Posted by Annabelle Smith on April 1, 2011, at 20:54:56
In reply to Re: so depressed » Annabelle Smith, posted by Dinah on April 1, 2011, at 8:51:54
Thanks, Dinah, for all of your thoughts. I sill feel really depressed today, and as if I am in chaos.
I want to say something about the positives that have come from therapy. They are there, but I just usually don't share them here because I usually come here to release desperation. But I have noticed huge shifts in my life. I will share two here.
The first, has to do with how I used to relate to other authority figures in my life. The dynamic in therapy is similar to what used to occur in my relationships with professors, pastors, and other mentor-types. I would seek them out. I would feel lost, confused, and alone and would go to them in a helpless way. We would meet to talk and send emails to one another (often mine were embarrassingly long and personal), and would begin to feel obsessed with them and with our relationship. I would think about the particular individual and would have conversations with myself out loud as if I were speaking to him/her, just as I do all the time with my therapist now. Sometimes I would pull up their pictures online and talk to it for long blocks of time. Whenever I would plan a meeting with him/her, I would think about it all week, but often, when I got to the meeting, I would feel like I went blank and didn't know how to act or speak-- just like in therapy (although that has been slowly getting better for me in therapy). It was like I became hyper-reflexive and self-conscious and was observing myself act-- like I was split. I would leave the meeting (which one time lasted for four hours) feeling like I had not said everything and feeling dependent upon that person. It was like an enslavement. But since I have been in therapy, I haven't noticed that happening much at all in the ways it used to-- now it has all centered upon the therapeutic relationship with a barely tolerable intensity. But the pressure has largely left from relationships with pastors and professors. I don't feel desperate to meet with them and talk, and if we do meet, it is normal, and I don't feel hyper-self-conscious and absent.
I'm a little more hesitant to speak of the second shift, but it is really big. I've never told anyone this before. It has to do with the process of imagingination and falling asleep. I have always had trouble falling. My mom usued to stroke my face to help me fall asleep when I was young. But from as long as I could remember (at least the age of ten onwards), I have had these imaginative thoughts-- anytime my mind is idle, but especially when I am falling asleep. In these thoughts, I was always badly physically injured-- I would imagine the worst injuries possible: starved, raped, beaten, bleeding, broken, dying and would imagine being rescued by competent and compassionate doctors. In fact, the worse the injuries and suffering, the deeper was their concern and compassion. I would invent gruesome things to be saved from. I would usually go to sleep in with my mind filled with the images of being on a hospital bed surrounded by doctors saying that they were going to take care of me and that it would be alright.
Sometimes it would be the opposite. There would be no compassionate doctors, but anonymous, face-less medical individuals who were doing painful and bad procedures to me that nevertheless they told me were necessary for my health. Sometimes I would just imagine the worst, most uncomfortable things possible and imagine that they were given to me. I would get very creative with this. These thoughts occupied my mind every night and often during the day, for hours, as I layed on the couch or rested.
At any rate, now, these kinds of imaginings have completely left me. I do not go to sleep thinking in this way anymroe-- a 10+ years-long thought obsession has been broken. But now, I go to sleep thinking about my therapists safe presence, his caring, his compassion, and his comforting words. Sometimes I listen to his voicemail messages on my phone to re-conjure his voice, because it is hard to recall his presence. But I see this as progress. Maybe one obsession has been replaced by another, but the latter seems better and more "normal," if one could say that.
I had to even censor what I said here, for fear of embarassment-- and this is anonymous. I could not at this point tell anyone in person.
poster:Annabelle Smith
thread:981607
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20110324/msgs/981683.html