Books: Wonderful things indeed

Some books on my "read soon" list. My Nook sits on top.

Books on bookshelves and on bedside tables at home; books in the public library; books in bookstores: I love to be surrounded by books.

My love affair with books began when I was a child. I remember taking books down from the bookshelves in the living room before I could read. I searched the pages for the one word that I knew, the word “the.” I ran my finger along the sentences until I saw my word, and then I would say it aloud: “the.”

I don’t remember learning to read. I just remember being able to read and loving it.

Even as a child, I enjoyed reading more than one book at a time. I carried a little stack of three or four books around with me, from one reading spot to another, entering first one world and then another as I switched from book to book.

I probably very much needed books as a child. Sometimes I needed the comfort, and I certainly needed something constructive and beautiful to do while I waited in hospital waiting rooms, doctor’s offices and at relatives’ homes.

I loved mysteries from the start. My favorites were the Trixie Belden books and the Nancy Drew books. I also loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, books by Maud Hart Lovelace and any book about horses.

I liked biographies, too, especially about strong women who made their way in the world like Amelia Earhart.

I like to say I practically grew up in our local public library. I loved walking the aisles, looking for something new. I loved the smell of the library. I loved the quiet. I loved the love of books that hung in the air.

During high school, I usually had a pleasure reading book with me so that, if I finished my work in class before everyone else did, I could bring it out and read a few pages before class picked back up.

I loved books so much I majored in English in college and got a master’s in English.

I have written before how obsessive-compulsive disorder has affected my reading on and off for years. I obsessed over whether or not I had “really” read every word and would reread passages until it felt “right” to move on.

It’s one of the most awful ways OCD has affected me because it hits at part of what defines me.

Thankfully, I can now usually push through the obsessions and keep reading until the anxiety subsides.

Most of the fiction books I read now are mysteries and thrillers. My favorite authors in those categories include Sue Grafton, Kathy Reichs, Meg Gardiner, Lee Child and Nevada Barr.

I also enjoy memoirs and other nonfiction books. Some recent reads include

*The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life. By Dinty W. Moore

*The Foreign Language of Friends. By Nadine Feldman.

*Here If You Need Me. By Kate Braestrup.

*Blue Nights. By Joan Didion

*The Memoir Project. By Marion Roach Smith

Some books I hope to start soon:

*Behind the Beautiful Forever. By Katherine Boo

*The Animal Manifesto. By Marc Bekoff

*Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. By Jonathan Grayson, PhD

*The Affair. By Lee Child

*Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. By Cheryl Strayed

  How much do you like to read? What are some of your favorites? What have you read lately? Please share!

Depression back story: How I allow the past to negatively affect my present



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Tree_Roots_and_Trunks_(F816).jpg



It has never been easy for me to be with my mother.

We have argued through the years far more than you would expect from a stereotypical mother-daughter pair.

I remember once as an adult, arguing with her with my father present, and he looked up and said with what sounded like pure frustration, “Why don’t you just get down on the floor and fight it out?”

That’s what my mother and I did for most of my life: rolled around on the floor, fighting, figuratively at least.

It was from my mother that I learned to read minds and make assumptions. I wrote about my tendency to read minds in a recent post.

Mind reading, making assumptions about what another person means by what he or she says, is one of the ways that I allow my past to dictate my present. It’s an example of distorted thinking.

In providing this back story, I am not trying to cast blame or throw a pity party. Rather, I want to show an example of how the patterns that we develop in the past can make the present more complicated and difficult.

Back story

I watched my mother closely when I was a young girl. I watched her facial expressions, the speed of her hands as she washed the dishes. I listened to the degree of vibration her feet made as she crossed the floor to tell me how heavy her footfalls were. I listened to her tone of voice.

I did this to try to determine her mood, her level of anger, what she meant when she spoke, how serious she was about what she said.

My mother could make me feel as loved as any child could hope to be.

“I love you so much, I wouldn’t trade you for a million dollars,” she’d say, and I believed her.

She took pride in her housework and was a fine homemaker, a wonderful cook.

She took time away from sewing clothes her family needed to make Barbie clothes for me. She even made a miniature satin and lace wedding gown for my Barbies, complete with veil and a tiny string of faux pearls.

She often allowed me to read instead of helping with chores, and she made sure I had plenty of opportunities to visit the public library.

My mother also told me I was lazy and selfish. I was shy, and she said sometimes said I acted “like a lump on a log.” She smacked me in the face. She told me my friends wouldn’t like me if they knew what I was really like.

She yelled at me for wasting water, wasting time, wasting toilet paper, being slow—all of which I did because of my OCD.

She yelled about her fate in life to “work like a dog” and get no appreciation for it. She threatened on numerous occasions to pack her bags and leave.

She tried to control what I thought, what I did, what I became. She tried to manipulate me into doing what she wanted me to do or giving her what she wanted.

She still does some of these things when I allow it. But I don’t allow it very often any more.

What I learned from my mother was to be ready, to leave the room if I could or stand and fight, whatever seemed best at the time.

I learned it was best not to ask questions of an angry woman who might lash out at me verbally or physically.

So I was often fighting blindly, responding to her in anger, not in any kind of rational way.

How it affects me now

My therapist says, and I recognize, that I don’t always address what is actually happening between another person and me. Instead, I respond as if I’m in the past, trying to read minds and blindly responding, mostly in anger.

Or I respond in silence, stuffing down the anger.

I end up thinking the worst, assuming that the other person meant something negative when actually the interaction we’re involved in provides no evidence of it.

What can I do about it?

I am learning that I have to ask questions like, what did you mean when you said that?

I may not like the answer, but at least I will no longer be responding blindly.

I will no longer give in to the hopeless thought of, why should I bother asking? I already know the answer, and it’s not one I want to hear.

Part of my therapy includes working on skills so that I feel more comfortable and competent at asking questions, throwing away the assumptions that get me nowhere.

I am trying to be more aware of my mind reading tendencies and recognize the thoughts for what they are: a coping mechanism I learned as a child that no longer works for me.

How does the past affect your present life? How do you keep your past from negatively impacting your present? What is your favorite technique for reminding yourself to stay in the present?

CBASP at work

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_Blue_2_-_Georgia_O%27Keeffe.jpg

I’m a mind reader.

Don’t worry. I’m not claiming to know what you’re thinking right this moment, while you’re reading this.

But if you and I were talking with each other, I would be able to interpret the true meaning behind everything you said.

I would not need to nor would I want to ask you what you meant by something you said.

Because I’m a mind reader. Or, rather, I practice mind reading.

That’s one of the lessons that was brought home to me in today’s session of Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy, or CBASP.

I first wrote about my therapist using CBASP to treat my chronic depression here.

During our first two sessions of this new (to me) therapy, we discussed my significant other histories, the stories of the people in my life who have had big influences on me and on how I view other people and myself.

Today we completed our first situational analysis questionnaire, which is a form that guided us through analysis of “an interpersonal problematic event.” The analysis included role-playing to give me the opportunity to practice new coping skills.

Before the session, my assignment was to select the interpersonal event—an exchange between another person and me—that troubled me and write a brief “slice of time,” with a beginning, an end and a short story in between.

Then working with my therapist, I did the following:

  *Described my interpretation of what happened, or how I “read” the situation.

  *Described what I did during the situation, which included what I said and how I said it. This was what someone else would have observed if he or she had been able to see me during the situation.

*Described how the event came out for me. This is called the actual outcome. Outcome has to do with the last thing I did, not what the other person did.

*Described how I wanted the event to come out for me, which is called the desired outcome. I arrived at that description by considering the end point of the situation and what would have been the best I could have done at that point.

*Answered whether or not the desired outcome was achieved and why.

What I discovered was that I tend to assume I know what the other person means when he or she says something. I don’t ask. I just assume. And I tend to read a situation with my past rather than staying in the moment and dealing with what is.

I didn’t do the very simple but very important thing that would have changed the whole dynamic of the “interpersonal problematic event.” I didn’t ask, “What do you mean when you say that?”

I was trying to avoid conflict. I am afraid of conflict. But when I avoid it, when I avoid asking questions because I’m afraid of the answers, I stuff my feelings. The more I stuff my feelings, the more they fuel my depression.

There is no guarantee that if I ask the question, I will get the answer I want. But I will have something real to cope with, instead of something that may or may not be true.

My therapist likes to use the example of the baseball player who is petrified of not hitting the ball. There is no guarantee that if he swings at the ball, he will hit it. But it is guaranteed that if he does not even go up to bat and try, he will not hit the ball.

People with chronic depression tend to not even try, to think there is no use in trying, because we’ll just fail.

So why should I explore the meaning behind what another person tells me that upsets me? I already know what he meant, right?

Well, no, I don’t. I am going to need to practice staying in the present and tackling what is, not letting the past dictate how I interact with others.

This therapy is not particularly pretty or easy. I had to face some things about myself, and I cried. That box of tissues on the therapist’s bookcase is going to come in handy.

But I feel heartened by it, too. My therapist and I are not spending time analyzing why I interact with others like I do. As he said, what happened in the past can’t be changed. I can learn how to act with more strength and assertiveness now.

I may sometimes believe I’m helpless, but I’m not.

You don’t have to have chronic depression to sometimes make assumptions about the meaning of the other person’s words. Are you a mind reader? Do you sometimes let the past dictate how you act today?