
You even view the world as an actively hostile hellscape with a malign intelligence focused on hurting you as much as possible at every opportunity.
I know I sure do.
Not intellectually, of course. On some remote and distant level, I know it’s all madness and that the reality is that the world is just a place and can no more being against me than the peak of Everest can be against me.
But the disease is not so easily disarmed. The distorted emotions are too strong to be subdued by reason’s meager powers.
It’s like there’s a giant with a megaphone screaming “YOU SUCK!” in one ear and a mild mannered Bob Newhart type saying “Um, that…. that’s not actually true. You…you’re fine. You know. Considering. “
Except less adorable.
That’s what lead me to the conclusion that depression is not a disorder one can out-think. It was sheer hubris to ever think it could be.
Like, did I really think that I and I alone was smart and strong enough to find the hidden door out of depression? That I would “figure out” how to escape it when millions others, some no doubt as smart or smarter than me, have failed to do so?
I am ashamed to admit that yes, I did believe that long ego. But no more.
The answers is emotions. And it will always be emotions. Due to how I am constructed I may have to go through a lot of complicated steps (like blogging) to access and process my emotions, but emotions are always king.
And reason is nothing but its helpful but hapless vizier who does its best to rein in the mad king that is depression, but ultimately has no power to stop him.
Didn’t expect this post to get political, but….
More after the break.
Dig where it hurts
Was talking to my therapist today about how I go looking for the things I don’t want to talk about because those are the things I want to be talking about.
That’s where the therapeutic pay-dirt is found and where the best deposits of the hurting that heals are layered, and so when I sit down to blog, most days I am prospecting for a topic which will provide the most progress towards wellness I can find.
I really do get caught up in my metaphors, don’t I?
So every day, I am implementing my own version of “leaning in”.
My friends have heard the following explanation, but just in case someone whodoesn’t know me ever reads this :
What I took from all that “lean in” talk a couple years back (in the Before Time) was the notion that when we are hurt, our instinct is to hit the bakes and slow everything down.
But that’s the worst thing you can do because it only prolongs the pain. Like my old buddy Winston Churchill said, “When you’re going through Hell…. keep going!”.
And he was a manic-depressive, so he knew Hell quite well.
The key is to learn to do the opposite – to move in the direction of the pain and thus keep it as short a time in agony as possible.
In other words, just rip the damned bandage off. Stop picking at it.
It’s an approach that is working for me, and it might work for you, but don’t feel bad if it doesn’t. I’m a slightly masochistic gonzo kind of guy who knows, on a deep level, that sometimes suffering is the price we have to pay for healing and growth, and I have more than made peace with that truth.
Now I actively seek the pain that heals.
But I understand that for some people, mild pain over time is truly better than one and a half seconds of total agony. They “hug the baseline” in life by avoiding the extremes, and thus they are never very happy OR very sad.
Extremes are therefore to be avoided at all costs. I understand, I used to be that way myself. It makes perfect sense at the time.
And all I can say to that is that you don’t know the deep pleasure when these long term pains are suddenly ended until you try it for yourself.
Once you give it a try once or twice, you will be as addicted as I am to this liberation.
And for once, it’s an addiction that actually makes you healthier!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.