Emotional Content

Thursday, Sept 21, 2023

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It is always rewarding to see progress, no matter how small.

I recently picked up my kids for a short visitation. Pickup was 5:30 PM on Friday and drop-off was noon the next day. It’s not a lot of time, but I cherish it.

Something happened just as I was supposed to pick them up. It slammed my mood sideways, took over my thoughts, and threatened to ruin my time with the kids. They could tell I was in a bad mood, and they gave me the space and understanding that they shouldn’t HAVE to know how to give me.

Here’s the good part. I saw what was happening. I did a check in and did my best to change both my thoughts and my behavior. It wasn’t perfect, but I managed to savor the time I had with them. They responded to the change, and I think they recognized that I had swerved away from a potentially gloomy visit.

This is a small victory for me. But my kids know I am going to therapy and working on myself. I hope this example has planted seeds that will help them avoid the same problems in the future. A change in the system affects the whole system.

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In going over Mind Over Mood with my therapist, I shared with him a realization with him. I have told him story after story about life events that have affected me. He has even, on occasion, praised me for telling the stories in a way that doesn’t make me out to be a victim, or place blame on other people.

I mistook this praise as a sign that my storytelling was good. I hoped so, after all, since I am a writer. It turns out I had blind spots that I wasn’t aware of.

Go figure.

In doing the mood check-ins that I described in an earlier post, I kept uncovering moods that I hadn’t realized were part of the situations I’d been through. Sometimes these were subtle, easy to miss. Other times they were pretty massive, to the point where I was stunned that I had missed them at all.

Like humiliation.

I had described a massive event that I had gone through. One that left me shaken and off balance for some time. I had gone over everything in detail with my therapist, making sure that I was telling things as they were, to the best of my ability to do so, and leaving nothing important out. I knew there would be continual fallout from the experience for years to come, but I didn’t think I was leaving out anything so major as humiliation.

It wasn’t until I stopped to ask what my moods were during and after the event that I noticed that it was there. Frustration. Fear. Anger. And humiliation.

What my therapist told me struck me so hard that I stopped taking notes and just stared at my hand for some time. He said that I was very good at recounting the details of events that happened. I was like a journalist, or recounting a blow-by-blow in a movie. Nothing was left out.

Except emotion. 

My understanding of the situations I had been through lacked emotional content. A part of me was morbidly amused by this, because as a writer I know that storytelling without emotional content will bore the reader. Yet somehow, IN THERAPY, I had missed that crucial point.

He went on to say that in order to process emotions, I have to include them in my own story. They will linger, hidden behind things, polluting my thoughts and behavior unless I allow them to have a place in the narrative.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that telling THIS kind of story needed to be emotionless. I don’t know if it was out of a desire to be as correct as possible, without emotions clouding the facts. Or maybe my security reporting background steered my words, trying to make sure that I said only what happened, without putting opinion or feeling on the events - like an amateur journalist.

In therapy - especially emotionally-based or cognitive-behavioral therapy - that doesn’t work.

Well. What we’re good at can often hinder what we are bad at. It’s time for me to tell stories badly for a while, get it wrong, and flex that emotional content muscle until I get it right once more.

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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