T is for Talk Therapy

I started off at the mental health services at my university in 2006. There, I met with a clinical psychology student. I think it’s great that universities run these programs to give mental health sufferers free services and give the students some clinical experience, but I wouldn’t recommend it for your first talk session. It was so awkward! She had to record the session to go over later with her supervisor. She was really nice, but I didn’t know what to say and she didn’t know how to get me talking. There was a lot of awkward silence.

The next one I saw was a psychologist. She was a bubbly dose of sunshine, which was nice most of the time, but hard to take on some days. She knew how to get me talking. I appreciated having those 50 minutes with her each week to talk about what was on my mind. I didn’t want to burden friends with my dark thoughts, so having that time to talk about myself was great. I didn’t feel guilty unloading on her, I was paying her to listen after all. I saw Ms. Sunshine for several years. Eventually I stopped seeing her because I turned 25 and was no longer covered by my father’s insurance. Ms. Sunshine was expensive!

Ms. Sunshine was very focused. Since it appears that I’ve had depression since childhood, she was convinced the answer was in my past. We went over and over it, but nothing. So Ms. Sunshine moved on to my relationships. She made it clear she didn’t think my current relationship was good for me. I was dating my husband back then. She thought we had too much in common, that he didn’t bring me out of my comfort zone enough (socially). She often compared us to a Venn Diagram. You know, each circle is a person in the relationship and they should only overlap so much. She thought we overlapped too much. I didn’t see my relationship as a problem. I was fine with having things in common and he didn’t need to be really outgoing, he brought me out of my comfort zone in different ways; hiking and travel for example. In the end, as much as I liked her, it was probably good that I stopped seeing her. Her fixation on my relationship wasn’t really getting me anywhere.

The next person I started talking to was a social worker. I was on a waiting list for over a year before I was able to see him. He was convinced that it was my Ph.D. that was making me depressed. He actually told me he didn’t think it was the right thing for me and that I should try something different. That was a big blow, I was heart broken, but I knew it was what I wanted to be doing. These people are smart and they are here to listen and to help us learn to live with our depression, but it doesn’t mean they have all the answers. Had I seen him when I was diagnosed back in 2006, he probably would have succeeded in changing my career path, but not now. I didn’t let him talk me out of the Ph.D. I asked to be transferred to someone else.

The next psychologist was great. We worked on my anxiety, perfectionist tendencies and self-esteem. She didn’t once tell me that my relationship or my career were wrong for me. She listened to me and what I wanted for myself and helped me figure out how to work with what I had to get where I wanted to go. I learned a lot from her and I am still practising what I learned from her today. Unfortunately, the health care system here only allows you a limited number of sessions, so I had to stop seeing her.

Currently I see a psychiatrist, Dr. Dreamy I call him, whom I have mixed feelings about. I’ve only seen him a few times and there has been long wait times between appointments. There might be some potential there, we’ll see.

I’ve had ups and downs with talk therapy. I think it is important to have time to talk about yourself. Saying things out loud and having a neutral party ask questions can make you see perspectives that maybe you weren’t able to acknowledge on your own. These people are caring and intelligent and trying to be objective, but they are only human too. They don’t have all the answers and they may sometimes express their personal opinions which can be right, or wrong. Listen to what they say, learn from them, but in the end, you are in control of your own path and you can choose to incorporate what they recommend or not.

The F Word

Not that F word!

There were a lot of F words that could fit my theme. I have talked about friendship and being “fine” recently, so I was thinking of others; fear, flat, fatigue, frustrated, foolish, frantic, furious. All of these are feelings. So there we go, F is for the other dreaded F word, feelings. Depression encompasses a lot of different feelings…or none at all. It’s a bit of a paradox in that sense.

Feelings are mediated by the limbic system in your brain and the autonomic nervous system in your body. Feelings are systemic. They are a whole brain-body reaction. When you panic for example, you are having thoughts of dread and doom, but you body is involuntarily reacting too; a higher heart rate, quickened breathing, sweating, shaking, etc. Every reaction requires a stimulus. Often the stimulus is self-talk or an external event, but it can be unconscious too. Feelings are also influenced by stress. When in a state of stress, your body is already primed for an emotional reaction. That’s why it takes so little to set you off when you are under pressure.

Feelings are subject to suppression. You can actively hide them or hold them in when you feel they are inappropriate for your current environment. Other times they may be unpleasant and its easier to distract your mind and avoid them than deal with them. The psychologist says that because I don’t express my feelings, I end up tired and depressed. Psych also says that by blocking my feelings I give myself anxiety. So it’s my fault I’m anxious and depressed? Thanks a lot. That makes me feel a lot better. I believe the psychologist is partially right, so how do I solve this problem? Identify and express. Easier said than done.

Often I feel overwhelmed by the intensity of my feelings or lack of. I feel buried with no way out. I don’t like to talk about my feelings. Not only is it uncomfortable, but I don’t know how to express what I’m feeling in words. I think I’ve been able to identify the basic feelings I have trouble expressing; anger and sadness. These are very basic emotions, there are probably a whole bunch of more complex emotions mixed in there, but we’d be here forever if I talked about those. So anger and sadness it is!

I have a lot of anger towards myself. I have discovered that is because I am a perfectionist. I am working on that. I hold in my anger towards other people too. I think it’s because I am worried about hurting them (emotionally) or what they will think of me. This is silly because when people are angry with me, they tell me and I’m not hurt and I don’t think any less of them. I have to learn to be more assertive.

I’m not really sure where the sadness comes from. Maybe it’s linked to the anger somehow. More likely I’m just chemically imbalanced. I do feel less of the sadness when I am medicated.

So I have identified my feelings. According to psych, that is half the battle. So now for expression. There are three ways I can think of to express feelings. 1) Talk to someone, 2) write them down, 3) physically discharge them.

For anger, I’m choosing to physically discharge it through exercise. I have done karate in the past and found that sparring helped. Since I can’t go beating up people on the street, I’m going to start exercising more. I plan to get back into doing cardio and maybe some kickboxing on my own.

Sadness is a bit harder to deal with. Since I am awful and using my words, 1) and 2) don’t really work for me. So how do you physically discharge sadness? Crying comes to mind. Sometimes I can cry, sometimes I just can’t. As you can see, I’m still trying to figure this one out. What do you do to manage your feelings?