Top 5 things that have helped my OCD

I have put together a list of things that have helped me most with my obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Other things have been of help to me, including meditation. But the following list includes what has been most important.

Not all of these things are for everyone. For example, I realize that medication is not the right choice for everyone. But these are the things that worked for me.

Once I made the list, I couldn’t rank them. I couldn’t say for sure that one was more important than another in helping me control and live with the obsessions and compulsions. So here’s my list, in no particular order.

Medication

Medication changed my OCD from being debilitating. With medication, I was able to consider that there might be ways to live with this disorder.

I have had to try different medications through the years, mostly because of my co-morbid diagnosis of depression. It’s not an easy thing, to change medications, to wait for them to work, or not work.

But it has been worth it to be able to gain some distance from an all-consuming OCD to an OCD that I can work with.

I’ve written more about my medication journey here.

Therapy

I’ve had talk therapy through the years, but the therapy that has helped me the most has been the practical cognitive behavioral therapy that I’ve had this year.

While it’s not been the formal exposure and response prevention therapy, it included exposures and the whole philosophy of learning to tolerate the anxiety and moving beyond it. The exposures my therapist led me in were helpful and instructive.

While the CBT got waylaid because of other therapy needed for my depression, I look forward to getting back to it. In the meantime, I’ve been doing some of my own exposures.

Brain Lock

I first read Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior-A Four-Step Self-Treatment Method to Change Your Brain Chemistry, by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz with Beverly Beyette, in the 1990s, and I worked on its principles on my own with some success.

The book taught me to walk away from compulsions even though I was feeling intense anxiety, and I learned that the anxiety eventually died down.

I wrote in detail about how I use “Brain Lock” in this post.

Adopting a cat

Adopting Waddles in 2000 changed my life in many ways. One of the ways was to give me almost constant exposures for my contamination OCD and my hyper-responsibility OCD, though I would not have known to call them exposures.

I learned to live with an animal and clean up messes without freaking out. I learned the joy of responsibility, which began to outweigh my fears of responsibility.

Learning that I wasn’t alone

From finding out a person I really respected and liked had OCD to starting a blog and connecting online with others who have OCD, finding out I wasn’t alone in my suffering has been a big component of my OCD improvement.

What has helped you the most in your battles with OCD and other anxiety?

Update: my 50th year

About two and a half months ago, I started my 50^th year with some plans. I thought I’d update you on how I’m doing.

My therapy is continuing. My therapist wants me to make weekly appointments through at least October for the CBASP for chronic depression.

I hope then we will have done enough work that I can focus more on cognitive behavior therapy for the obsessive-compulsive disorder.

My therapist and I are already seeing results from the CBASP therapy, so I feel like my time with him is well spent.

And my own efforts with the OCD, with encouragement from my therapist, are helping me.

One of my 50^th year goals is to get in better physical shape. I am using the plan to participate in the Giblet Jog 5K, on Thanksgiving Day to inspire me. I’m scared to death to participate in a race—I never have.

And I’ve started my “training”—if you can call it that—very slowly, without consistency.

So I’ve got some work to do within the next three months.

Another one of my goals for my 50^th year is to finish a draft of my first book. I’m not aiming for a perfect draft or the last draft, but a first draft.

I have finally written down details of how I’m going to accomplish this.

I will be continuing the writing that I’m doing now—scenes, vignettes and stories—until Nov. 30. I’ll use December to go through everything and find a structure. Then I’ll start the actual draft in January and have it finished by May 30, my 50^th birthday.

Keeping to this schedule will mean early mornings and late nights, but I am quite determined to get it done.

To accomplish these goals, I’ll have to fight the procrastination that seeps into my activities. I’ll be writing more about procrastination in a future post.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that a few weeks ago I decided go from posting every weekday to posting three times a week.

That didn’t work out. I just seemed to have more to say than three posts a week could take care of.

I’ve decided to compromise with myself. I will post Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. That will give me some breathing room while also giving me the time for doing something I love so much, blogging.

Are you working on some projects that you’ve set goals for? What would you like to share about them? Do you have any advice on how to stick to goals?

How mental illness has limited me, but not stopped me

Would I be a college professor? Would I live in Virginia? Would I be a published author by now?

Yesterday, I wrote about how my father’s dreams may have changed during the course of his life. Today, I’m writing about something similar.

In July I wrote a post in which I asked for suggestions on topics for this blog. One suggestion was to write about whether or not mental illness caused a limitation in my life.

The easy answer to that question is yes; obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression most definitely have limited my life.

There are many things I haven’t done because of my mental illnesses.

Because I was in a deep depression, I transferred from one college to another. That had a profound effect on my life, changing what I did after graduation and what my opportunities and influences may be been.

Chiefly because of my OCD and the ways it affected my reading and writing, I never finished my doctorate degree in English. I made it through the classes, the written and oral exams and the dissertation presentation. But I never wrote the dissertation.

And how many missed opportunities were there because I was too scared to try? How many people did I never meet because of my anxiety?

What job would I have? What friends would I have? Where would I have traveled?

Sometimes these missed opportunities, these “if only” statements grieve me. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t have OCD and depression.

What kind of person would I be? Who would be in my life?

But, of course, without OCD and depression, I may not have had a better life, just a different one.

Do I want to be a college professor now? No. Am I happy in the job I’m in now? Yes. Do I like living in Virginia? Yes. Do I enjoy the writing I do now? Yes.

And most importantly, am I happy with the people in my life? Yes.

The path my life took may not be what I planned when I was a teenager and in my 20s, but it led me to my husband, Larry. It led to our life together.

And the path led me to become the person I am today. Who is to say it’s not the person I’m meant to be?

The questions, the “what ifs,” float around me sometimes, but I have hope that I am where I am for a reason.

That doesn’t mean I don’t work to lift some of the limitations I’ve allowed OCD and depression to place on me. Usually, those are situations where I feel fear, and I’m learning ways to push through the fear.

But focusing on my past will not make my life today better. I’ve grieved enough for what might have been. It’s time to truly focus on life today, on what I have to do today.

Can asking “what if” ever help us? When does it become more harmful than helpful?

A snippet of memoir: Making butter

Me at age one.

The path that took me from the first signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder and the accompanying depression when I was a child to the official diagnosis sitting in a psychiatrist’s office when I was 26 is not a straight one.

Though the OCD and depression have affected me most of my life, I remember times when I didn’t obsess about sin, dirt and danger, when I didn’t wash my hands and pray constantly to try to rid myself of that sin, dirt and danger.

I was born in 1963 and grew up in South Central Virginia, in the Piedmont area of the state about an hour from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west.

My father was a full time farmer when I was born, and my mother was a homemaker. They brought me home from the hospital to two older brothers, one 11 years older and one two years older.

My mother has told stories about how much I slept as a baby and how the doctor told her to wake me up to feed me because I wasn’t gaining weight as I should have.

I don’t believe my mother was deliberately not feeding me enough or was neglecting me. But I do think it was probably a relief to her that I slept a lot and was a low-maintenance baby. She had a lot of other responsibilities to tend to.

Our farm was a full working farm. We had milk cows, beef cows, pigs and chickens, plus my father raised tobacco. There were animals to care for and crops to tend and things like butter to make and eggs to gather to sell.

One of my earliest memories is watching my mother make butter.

For some reason, I don’t remember her churning the milk from our milk cows, though of course she did. What I remember is what she did with the result of the churning.

I remember her at the kitchen table, holding a golden yellow ball above a glass bowl of water, splashing it and washing it off.

At the same time, she moved her hands quickly, turning the ball and smoothing it.



Butter press.



Then she pushed the ball of butter into the wooden press her father had made. She pushed the butter in tight with a small wooden paddle.

Inside the butter press.

The butter pressed up against a flower design inside, and when she pushed the butter out on wax paper, it was round with petals imprinted on top.

I have that butter press now, and it brings back good memories.

Have you ever lived on a farm? Would you like to? What about living on a farm appeals to you? What old way of doing something, like making butter, would you like to try?

Making art to ease the anxiety and depression

Mandala #1

I am not an artist.

I have never been able to draw.

   I have taken one art class in my lifetime, one called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” which helped me understand that, unlike an artist who draws what he or she sees, I tend to draw what I know.

For example, I know that a dining chair has four legs of equal length, so that’s what I draw—and it doesn’t look like a chair. One who sees like an artist, though, automatically draws the chair with perspective, drawing how the chair appears.

Other than my work with that one class, I have allowed my lack of basic talent keep me from my love of creating, of color and of design.

Then, as I wrote about in a past post, last fall I pulled out my art supplies and started coloring and drawing mandalas. I consider making them part of my therapy.

That making art, being creative, can be therapeutic is not a new idea. According to the International Art Therapy Organization website, art therapy is considered a mental health profession, though it is also used in non-clinical settings.

I have not participated in art therapy with an art therapist. I have simply found that making art, specifically mandalas, helps to calm my anxiety and feel the satisfaction of completing something.

In her blog “The Healing Arts,” Cathy Malchiodi wrote about art therapy using mandalas.

“According to [Carl Gustav] Jung, mandalas symbolize ‘a safe refuge of inner reconciliation and wholeness.’ They have the potential to call forth something universal within, perhaps even the proverbial archetypal Self. And at the same time, they give us an experience of wholeness amid the chaos of every day life, making the ‘sacred circle’ one of the very coolest art therapy interventions for both soothing the soul and meeting oneself.”

An idea for a mandala usually starts with an idea or experience that I want to express. I may not put pencil to paper for days, but I mull over how I want the design to look and what I want to include.



Mandala #2



Sometimes a picture of a mandala is complete in my imagination before I draw it. Other times, I create as I draw.

In mandala #1 pictured with this post, I chose to express my priorities. At the center of the circle, the blue, smaller circle represents for me the center of all life. Around that I have the bond of the wedding rings to represent my marriage, and other symbols to denote my spiritual life, my cats and my writing and reading.

Around that are other symbols representing my love of animals, nature and music and my search for peace.

In mandala #2, I created a picture of chronic depression: the dips into the darkness of depression, the gray of the chronic disorder and the blues and greens of whole life available.

I enjoy creating such pictures to look at later and even meditate on.

The process of sitting and drawing and coloring is relaxing. I focus on the task at hand and practice mindfulness. And creating a mandala teaches me about myself.

I want to venture into other art forms and types. I just need to get over my fear of not being good enough and my notion that if I’m not good at something, I shouldn’t try.

What activities do you engage in to feel soothed, to feel like you’re getting in touch with your real self? Do you make art? If so, what kind? How does it make you feel?





Sick and down: How physical illness can affect mental health

I’ve been sick since last week. Not seriously ill, just a cold with a bad cough, but it makes me feel miserable.

What made it worse was that I took a couple of days of vacation to go along with the 4^th of July holiday, so I was off work last Wednesday through Sunday, and felt bad for most of that time.

I woke up Thursday morning with a sore throat and it was down hill from there.

My sinuses were stopped up, then runny, then stopped up, then half and half. I sneezed. I coughed. My throat continued to hurt.

I self-treated the best I could with Tylenol, antihistamines, hot tea, lots of other fluids and as much rest as I could get.

I’m telling you this to illustrate my next point: I also felt down.

Being physically sick usually means my mood goes down.

At least part of the reason lies in what I feel like doing when I’m sick: nothing.

I have been so miserable that I haven’t felt like doing much reading, writing, drawing, exercising, cross-stitch, crocheting—many of the things I depend on to make me feel better.

I don’t feel like doing any of the things I listed as self-care measures in a post last week.

I don’t even feel like watching TV or playing games on my phone.

I did exercise last Thursday, but I haven’t since.

My sleep patterns have been messed up. Friday morning at 4 a.m., I was wide-awake. Saturday afternoon, I was dead to the world. The rest of the nights have been spent battling a cough.

I’ve learned two things. One is that my physical health has a direct impact on my mental health. The better I feel physically, the better able I am to help myself with my mental health.

And how I spend my time and my activity level are very important to my mental health. It’s important for me to read, to write, to think, to write some more. It’s important for me to move around, to use my body as well as my brain.

In his book Depression: A Guide for the Newly Diagnosed (which I reviewed here), Lee H. Coleman Ph.D., ABPP writes about the importance of daily self-care in depression recovery: “When you’re recovering from depression, it’s especially important for you to have some routine in you life. This doesn’t mean having a boring, predictable lifestyle, but it does mean taking care of yourself by having a regular bedtime; consistent, healthy meals; and, ideally, a program of exercise” (p. 135).

I would agree.

How about you? When you are physically ill, does it adversely affect how you feel mentally?

Back-story: A clue to chronic depression

This is one of the most difficult posts I’ve written.

I want to tell you a story that will provide a clue to why I or anyone else might suffer from chronic depression.

It’s an incident in my life that offers a small explanation about why I have struggled with feeling “good enough” all my life, about why I still have times when I feel worthless and hopeless.

My therapist told me that those worthless and hopeless feelings are at the center of my chronic depression. That’s what we work on during our sessions together, when we analyze specific personal interactions and role play, where I practice being more assertive and strong.

I’m telling this story so you can understand the things that can play into depression, including chronic depression.

Perhaps you can see yourself in this situation and know that you are not alone.

My parents were not evil people. What they did to me through the years was wrong. What they did to me was probably what their parents taught them to do. That’s not an excuse, just perhaps a bit of a reason.

This story takes place in the kitchen in our farmhouse. I don’t remember exactly how old I was. I was probably 8 or 9 years old, definitely under 10 because we moved from that house when I was 10.

The kitchen in my first home, the white frame house with the red tin roof, was the center of the household. We had no formal dining room, so we ate in the kitchen. When company was there, it wasn’t unusual for them to sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking.

The distinguishing image of that kitchen for me was the floor. It was made up of linoleum squares, alternating green and yellow.

It was a real green, not an avocado 70s green, and a real yellow, not a gold yellow.

The squares were perfect squares, not rectangles. They were about six or seven inches on each side. The entire kitchen floor was covered with this pattern.

It was in the evening. We had been somewhere—probably church, probably a revival service. We—Mama, Daddy and my second brother and me—were standing around the kitchen having a drink of soda before going to bed. It was probably either Pepsi or Dr. Pepper, because those were the sodas that we usually had in the house.

I was drinking mine from a Dixie cup. We had a dispenser of the cups in the kitchen. What probably happened was one bottle of drink was opened and shared in Dixie cups, with Daddy drinking what was left from the glass bottle.

I remember laughing. I don’t know if I said something I shouldn’t have or if it was my laughing that was wrong.

But suddenly Daddy’s hand was in my face. His open hand slammed into my nose and mouth.

I remember how numb my face felt. I remember crying and trying to drink my soda from the Dixie cup through lips with little feeling. I don’t know if I was ordered to finish my drink, if I really wanted the drink, or if I was being defiant in continuing to drink, like being slapped in the face wasn’t going to stop me.

Why do I remember that when I was spanked and slapped other times during my childhood? I don’t know. I remember the numbness of my face so much, and the difficulty of drinking from the cup with trembling lips.

The slap seemed to come out of nowhere. I wasn’t anticipating it, so I must not have realized that I had done something, or said something that would make my father mad.

I usually knew if I was treading the line of making one of my parents mad at me and was putting myself at the risk of being spanked, slapped, or yelled at.

When I told this story to my therapist, he asked me how it made me feel.

It made me angry. It made me feel defenseless. It made me feel like a terrible person. It confused me. It made me feel worthless. It made me feel hopeless.

I do not want to feel that way now, and I am working on that. My reaction to my childhood is not going to adversely affect my whole life. I am going to beat this depression.

What are you determined to overcome?

What I don't see when I'm depressed

  This week I’m building my posts around the five senses. Monday I used the sense of touch, Tuesday, the sense of taste and Wednesday the sense of smell. Today, I consider the sense of sight.

A few years ago, I was taking a morning walk/jog before work. I went my usual route. As I ran slowly down the street, I was thinking, but not about my form, my rhythm, or about anything I saw around me.

I was thinking about how depressed I was. How hopeless I was about my job, my future, my life. My feet seemed to plod more than fly. Just one step in front of the other. Just going through the motions.

Sometimes going through the motions is all we can do. Sometimes it’s helpful to do the action first. The motivation will come later.

But sometimes the plodding is just getting through time.

And when I’m just trying to get through time, I miss a lot of what is happening around me.

I miss the sun breaking through the treetops to give a little light to the dark woods beside the road.

I miss the blooms of the flowers.

I miss nature.

I miss life.

I’m in a better place now, but I still find that it’s too easy to get wrapped up in my thoughts and not notice what’s surrounding me.    

Here are some photos of some things I don’t want to miss on my walks.

What do you miss seeing when life gets too anxious or seems too difficult?

Chronic depression and discerning what I want



Claude Monet, "Weeping Willow." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_Weeping_Willow.jpg



When my therapist and I do the CBASP therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Analysis of Systems Psychotherapy) for chronic depression, one of the key points in the session is to pinpoint my desired outcome of the specific interpersonal interaction we’re discussing.

Those specific interactions are what the therapy is built around. Every week I bring in an example—positive, negative, or a little of both—of an interaction with another person, and we analyze it in a systematic way.

There are two types of outcomes we discuss.

The actual outcome is based on what actually happened. It’s the last thing I did or said during the interaction.

The desired outcome is the best possible outcome given the circumstances.

That’s where I’m having the most trouble, deciding what the desired outcome should, or could, be.

Sometimes I literally draw a blank when my therapist asks me, “What did you want to happen during this interaction?”

It’s not unusual, my therapist said, for people with chronic depression to not know what they want.

In my mind, I view “the right thing” or “the best thing” in opposition to “what I want.” I tend to think of “what I want” as the selfish thing.

What I want?

I don’t mean I have trouble deciding what flavor ice cream I want, or which outfit I should wear.

I mean decisions about what I want out of life: what is good for me and what is not, when to speak up and when to be quiet, how I want to spend my time, what I should be doing with my life, what my purpose is—the big but basic wants.

Effects of depression

Depression can suck the energy right out of me. Sometimes I feel dull and lifeless and all I want to do is sleep. I don’t want to do the things that I usually enjoy, like reading or cross stitch. The thought of doing anything overwhelms me, so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I want. I don’t care.

I also sometimes have a difficult time knowing if I’m making a decision based on my depression or on an understanding of what I want in life.

And the hallmark of chronic depression is a sense of hopelessness. So to consider what one wants begs the question, what does it matter?

So how can I help myself?

At this point, it’s important for me to consider what I want—something novel to me—and then consider whether or not it’s the right thing.

There are some ways that help me decide what I want. Most of them involve quiet activity:

*Writing helps me sort through my thoughts. Often while writing a post, I will figure out what message I’m trying to convey only after I write it.

I can relate to the writer Joan Didion, who said, “I write to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.”

With better thinking, I can gain better self-understanding.

*Quieting my mind helps me to focus. The best way for me to slow down my thoughts is to sit quietly in meditation, listening to my breath and the other sounds around me, imagining my thoughts passing through my mind.

As the frenetic pace of the thoughts slows, I can pay better attention to what’s going on now.

I have found that if I meditate regularly, I am calmer and better able to attend to now. The key is regular meditation.

*Nature helps me. Sitting by the river and listening to the water, talking a walk, and biking through fields and trees soothes me and calms me.

It’s a process. I’m still having a difficult time discerning what I want out of an interaction. But I’m working on it.

  Do you ever feel that what you want is in conflict with what is right? How do you resolve that conflict? And how do you discern what it is that you want?

Tell them how I feel: my battle with chronic depression



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_Willem_van_Gogh_041.jpg



What exactly does it mean to “stuff your feelings”?

The image that comes immediately to mind is of me pushing hazy objects down into my chest, literally stuffing my body and keeping the hazy objects, or my feelings, hidden.

I have learned as I’ve gone through Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP) for chronic depression that I have a habit of stuffing my feelings.

But I thought of it as more of a problem of holding anger in and not expressing it appropriately. Expressing and releasing those feelings would just ease up on my anxiety, I thought.

I’m learning there’s more to it than that.

During our last session, my therapist and I talked about an interaction that had occurred at work.

It was a situation where I felt angry and annoyed that I had not been kept in the loop of what was going on in the office.

When this happens, I feel like I’m unimportant in the workplace, and feel very frustrated.

Or, more specifically, the effects of my co-worker doing this is that I feel like I’m unimportant in the workplace, and I feel very frustrated.

It may not be what he intends, but that is the effect.

During said interaction, I was able to express what I would and would not do during the situation we were discussing, but I did not express my problems with what was the larger issue to me: that this is a repeated instance of this co-worker not including me in conversations and decisions pertinent to my work.

In other words, I’ve discussed this with him previously. I’ve had several conversations with him about how I dislike him keeping me out of the loop.

He has been receptive, at least on the surface, but nothing changes very much.

And so we were right back in an interaction where, once again, I found out about something at the last minute and felt blindsighted.

According to my therapist, it was a good thing that I was able to state clearly what I did not feel comfortable doing in this particular work situation. To move the interaction up a notch, to make it even more effective, I could have brought up the larger issue and how I felt about it.

The co-worker might have been understanding. He might have made an effort to change how he did things. He might have told me something along the lines of “so what.” My therapist said. I couldn’t control that.

What I could control was my expression of how I felt.

“But why bother if it isn’t going to change anything?” That was my question.

“Even if it doesn’t change anything, you have reminded yourself that your feelings are important,” he said.

Oh.

It was one of those “aha” moments for me.

He said after being told explicitly and implicitly while growing up that what I felt wasn’t important, I believed that my feelings weren’t important. That made me believe that I was helpless to change anything in my life, leaving me feeling hopeless.

I need to start reminding myself that my feelings are important. It’s not that everything needs to go my way or that my feelings are more important than anyone else’s feelings.

But they are just as important.

So even if telling someone how their behavior affects me, and how I feel about that, doesn’t change the circumstances, it can change me. It can help me feel less helpless and hopeless.

That’s a powerful tool in my work against chronic depression.

Do you have trouble expressing how you feel? If so, how has that affected you? If not, how does expressing yourself make you feel?

Swing at that ball: Coping with chronic depression

I was 20 years old, walking across my college campus, in front of one of the main buildings. I don’t remember where I was going and or where I was coming from. What I do remember is thinking, I don’t look forward to what the day might bring anymore.

I no longer thought of the day as open to anything good or surprising. It was open to only the same thing, the numbness and sadness I felt everyday.

That is my personal definition of dysthymia.

My therapist has diagnosed me with dysthymia, or chronic depression.

From what I’ve learned in therapy, chronic depression is not an unending bout of deep depression that leaves me unable to function.

Rather, it is a consistent and constant low mood. I may drop into deep depression, but when it improves, it will improve only so much. My mood doesn’t lift above that low level.

My therapist said one of the hallmarks of chronic depression is a sense of hopelessness and of helplessness. People with this disorder tend to believe that no matter what they do, it won’t make a difference. They may stop even trying.

Hopelessness is what I felt that day on campus. No more hope that the day might bring something good.

Another characteristic of people with chronic depression is that they sometimes can’t even pinpoint what they want, because it has never been about what they want. They’ve never seriously considered it, because, again, what good would it do?

My interpretation of chronic depression.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health’s website, dysthymia is defined as “depressive symptoms that last a long time (2 years or longer) but are less severe than those of major depression.”

I like to look at a list of the main signs of depression every now and then and remind myself that it is a disorder with symptoms, not just a word we throw around to describe a bad day.

The NIMH website provides the following information about the symptoms of depression.

Different people have different symptoms. Some symptoms of depression include:

*Feeling sad or "empty"

*Feeling hopeless, irritable, anxious, or guilty

*Loss of interest in favorite activities

*Feeling very tired

*Not being able to concentrate or remember details

*Not being able to sleep, or sleeping too much

*Overeating, or not wanting to eat at all

*Thoughts of suicide, suicide attempts

*Aches or pains, headaches, cramps, or digestive problems.

How has having chronic depression affected my life? I think about that often. And I wonder what my life would have been like if I didn’t have OCD either.

Being depressed and having OCD have affected my life in some concrete ways.

For example, I never finished my doctorate. I was so close. I was ABD, which stands for all-but-dissertation. But I never finished—I never really started writing—my dissertation.

I also never aimed high in my career. I stifled what I really wanted to be—a writer—and did what was safe. I spent years working as a public servant, first at the state employment agency and then as a health educator for the health department. They were rewarding jobs in their own way, and I enjoyed much of the work, but it wasn’t where I wanted to be.

And my interpersonal interactions are affected by chronic depression. I tend not to ask enough questions of others. I make a lot of assumptions. I stuff a lot of anger instead of expressing how I feel because I fear conflict.

The thought and behavior patterns that perpetuate chronic depression run deep, but we can learn new ways of thinking and behaving.

I want to get out of this cycle of chronic depression, deep depression, back to chronic depression. I am afraid that I never will.

But with the CBASP therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy), and what I’m doing on my own with study and practice, I am trying.

My therapist loves the analogy of the baseball player who is afraid he won’t hit the ball. He’s so afraid of not hitting the ball that he won’t even try. So he’s guaranteed never to hit the ball.

But if he goes up to bat, and practices good form, and makes an effort, he might hit the ball. Even if he doesn’t, he tried.

I’m up at bat, and I’m practicing good form. I’m doing the therapy assignment each week, and my therapist and I work hard during each session. I read, I listen, I think, I write. I practice what I’m learning.

And I am getting better. I am feeling more positive. I have more energy. I’m stopping the negative thinking more quickly.

I still have doubts. I still get anxious when I think about the possibility of not getting a lot better. I worry about not trying hard enough, or not doing the right things, or missing something vital my therapist tells me, or not understanding the therapy.

At least part of that doubt comes from my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I want to ensure there is no miscommunication. I want to make sure I’m not doing something wrong. I’m obsessing over it.

But despite my fears, I am doing my best. I will arise above that low level.

And I will look forward to each day.

Is there something you are up at bat for? How do you practice good form and swing at the ball?