Focusing on the emotions that are

I am afraid of snakes. Very afraid. I’m so afraid of them, I have a hard time looking at pictures of them. I feel anxious just hearing other peoples’ stories about encountering them.

Larry has found about five snake skins in the yard this summer. For a few days after he finds them, I move carefully when I go outside. I examine every stick from afar before I venture into the yard.

When he saw a live snake in the side yard near his truck, I could barely listen to his story. I thought about it later, feeling anxious and worried. I wished for winter.

So why am I including with this post a photo of a snake skin?

I made myself take the picture. Though I felt fear, I made myself walk up to the skin. I held up my phone and took several photos. I made myself look at the photos.

I’m not sure if this “exposure” did much good. When I was flipping through the photos on my phone earlier this week, I shuddered—I did that “jump out of my skin” move—when I unexpectedly saw one of the snake skin photos.

But still, I keep looking at the photo. And I’m sharing it with you.

I’ve been dealing with anxiety over life issues in a similar way. Life has been hard lately, as you know. Bedtime is probably the hardest time because I have less to distract me.

I decided that I would try an experiment. Instead of trying to immediately change my thoughts or cover up the bad emotions with visualizations or calming recitations, I would focus on experiencing the anxiety.

I feel the anxiety the most in my chest. It’s like a weight in the center of my chest. When panic comes, my chest physically hurts.

I have focused on the hate I’ve felt, too. I’m not proud to say that, but that’s what I’ve felt at times. It, too, is a heavy weight.

Anxiety, hate, anger, hopelessness—they all settle in my chest. I feel like it’s going to burst.

I want to get up and move or talk or read or listen to music.

But I try to lie there and be mindful of how I’m feeling, even for just a short while.

My hope is that the more I face my emotions, the less afraid I’ll be of them and the less I will do to avoid facing the issues that are causing the emotions in the first place.

My focus on emotions is not a new idea. There is a lot of good information out there about living mindfully and accepting our emotions. I did an online search and found some good, science-based information HERE and HERE.

One good thing that has come out of my experimentation with this is that I’ve become less afraid of being still and alone with my thoughts and emotions. I hope this leads to more calmness and peace.

And the snake skin photo? I hope from now on the only snake skin I see will be in a picture. That’s about as far as I want to go with that exposure.

How do you deal with uncomfortable emotions?

Letting go of emotions that feed my OCD and depression

As I wrote about in my last post, I have made “letting go” the theme to guide my goals in 2013.

I have some heavy, serious emotions to deal with and to try to let go of: anger, sadness, resentment, despair, even hate.

I don’t like to admit having these feelings and emotions, but they are there, sometimes lying underneath the day-to-day feelings, sometimes rising to the surface.

I have found myself lying down at night, unable to go to sleep because of the thoughts running through my head, ruminations and obsessions that make those negative emotions rise to the surface and feed my anxiety, OCD and depression.

I want to be free. I want to be light and free of the tears that come when I contemplate all the junk inside me.

In a recent guest post linked to from her blog, Shirley Hershey Showalter wrote about two verses from the Bible to help guide her through 2013. In a comment, I told her how she had inspired me to find words to help me in my theme of letting go. And she offered this link to a beautiful poem by Mary Oliver.

Inspired by Shirley, I will take Oliver’s poem with me through the year.

In addition, I will take my favorite prayer, which, to me, is all about letting go of what we don’t need to hold us back, and taking on and passing on what is important: peace, pardon, faith, hope, light, joy and, most important, love. That is the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

I’m not looking forward to the work that will be involved in letting go of these emotions and of bad habits that I’ve taken on through the years. But letting go will surely help me with my mental health issues, and with that, my whole life.

  What are you trying to let go of?

Depression and expressing my needs and wants

I carry an ideal around in my head about what I should be able to accomplish: I should be able to be told something once, understand it once, and then never have to be told again.

Real life doesn’t work that way, of course, and the hardest lessons take time and repeated instruction.

I have found that out in the therapy that I’m undergoing for chronic depression.

I’m still having difficulty in expression my needs and wants to others.

Now, my therapist doesn’t want me to turn into a self-centered, selfish person who cares only about my own wants.

He doesn’t want me to become demanding or shove my wants down someone else’s throat.

But he does think it’s important to my emotional development and to my depressive moods for me to learn that my needs and wants are important.

Through my upbringing, I learned that my needs and wants were not important and I was selfish and spoiled to want them considered.

Even though intellectually, I know that people’s own needs and wants are important, even my own, I don’t accept it emotionally.

And therein lies my problem.

I recently failed once again to tell my husband what I was really feeling about something, what I was really wanting. It wasn’t over anything earthshaking, but it was important enough that I needed to express myself.

Instead, I resisted, and then later when my husband asked me what was wrong, that I seemed far away, I answered with my old standby: “I’m tired.”

I wasn’t making that up. It wasn’t like I was full of energy and raring to go. I really was tired. But I was tired with the fatigue of depression more than the fatigue of work.

My therapist said that when I don’t speak up about my needs and wants, I might avoid conflict. But I push the feelings down.

“And who keeps score?” he asked.

“I do,” I said.

“Your body does,” he said.

When I’ve acted in a way that is consistent with helplessness—not expressing myself, believing that it’s not important, believing that my needs and wants are not important—then I feel helpless.

That shows up in my body with a depressed mood and fatigue.

What can change that? My behavior.

I have to act like I’m not helpless. I have to express myself. I have to act like my needs and wants are important, even if emotionally I don’t yet get it.

If I watch closely, my therapist told me, I will begin to notice that when I don’t express myself, my mood is lowered. When I do begin to speak up, my mood will be better.

The brain is a social organ. Interpersonal relations affect how I feel, he said.

So once again I’m learning that my behavior can make a huge difference in how I feel.

  Do you have a difficult time expressing your needs and wants? How does that affect how you feel?

Tell them how I feel: my battle with chronic depression



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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?

Where does the lonely hide?

Sometimes I think that because I have OCD, anxiety and depression, I’m extra sensitive and hyper-alert to how I feel. I monitor how stressed I feel, how down I get, how tense.

I try to be aware of any changes because if I need to make an adjustment in medications, I want to jump on it quickly. And lately, I’m analyzing myself more closely to try to decide if I want to take cognitive behavioral therapy.

But sometimes the feelings sneak up on me.

I had a semi-pleasant day today. I conducted an interview and wrote four stories for the paper tomorrow. It was hard for me to concentrate and settle down to write the stories, but I managed to get them done and get home at 7:15.

Once I got home, I thought things were OK. I told my husband about my day, watched part of “Jeopardy” and snuggled with my cat Sam.

But I started thinking about Waddles and, as soon as my husband left to go get some takeout for dinner, I had a deep crying spell over her.

Waddles was my beautiful baby cat who died in October. I wrote about her and the incredibly positive impact she had on my life in a past post.

I just fell down into the grief of losing her. I wanted to have her with me so badly. I didn’t want to go on without her.

When my husband got home, I told him how lonely I felt without Wa. He said he understood because she and I had spent so much time together.

I am still grieving. I understand that. And I understand that I’ll never “get over” her. I don’t want to.

But I have become more able to get things done, to focus on what’s in front of me, of making over the other cats. There are things that I still can’t think about, but the tears haven’t been so close to the surface lately.

I guess what surprised me about the episode this evening was that it seemed to come out of nowhere.

But then I remembered that I got out the Christmas stockings last night, including Waddles’ stocking. Maybe that stocking, which now represents a lost loved one, burrowed down into me and pushed the grief to the surface.

Maybe I’m not as self-aware as I think I am.