Bad Habit: Sleeping the Day Away

Bad habits are like kudzu or English ivy: easy to start and extremely difficult to get rid of. When having a flare up of the depression or anxiety, bad habits multiply for me like fruit flies on rotten fruit.

One of my current bad habits is that of taking a nap to circumvent part of the day. Sometimes I just see hours stretched out before me and nothing I feel I want to do with them and they look difficult to endure, so I take one of my hours-long naps and wallah! Afternoon is gone. (And I've allowed my emotions ("I don't feel like it") to manage me rather than the other way around.)

Also gone are the opportunities to work on my novel, to clean something, to draw, to read, to look for a good basic starter yoga routine, to exercise, and to do any number of other useful things, or things I enjoy doing or want to do.

While I am making progress and I am learning to manage my emotions, or at least learning to learn how to do so, I am still in difficult territory, surrounded by alligators and fish with sharp teeth and gigantic mosquitoes and roaches (I'm being metaphorical here, although it looks literal, given that I'm in Houston). I still have habits to beat into submission and mental routines to reroute. I can't just give in to bad habits, especially the one that makes me unconscious for 3 or 4 hours at a time.

In cognitive-behavioral therapy, we substitute rational language and thinking for that which is broken. For example, irrational and broken thinking and self-talk might be "I shouldn't be unemployed. I hate it! It's horrible! What am I going to do?" And then it just ramps up from there. Rational substitutions could be "I don't like be unemployed. I want to work. It's uncomfortable and I feel afraid. I'm going to go look for work now."

Progressive Thinking

I'm making progress! My therapist sat there this week and told me what a delight it was to watch me change how I was speaking about something, midstream, from using passive or victim-like language to strong and rational language. And how she'd been seeing this more and more the last several sessions.

We talked in our last session about how to break myself from identifying with depression and anxiety, something I do because I've dealt with them for so long they seem like something I just am. Well, I am not depression and I am not anxiety and I'm going to approach them the way I approach the fibromyalgia, starting with changing from saying my depression or my anxiety to the depression and the anxiety. None of them are me, none of them are who I am, they are simply disorders or illnesses or enemies that I struggle with, that try to keep me from being the energetic, creative, active person I truly am. I am now externalizing them rather than internalizing them.

Who would think that a small word change like using 'the' instead of 'my' would make a difference? But it does. How's this for an example? My depression makes me tired and sleepy versus The depression causes me to feel tired and sleepy. Using 'the' distances the depression from me, which cognitively allows me to add the extra words in the second sentence because they enhance the sense of distance. And if I only feel tired and sleepy, I don't have to give in to the feeling.

There is also the power aspect. As my therapist put it, the depression and the anxiety are the enemy and I have more power to fight them when they aren't part of me. My anxiety can control me; it's in charge and it's big. The anxiety is just a thing I experience and I, as I am learning to manage my emotions, am developing the ability to choose how I respond to it. 

It's freedom and it's in reach. Instead of being controlled by how I feel, I am learning to control what I choose to do in response to how I feel. The SOS Help for Emotions book says "manage your emotions or they will manage you." And I'm learning how to do that.

I've always before not done something if I didn't feel like it or done something else because I did feel like it, but always how I felt determined what I did. I basically knew that wasn't really the best way to do things, but that didn't change how I did what I did. Now I have very real proof that I not only don't have to live that way, there is a better way to live and I can do it. I'm still having difficulties with doing things I don't feel like doing, but as I'm making progress with my thinking, I'm making progress with my speaking. Next I'll be making progress with my behaving. And that's what cognitive-behavioral therapy is about.

"I think therefore I am" may be enough for some people, but for me, I think I'll choose "I think therefore I do."

Misplaced Heart

I lost my heart years ago and have been trying to get it back again. My heart is never entirely with me, never completely where I am; it's usually looking out the window or over the wall or across the sea. For awhile, my heart may sit beside me, whether it's in a cottage outside of Seattle, a rehabilitated ranch house along the Pacific Ocean, or an apartment next to a lake northeast of Houston, loving the place where I am. But after a year or two or four, my heart sprouts wings once again and flies off, telling me I don't love where I am, I never loved where I am, and urging me to leave. My heart is always making me chase after it.

I loved where I grew up. I loved my small town as it grew to the size of a small city. I loved my family's house. Okay, I didn't love the pink all over my bedroom, but the rest of the room was fine. I even, when I was much younger, loved myself and was my own friend. My heart was inside of me and in my family and my home. I was content.

But we moved. Daddy died. We fell apart, my family and I. And I didn't love where I lived.

Life changed so much then. I graduated from high school. I went to college. I moved between college and my family's home — which I had come to dislike a great deal — for school year and summer until I graduated yet again and remained in Seattle. There was never time to love a place or to find my heart or my center. And then, for a few years, I moved every time my lease was up until I moved in with two friends. We shared a house, these two young men and I, for a year and a half. One of them moved across the country for a job and my best friend and I found a great apartment to share for the next two and a half years, until we were heartily sick of one another.

I enjoyed the apartment a great deal. I enjoyed my next, with another friend, also a great deal. A year after that move came more changes in where I lived and who I lived with and how happy — or rather, unhappy — I was.

Two Years

Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of my mom's death. I didn't cry or get horribly depressed, although I think my being slightly less functional this week may be related to it. My organizer came for three hours (our final three hours, it turns out ... we're done! Now it's all up to me ...) and I had an hour-long conference call meeting later on. I went to the grocery story and the library (finally able to get out of the house). But while I felt some sadness, it was mild and easy to handle.

I did feel on the edge of some major crying a few times, and on the edge of feeling very sad, trauma-sad, but it didn't come, even when I allowed myself to think about my mom and about losing her, oh so much too early.

My friend Deb chatted with me on IM for awhile to make sure I was okay. My BFF and I texted and he wanted to make sure I was alright, too. I still feel on the edge of great sadness, but I know I'm okay, as well.

For most of this year, I've been highly medicated, to get me to a place where the therapy could work. I've also felt rather emotionless, other than anxious. Numb. In the last couple of weeks, I changed some of my medications around and I have started feeling again. This is a good thing because if you numb your feelings for too long, they just build up rather than going away. Then, when you start to feel again, you have a flood coming out rather than a stream.

So I'm glad I could feel sad about my mom, and glad that I didn't fall over the edge into trauma-sadness. I feel like I am finally getting better, which will spread out into all of my life. I may have other times where I feel sadder — it's not at all predictable — but I feel I can handle it. And I can always get in contact with one of my friends if I need help handling how I feel. I know and trust that now.

Two years. It still doesn't seem real or right, but I am fine.

Irrational Thinking, the Scarcity Mindset, and Cognitive Therapy

I am afraid. I'm afraid of many things, few of them rational. Some of them even have names. One of the things that most occupies my fear at the moment is that I'm going to run out of money and have no options. This is called a Scarcity Mindset. It's a little rational to think that I'll run out of money because I'm not working and the inheritance will last for only so long. But it's not rational to the extent that I fear it. I'm almost paralyzed with it.

It doesn't help that, for almost two years, I've been almost incapable of holding down a job. I worked at that contract job and called in sick way too often, just out of the stress of working and commuting when I was still recovering from my grief.

I'm capable of working a regular job now. I'd rather work freelance, but I think I can work something more normal. It would be best if it could be on a contract so I could get paid by the hour and extra for more than 40 hours a week; I don't want to work all those extra hours without extra pay anymore. I'm too old for that shit.

So here I am, looking for work on craigslist and the freelancer's association job list and LinkedIn and not finding anything or at least not getting even any messages back and I'm thinking maybe I need to find an office job (not like there aren't already enough office workers looking for work out there) or a retail job or something just so I can earn some money. I need to find work. I need an income. And I'm terrified that I won't find work and that I'll end up stone-broke. 

But this is something that cognitive therapy is designed to work with.

Love is Not Geography

Technology has some interesting uses that I never imagined using it for. For example: late last week, after I'd gotten comments on my previous post, I realized that it would be useful for my therapist to read the post so we could talk about it, and if she did this before our session, we'd have more time to talk about it. So I texted my therapist about the post and she texted back that she was happy to read it. Then, in our session this week, she pulled up my blog on her iPad so she could comment on certain parts of it, or on something in a comment that struck her. So much easier than my trying to remember what I was thinking a week or so beforehand that had seemed so important but I'd forgotten to write down so I'd remember it for therapy!

So we talked about my post. She at first was concerned that I was going to Move Right Now, so I explained that, among the reasons for me to stay was the fact that I have this great therapist who is helping me a whole lot and I'd rather not leave her right now. And that I am just not ready to choose another place to live. I have too many things churning inside my head to be able to make a reasoned and good decision about where to live next. I'm staying here for now and continuing the good fight with my therapist. Not that I'm fighting with my therapist!

One of the main things that struck her was how powerless and passive the first part of the post sounded, where I talk about what I don't like or don't have where I live now, what would or wouldn't work in the other places I'm considering. It's like I'm a victim of circumstance. It also shows me having external loci of control (the weather, if my friends have time to spend with me, etc.) rather than internal. I discussed in a previous post ("Locusts of Control") how having external loci of control leaves you powerless to make your life the way you want and to make yourself happy.