Posted by Fallsfall on August 17, 2008, at 10:10:59
In reply to Feeling shame and anger, posted by DAisym on August 15, 2008, at 21:05:17
You ARE sad and depressed because of things that were out of your control. You didn't have control of your childhood. I wish you could stop blaming yourself for your situation.
But. You do have the capacity to climb out of where you are and move forward. And no one else (even your therapist) can do this for you. You can't, however, just "wish" yourself happy. It doesn't work that way. Getting better is a process. You need to establish and strengthen new pathways in your brain. Your brain needs to learn new ways of thinking. This takes TIME, and effort. You need to be patient with yourself while your brain learns these new ways of thinking. Watching "What the Bleep do we know" helped me so much to understand this. The solution is not an Ah Ha moment. It is painstaking development of new neural pathways and then reinforcing those pathways over and over again. Choosing to see things in a more optimistic light will help to develop these new pathways. And until the pathways are strong, it will take effort to use them. But eventually, they become well worn and comfortable, and then it no longer takes effort - they become part of you.
Learning patience with this process was probably one of the most important things I have learned (and even the learning of patience followed this pattern...).
Think of walking through a meadow. The first time you walk along a (future) path, it is very difficult. The grass is very tall and hard to walk through. You can't tell where the "path" is. You feel like you are going in a random direction. The next day, you can try to take the same "path". You may be able to see evidence of your footprints from the day before, but you will need to concentrate hard to see them. You may not take exactly the route you took the day before. But if you can stay on the same path, the stalks that you broke with your feet the day before will be less in your way today, and it may be a little clearer where the path should be. The third day, the combination of the previous day's travel will make the path even clearer. But it is still hard going. If you take the same path for two weeks, it will start to be clearer where the path is. But it will take months for you to wear the path down to a nice dirt path with no vegetation. This is how the neural pathways are in your brain. You need to use them over and over to make them strong.
Please try to accept that these changes will take lots of time, but it gets easier as you go. You have already created so many important new pathways. You now know how to accept that bad things happened. You are learning to accept help and that people may care without wanting something awful in return.
You can't teleport out of the hole. You have to climb out. But as you climb higher, it gets less steep (because you have more tools).
I'm still climbing, but I am happy and enjoying life. I need to learn a lot about socializing, and about having fun. This is a long way from barely being able to walk to the table to eat a dinner that was prepared for me, and feeling suicidal. Patience is a virtue.
Love,
Falls
poster:Fallsfall
thread:846523
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20080810/msgs/846810.html