Mood Check-Ins

Thursday, Sept 14, 2023

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Depression has crept back. For now it’s simply sitting with me, keeping me company. It’s making me nervous, wondering whether I’m going to get caught up in its grips again, and for how long. It’s like I just stepped out into the cold. I can feel the chill on my skin, but the cold has not yet seeped into my flesh and bone. Maybe there are things I can do to stave off the cold until I can get somewhere warm again. 

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Continuing where I left off with Mind Over Mood, I’ve been using what I learned about the relationship between my experiences (environment, situation, and life changes) and my mood. I have been taking up a practice of rating my own mood through the lens of specific situations, to get a better understanding of exactly what impact they have had on me.

As a reminder to myself, my internal workings (physical reaction, mood, thought, and behavior) and how they shape and are shaped by each other, and the external world.

What the book asks me to do is consider a situation, positive or negative, and describe it briefly with the W questions. Who am I with, where am I, what am I doing and what is happening, and when is it happening. I then identify the mood or moods I experienced as a result of that situation. Finally, assign a value to the mood from 0 to 100.

A nice example was being at home with my twins, relaxing on their bed on a weekend afternoon, watching shows. I felt loving (80) and content (70).

(I always feel weird assigning number values to sensations or emotions. What happens if I write 100, and then I feel something more intense? But that’s a me-problem that I’m working through.)

A silly negative example was driving myself and Spoofle (my partner) home after dropping Pogi (our youngest) off for the first day of the school year, heading down a busy intersection with traffic and construction early in the morning, and having someone try to drive across several lanes of traffic so they can get to the left hand turn lane. I was in their way, so they honked, gestured and shouted at me to move. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, so he continued to escalate his behavior. Eventually he pulled behind me, into the left hand turn lane, then up beside me. He leaned on his horn and made rude gestures at us. 

For my mood, I identified frustration (40), and calmness (60). I also discovered that I was being spiteful.

Interesting. I was surprised, not because I didn’t think I would be spiteful, but because I didn’t realize it was there until I took a careful look. My awareness had deepened, showing something about myself that I wasn’t sure I liked.

The idea behind these check-ins is for me to make it second nature to notice how the external world has an impact on my internal world, specifically my emotional state. It’s been less than a week, and I already catch myself taking mental notes that I hope will be helpful.

Specifically, I can see how tracking the who, what, when, and where of my moods will make it possible for me to structure things for success. If I am routinely in a bad mood when I am doing chores alone at 3 am, I should probably look at changing a number of those variables. Likewise, if I am feeling productive (is that a mood?) at 2 pm on a Saturday when everyone is busy with their own projects, I can use that to get stuff done.

However, even if I were a master situational architect, I wouldn’t be able to prevent all problems. So an important piece that I am anticipating in future chapters is changing the way I think about things when situations arise.

Lots of practice still to do, and lots more to learn. 

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Shifting Gears

 Thursday, Aug 03, 2023

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I am limping along. Emotionally I am well, but physically and mentally I am exhausted. I have trouble telling if this is some kind of burnout, or lingering effects of long COVID, or even a side effect of my fluctuating blood glucose. There always seems to be another round of illness, from strep to dangerously low glucose levels to horrible aches and pains all over my body.

And yet I feel pretty good inside. Not healthy, but more centered. Not tidy, but like I can see a pattern in the mess and understand what I need to do to start cleaning up - with permission from myself to take my time in doing so.

So, I take that as a plus. Direction over velocity. Journey before destination.

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After a long time away, I had my first therapy session in months. I hit a wall, mentally and emotionally, back in January and needed to take a break from it. It took a lot of consideration, but I realized that I had become frustrated with a lack of progress. I was spending my sessions updating my therapist on what had been happening, and I didn’t feel like I was actually improving.

I sought out the same therapist, and thankfully he was still available. I explained why I stopped the sessions, and he understood. In fact, he likened it to a shift in my growth. The way I expressed it to him months ago was not ideal, but it was an understandable reaction to my changing needs.

He described my previous sessions as relational therapy, which focused on my relationships with other people. My spouse, my kids, my parents, my inlaws, my boss, my friends, you name it. Looking back, that is 100% correct. I was drowning in stories I had to get off my chest about interactions that left me frustrated.

Occasionally I was able to dig below the surface of that, identifying a question, a cause, or a trigger. Something that intellectually I understood, from all my consumption of therapy material, but had trouble noticing in myself. But because I was still drowning in stories and their consequences, I didn’t have the space to investigate these seeds and see what they grew into.

Shifting gears, we will focus on goal-oriented therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy - which brings me full circle. When I first started researching depression I read a wonderful book on CBT that I can’t remember the name of. I read it in an attempt to better understand the suffering of someone close to me, and stumbled into an understanding of my own depression. However, never having done the actual work of CBT, I never learned the tools I needed to apply it to myself.

I am excited, and a little worried. This isn’t just going to be me talking to someone about my problems. This is going to be me trying to figure out exactly what those problems are, why they affect me the way they do, and how I can reprogram my own responses.

I told my therapist today that my long term goal is to be able to be angry and to respond to everyone involved - including myself - with calmness and kindness. Not to ignore the anger, which will make me sick, but to integrate it and reclaim it, teaching myself how to take the gift of my anger and take away the potential harm, turning it into a useful response.

He also said that, from our conversation, it was clear that I had done a lot of work on myself in the past few months. It was good to hear that, because sometimes it’s hard to recognize our own progress. Especially when things have been dark.

So. It’s time to shift gears and focus on fixing the problem, not just talking about it. Time to do the work. Time to be better.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Clashing Self

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

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The days are a fog, rolling past me, but I think I’m getting better. I just have very little motive force. I know what needs to be done, but I can’t make myself do it. But the horrible black mood has moved off for now.

I will see it again. I hope it will be on better terms, next time.

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Who I am as a person has changed drastically over the past few years. On top of that, my sense of self identity - who I perceive myself to be - has changed just as much. They don’t match what they were, and they don’t match each other.

Cognitive dissonance is when a person holds conflicting ideas about a thing - including the person themselves. And this clash of incompatible ideas can cause significant discomfort, or even pain.

I used to think of myself as reliable, hard working, tough. Compassionate. Patient. I can look back at a time when I worked two jobs and trained hard at the dojo, while being there for my family and friends and taking care of my share of the work at home. I remember a time when it would take monumental, concerted effort from someone to make me angry. I remember being helpful and considerate, extending respect to everyone, whether they showed it to me or not. And under it all I always, ALWAYS, wanted to get it right, to do it right, to be right for people.

Now I feel like I am unreliable, because of my failing mental and physical health. I feel like I can’t be hard working, at least not by ordinary standards, because my body and soul can’t take it. I am no longer physically or mentally tough. I am frail, slow, and inflexible. Lethargic, even on my best days, with short bursts of energy that leave me winded. I fail to be there for the people I care about, even when I want to. Birthdays, important events. Chores. Daily minimum. And I am so very tired of being patient, of having people treat me like garbage to be abused without consequence or regard for my humanity. I still try to show respect, but it doesn’t take much anymore to make me drop the gesture if it’s not reciprocated. And whether something is right or not, I find myself wishing I didn’t care.

It wouldn’t take a psychologist to see the markers. People pleasing. Savior complex. Overwhelm. Burnout. Hell, even ADHD markers are in there. But again, this isn’t even the real me. This is the concept of myself that I have. How much of it is true is hard to grasp. Plato’s cave and all that.

I have moments where I can see through the image, as if it were an overlay on the real world. I am hard working, but I have too many things to work on, so I fail. I am compassionate, but I get overwhelmed with all the things I want to be part of, to support, to help, and I feel myself breaking from the strain, and then I snap back into myself like an elastic. As a defense mechanism. To prevent me from tearing into pieces emotionally, which ironically lends itself to tearing apart anyway. I am tough, to have been through all the physical, mental, and emotional problems that have come my way, and I’m only seeing the outward cracks, not everything that’s still being kept together. I go to work or accomplish things at home even when I should be bedridden, or checked into a hospital. 

And I care. No matter how much I sometimes don’t want to, I care.

This last one is the thing I keep coming back to. Because when I go dark it becomes one of my intrusive thoughts. “I don’t care. I just don’t care.” But it’s not true. It’s a part of me trying hard to make me not care, because caring hurts too much. It’s self protection. And no matter how many times I tell myself to believe it, my actions and my feelings belie the truth.

The cognitive dissonance - the horrible action of these different conceptions of myself grinding themselves to pieces on each other - is painful. But when I see that for what it is, I can step back a little and let them be what they really are - ideas. And ideas can be entertained or left alone. They can be proven or disproven. Forgotten. Remembered.

I chose to remember who I enjoyed being. Who I am at my core. 

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination