Working on it

Changing leaves from a past autumn.

Happy autumn to you, dear readers! It’s one of my favorite times of the year. Perhaps it’s a relic of spending years in school, but the beginning of fall seems like a new beginning to me.

I have been working on getting better since I posted HERE about feeling stuck and full of anguish.

I saw my psychiatrist, and he was concerned about my lack of energy and motivation, my lack of desire to do anything but sleep. We made an adjustment in my medication. It’s one we’ve made before.

It’s too early to experience the full effects of the change, but I have felt more like making plans and setting goals. I am having an easier time starting the day. I am feeling better.

My psychiatrist also thinks it would be a good idea for me to get into talk therapy again to deal with my anger and confusion about my mother. I agreed. I do want to talk with someone nonbiased who can help me find my way through the confusion.

I’m going to see the same psychologist I saw the last time I was in talk therapy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have an opening until mid-November. I’m on the list to call if he has cancellations, and they did call about an appointment. But it was for a Monday, which are busy days at the newspaper. So, I’ll wait until November if that’s what I have to do.

The idea of taking care of myself, of loving myself, is something I’m still getting used to. It’s not what I was taught to do as I was growing up, and I’ve held on to the belief that thinking of oneself is selfish.

But the time for change is here.

I’m learning more about taking care of myself when I am anxious, angry about the past, or feeling lost.

For example, last week, a particular news story was bothering me. It brought back a lot of bad memories, and I felt tense with anger.

I sat down and wrote down a description of how I felt. I probably frightened the keys on my computer by how hard I was pounding them. But I felt better—relieved, calm—after I finished.

Writing can definitely be therapeutic.

So can knitting. Here is my first knitted scarf:

I love the motions my hands make as they work the needles. I like the way the yarn feels. I like the rhythm. I like having a finished product. I feel soothed.

So that’s where I am right now. Still putting one foot in front of the other, as we all have to do.

Take care of yourselves, love yourselves. And I will see you on Thursday.

Anger: Working through it

In the moment, I feel like I’m having an anxiety attack that has come on quickly. My arms and legs feel numb, my heart rate increases, I feel like I can’t breathe deeply. I have trouble speaking, and I usually get tears in my eyes.

Later, when I’m reliving the moment, I feel agitated and hyper, and my mind fills with the words I wish I’d thought of saying.

I keep reliving the moment, day after day, and sometimes, month after month, year after year.

That’s what anger does to me.

I don’t handle anger very well. I tend to feel guilty about feeling angry.

I also don’t like conflict and avoid it when the better choice might be to face it. When I avoid it, I sometimes end up angry over situations that I could have attended to sooner, if not for my fear of conflict.

I’m holding on to a lot of anger, some from years ago.

My goal this year is to let go of what I don’t need in my life, and that includes harmful emotions. Anger that I hold onto, that turns into grudges and resentment, is something that I want to let go of.

From a health standpoint, I know anger that I keep stuffed down inside can aggravate my OCD and other anxiety.

It affects my depression, too. I tend to feel helpless in my anger, and the helpless feelings are directly related to chronic depression.

But I want to let go of anger for a bigger reason. From a moral standpoint, I don’t want anger and resentment to ever get in the way of having compassion for others.

So how do you let go of anger?

I talked with my therapist about this recently, and he told me it’s not really a matter of letting it go.

It’s a matter of working through it.

It’s a matter of being assertive and friendly and expressing myself honestly and completely so that I don’t feel helpless.

Because when I tell myself I’m helpless in the face of conflict, my brain shuts down and I stay mired in the chronic depression.

I’m practicing this friendly assertiveness in therapy, reviewing situations that have come up in my interpersonal relationships, thinking about and talking about what actually happened and what would have been the best outcome.

I’m not going to wake up one morning and not feel any anger anymore. But I will gradually get better at working out anger and conflict so that I don’t feel helpless. And with that, I will get better at not carrying around anger.

How do you work through anger so that it doesn’t interfere with your peace of mind?

Breaking through fog: therapy lessons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:V%C3%A9theuil_dans_le_brouillard.jpg

It worked out this week that I saw both my psychiatrist and my psychologist, and I had helpful sessions with both. But I still feel like I'm trying to break through fog.

The psychiatrist

I discussed my increased anxiety with the psychiatrist Wednesday, and he was concerned because of the sense of dread I was experiencing and because I had reached the point of starting to fear driving, like I did a few years ago when I was in the midst of the worst anxiety I’ve ever had.

So he decided to take me off of one of the medications, Wellbutrin. It could be having unintended consequences, especially in combination with another medication.

It’s a balancing act to not tinker with the medication enough to allow the depression to get worse, and yet help the anxiety. It’s trial and error sometimes, and that’s not always easy to deal with, especially for an impatient person like me. I just have to wait and see.

At least it won’t be long. He said I should notice a difference by this weekend if it was going to have an effect. Here’s hoping it will help.

On an added note about the anxiety, I’ve been listening to a mindfulness CD by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and it has helped me to be able to fall asleep fairly quickly each night. I’ll write more about the CD and what I’m learning in a future post.

The psychologist

My psychologist and I, as usual, did a situational analysis yesterday, and this led to a discussion about anger, fear and anxiety.

I don’t express anger very well. A lot of the time, I don’t express it at all.

In the particular situation we discussed, I was feeling anger but interpreted my feelings as fear. I never expressed my anger in words.

My therapist said the bodily reaction to anger and anxiety is the same. What I’m not always recognizing is that I’m feeling anger. I recognize it as fear. I then fail to verbally express my anger in healthy ways.

I also tend to think of anger as something bad, something I should feel guilty for feeling.

Something that my therapist told me that was helpful was to think of the motivation for anger and the method of anger.

A motivation for anger might be the fact that you care about someone. A method for showing that anger might be yelling. No one likes to be yelled at. That’s not an appropriate way to express anger.

But the fact that you yelled doesn’t negate your motivation for the anger. You can apologize for yelling, but you don’t have to feel guilty for being angry.

I certainly don’t want to hold on to anger. I just want to stop feeling like I’m a bad person because I sometimes get angry.

It’s all in the balance.

  So that was my week in therapy. To say that I’m frustrated at having to work on these issues at my age is an understatement. I know such issues have no age limit. But I’d have thought I was past them.

  I’ll just keep plugging along, going forward.

Do you ever get frustrated at your progress to become a better person, improve in a skill, or make a positive change? How do you handle it?

CBT session #4: What does this have to do with OCD?

Let me preface this post by saying that I hope all of you in areas where tornadoes hit today are safe and well.

According to what I can glean from weather reports, I think all we’ll get in Central Virginia are thunderstorms.

Elizabeth, on her blog “Into My Own,” wrote an excellent post today about weather anxiety. If you haven’t read it, go here.

***

I had another cognitive behavioral therapy session today, and I left depressed and cried a good part of my drive home.

I have been experiencing a great deal of anxiety, the kind that causes my limbs to feel numb, makes me feel hyper and gives me a feeling of doom and fear.

I’ve tried to monitor myself enough to ask myself, when I felt this way, questions like, what am I thinking? What has happened? What am I doing?

The point was to find the triggers that promote the highest levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms and other anxiety. That was one of my assignments from last week’s therapy session.

Some of my worst anxiety occurs when I think about the clutter that I have around me. It’s mostly papers: paycheck stubs, paid bills, receipts and other records. I deem some of them too important to dispose of, but I don’t have enough space to store them, and the process of sorting through them is daunting.

Another time that provokes intense anxiety is when I’m writing for work. I have been working on limiting the time that I give myself to edit once I’ve written a piece, but I haven’t made a great deal of progress.

I have also had a lot of anxiety about workplace issues. I even woke up at 4 one morning this week thinking about work with anger and resentment. But I didn’t relate it to OCD.

The last couple of days, I’ve also been feeling depressed.

When my therapist asked me today how things had been going, I told him I have been feeling very anxious and depressed, and mentioned the work situation.

He jumped on that and asked questions about that specifically. Soon he was talking about the underlying anger that can make things like OCD and generalized anxiety disorder worse.

People with anxiety disorders tend to suffer from what he called “over niceness.” We don’t like conflict, so we tend to stuff our feelings, sweep our anger under the rug. But it bubbles up, he said, and, hence, aggravates OCD and GAD.

We spent the rest of the session talking about using empathy, assertiveness and respect to get our desired effect, not necessarily the desired outcome. We role-played. I cried, which I haven’t done in our other sessions.

At the end, I asked him if we could talk about OCD again. He said, of course, but he didn’t want me to avoid facing things like the conflicts we talked about today.



Sometimes, fire extinguishers are necessary.



He said he could give me tools that would work like a fire extinguisher on my OCD, but if gas (the stuffed anger and resentment) was poured on the fire, the fire extinguisher wouldn’t do any good.

So it was a session that didn’t help me with OCD. And I felt like, oh, here’s one more thing I’m doing wrong.

I’m sorry if this post sounds whiney. I went along with my therapist today and talked about the work conflicts. I’m sure I do need to work on facing conflict.

But I don’t want to deal with that right now. I want to deal with the OCD that plagues me and has plagued me for most of my life.

Yes, I cried during today’s session, which I admit could mean we were touching on a subject that is bothering me a lot. But I’ve also been depressed and hopeless. The tears could have been related to that too.

I don’t have another CBT session for two weeks, though I can call the office next week to see if the therapist has any cancellations. In the meantime, I am going to work on my OCD.

Any thoughts on this?