Blackhole does therapy or whatever

Sorry for being a bit overly dramatic and rambley with all of this. I'm pretty sure that a big part of all of this has been just due to tiredness and the fact that I still have fading traces of drug in my system, which is after all always a recipe for messy blowups of one kind or another. I wouldn't be coating this thread with so many rambley self-indulgent posts if it weren't for the face that this is my thread about me, and so I feel somewhat more justified in doing so. I'm sure my outlook will have perked up fine in time for tomorrow; it usually does.

 

One thing that might help you is to internalise the fact that of course she has to have a layer of separation between herself and her clients. She would likely be an entirely ineffective therapist of she didn't, and she would be emotionally wrecked besides.

Maybe review your posts and take note of the parts you think are important to bring up or are causing you particular distress. Notes always help me in therapy. Definitely bring up your fears that you're making all this up - it is a common experience and she has almost definitely heard this from clients before.

 

What I was about to say was "ah yes, but those other clients are presumably people who are definitely actually mentally ill, and merely think that they be making it up, as opposed to with me where I might actually just be making it up" but then I realised that if I was one of the actual cases then by definition this is all exactly what I'd be thinking anyway... The idea that any amount of reasoning on my part might be leading to a less than logical conclusion about an objective situation is a foreign one to how I think and so I'm just going to stop thinking about it.

 

It's circular and insidious isn't it? At the root of it, it doesn't matter whether or not you are "really" mentally ill, you are accessing a service that exists to help people sort their brains out, and if you end up in a better place through it it will have served its purpose.

 

Hey, so therapy was good today. Therapist laid out some various theories as to whether or not my worries are valid and pointed out that most of the evidence is saying that they're not. I liked today a lot more, I think we're getting somewhere with this.

Another question, though - obviously what I'm being treated for are my recurring issues with obsessive worry, but recently I've been feeling kind of shit a lot more generally as well. Unless I'm actively out doing something fun or at the very least distracting, I tend to feel just this underlying discomfort, extreme boredom, and don't seem to be enjoying myself generally. It's really unpleasant. I'm wondering if it's just residual stress from all this obsession stuff (given that it hasn't been troubling me soooo much this past month or so), a side effect of being isolated in the house without much to do or if perhaps I'm developing a sort of low-grade depression which would not be good. :|

 

Sometimes therapy makes me feel short-term worse, because I'm directly looking at things that I try to tune out. Might be another possibility for why you're feeling worse lately.

 

Sometimes I feel like therapy brings a sort of emotional exhaustion that leaves you temporarily more vulnerable... It's like cleaning a wound: you can't leave the shrapnel in it to fester, but you have to cut open parts half healed and wash and irrigate which irritates flesh. It leaves the area tender to slight touches. Dealing with brain weird is really hard and messy! I can't count the amount of times I came home from therapy and basically threw myself on bed and spent the week like a fragile doll. Sometimes when you clean the wound it gives space for something one didn't know was there to surface and be noticed, tested, cleaned... A long process.

Regardless of the cause, I'm really glad you are seeing a therapist. I think keeping a log/thread is a good idea, and will help you and your shrink point out what it is that is causing these reactions. Tracking is a big part of learning about oneself! If you are worried it is depression, try to do activities to keep it off - I got a literal written recommendation from a doc once to walk around outside for thirty minutes in sunlight (if possible sunlight since weather). I hope this helps.

E: corrected a typo

 

hey @BlackholeKG i'm probably repeating things that have already been said, but everything that you've said in this thread so far reads to me like everything's not exactly a-okay for you brain-wise.

seriously, the whole "i'm totally faking it and all my 'mental illness' stuff is bullshit i made up to help hide the fact that really, i'm just a useless asshole who doesn't want to improve" feeling is, in my experience, totally par for the mental illness course. unfortunately, being aware of it doesn't necessarily make the feelings go away. which sucks.

but! i'm glad you had a better appointment with your therapist this time. a lot of the awkwardness of the first few sessions with any therapist comes from a lack of rapport and familiarity. it usually gets better once you're both a little more comfortable with each other, and if it doesn't, that tends to be a sign that you should find a therapist who suits you better.

the general shitty feeling -- is that something you have experienced before, or is it unfamiliar?

 

I'm actually not sure. I've definitely felt shitty before but I'm kinda bad at categorizing it generally.

We'll see where it goes I guess. And thanks for your perspective!

 

so here's a thing about that whole "i'm making it up, i just go looking for things to be upset about" line of thinking: depression causes you to have negative thoughts. thinking "everything is terrible" about stuff that is objectively not that big a deal is a textbook symptom of depression. when everything is actually going pretty well, and your mind insists on finding reasons why it's actually horrible? yeah, that's a symptom of depression. note, i'm not handing you any specific diagnosis! but depression is a component of lots and lots of brainweirds. so it's only true that you're "making it up" in the sense that depression lies, it is a lying liar that makes you think all kinds of negative things. so yes at some level a depressed brain is "making up" things. but it's not at a conscious level.

(when i learned about this particular symptom, it blew my mind a little bit. the causality is backwards, i'm not depressed because everything is horrible-- i think everything is horrible because i'm depressed!)

 

My mind confuses me tbh I just wish it could settle on a constant static symptom set so that I can be diagnosed instead of all this wishy-washy umming and ahhing.

I've been feeling pretty much fine for a lot of the past month (aside from the bouts of shittiness I talked about above and even that has been slackening off this week) and that really scares me because while it should be a very good thing it makes me feel guilty of having thrown up so much of a fuss last autumn/turn of the year.

I mean yeah I had a big rant on the previous page but that was largely a result of my taking drugs and I mean that's entirely my own fault if I felt more shitty after that. Idk. I don't say anything here that isn't true as it appears to me at least but all of it seems to be getting less relevant recently. It makes me wonder why I'm even here or in therapy at all maybe I should just stop it all and shut up lmao

I don't know why I'm being selfish and feeling bad about feeling better but lol who even knows at this point. Edit: Yeah I'll just stop talking sorry for throwing fusses

 

A metaphor thing: so suppose that you are walking outside and suddenly this rainstorm that you were not prepared for comes out of nowhere. You get drenched and cold. Some time later you don't feel cold and wet any more. Maybe you got home and into dry warm clothes, maybe your brain is doing the "this is fine" thing, maybe some other stuff happened, I don't know. Either way, you don't have the "cold, wet, not fun" experience any more. And maybe it feels silly to have thrown a fuss, because it was only a little rainstorm.

But this is not quite right. The you that was cold and wet was entirely right to feel that his situation was bullshit and unpleasant. Just because the current you feels better does not mean the you-a-while-ago was wrong or fussing too much. He felt cold and wet, that is an unpleasant state.

It's probably a natural thing to see things in the past as less powerful than things in the present. Like, you have already gotten through them, they're not looming any more. But this does not necessarily mean things in the past were as small as you're perceiving them now to be.

 

To extend @Silvereye's rainstorm metaphor- therapy is like having wellies and an umbrella in monsoon season. The weather may let up a bit every now and then, but it's still a good idea to carry your umbrella around until the weather is much more reliably sunny.

 

Also, tbh, the best time to work on shit is when you are feeling better, because then you have the emotional capacity and spoons to actually do shit. Grab the opportunity now, don't let the badfeels ambush you again because you didn't think to check the rubble for the villain's body and slit their throat just to be sure.

well, screw "fault." If it's a problem, it's a problem and needs dealt with, no matter where it's coming from.

 

Therapy was really good today. I may have had reservations at first, but these past few sessions have been really useful. I actually appear to be learning new things about myself, which I didn't expect. because seeing as part of my issue has been excessive rumination I kind of thought that I'd covered all the angles. Apparently not, my therapist has been making some really good connections this week especially that I hadn't seen before looking to get to the root of the cause of all of this.

Also, she essentially confirmed that I have some form of OCD, which is good to know, and pretty much what I had expected.

 

I'm really glad that therapy is working! It sounds like your therapist is doing exactly what they're supposed to.

I'm not surprised that you overlooked some angles, so to speak, despite constant thinking. That's the problem with mental illnesses, like depression, how they hijack our thinking and feeling and blind us to reality, and it's really hard to see the flaws in the thinking apparatus when the apparatus itself is flawed (I think this is something of a catch 22? I'm not sure if that is the right expression). I find that fighting against my self criticism and expectations to be something like trying to swim out of a current: if you don't know that you are in a current it carries you out to open sea, your swimming in any direction but the current is likely to do little more than tiring you out. But once the nice lifeguard (therapist) pointed out that I was in a current, and taught me to not swim against it, but cut across it until I'm out, I've been getting to other places (thoughts). I'm still learning to detect currents so I can react properly instead of being dragged, but I'm in shallower, less dangerous waters. Part of learning is a rough map of how my mind works: what currents and sandbars exist, where to flee, how long I can swim against or through a current, etc.. The therapist in this analogy has higher ground, be it a boat or land or height, and can see things one cannot see because of slogging through waves that break over one's head.

I hope learning all this gives you much deserved relief. No one deserves to be their own malfunctioning brain's punching bag.

 

Urgh. I've just overslept by several hours and missed my appointment this week. Damn damn damn

 

It happens! It's happened to me a few times where I fell asleep in a nap and missed my appointment. Send a message or email if you can (I find it easier than phone) and give yourself a max of two apologies in the body of the message so you don't have to dwell on it. I try to dash those out before the guilt shames me into inaction, just a simple "I am really sorry, I don't have an excuse I simply overslept. I wanted you to know it isn't physical sickness. I'll see you at (next appointment). I really am sorry" type message.

Once I even simply completely forgot an hour before the appointment, I sat at home futzing on the Internet and didn't realize I had forgotten until my therapist called half an hour later to see if I was ok. It was horrible.

Since then I've started using my phone's calendar so it gives me reminders of appointments an hour to half an hour before the appointment.

[Edit] Of course, that only works when I remember to take my phone off silent mode.