Posted by Noa on May 9, 2000, at 18:25:07
In reply to When?sday!!, posted by tina on May 9, 2000, at 16:39:18
Tina, there seem to be two basic things happening, it sounds like. First, is the rage and hurt and sadness--all the intense feelings, what Janice referred to as a kind of seizure--a flooding of intense negative feelings. Second, is the interpretaion part. You are in the habit (as so many of us are) of interpreting the feelings as a sign of your essential weakness, insufficiency, badness, whatever. What can help is to start practicing a strategy to not go automatically into that interpretation part of it, and to move toward responding to the emotional explosion in a different way, maybe one that is nurturing toward yourself, that aims to just get you through it til it passes. This means possibly letting go of the expectation that the problem will be fully understood and fixed right away. I think that to be able to say to yourself, "my job right now is just to take care of myself enough to get through this. I don't have to analyze it or understand it, or solve it. Just survive until it passes, and be good to myself while I am going through it because it is an awful experience." As paradoxical as this sounds, I think I started to get a better handle on my depression when I started to work on not disowning that part of myself, and began accepting it more. Obviously, this is a work in progress for me; I claim no great achievement toward these goals, but some progress, little by little. You are so critical of yourself, as though you brought on your own suffering. And that self-reproach, self-loathing makes it worse, doesn't it? Not that you are to blame for doing that to yourself. It is something many of us learned to do very early in life, and happens to be part of the illness itself.
As for conveying this to the pdoc (I identify with the frustration that comes with variable moods and not being in the "right" one at the doctor's office), well, one of the benefits of babble is that you can always print out your post and bring it with you to your appointment.
poster:Noa
thread:32910
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000508/msgs/32939.html