I’m continuing to get used to living day-to-day, more and more interested in what’s going on around me than my internal “mental” or emotional misery and confusion. I can see better now that what I thought years ago was ineffective or harmful therapy actually was. I don’t yet see how to take my experiences and turn them into something that will be useful or helpful for others. The topic for my support group meeting last night was “turning it over”. So – I guess I can do that. Little by litt
That’s the third stage of therapy for trauma according to my therapist. I’m mostly at the start of that stage although I sometimes I seem to slip back to the second stage, “remembrance and mourning”. I’ve got all my feelings now, I hope. Today I went to a Waffle House while my car was being worked on. It’s a chain restaurant here in the U.S. with a lot of hustle and bustle – that is, a lot of activity. I felt very alive in there. I had some interaction and exchanged humor with some of the s
The bad person feeling is still “around” but kind of in the background. Writing here helped my rationality stay a speck in the background when bad person took over. That’s been an issue for about the last year. Rationality could acknowledge bad person but when bad person took over, it could not acknowledge rationality. I guess maybe when rationality acknowledged bad person and evil person, it gained some strength – the strength of understanding, maybe, since that is what it is about? – and so
At least for a while. Hopefully it will be a learning experience and quickly over. Yesterday I went to my therapist and was trying to communicate how horrible a family situation was for me by demonstrating, letting a scared and horrified part of me take over. It wasn’t my therapist’s best day, perhaps, and she misunderstood some things, I think, and I ended up feeling rejected and demeaned – which are deep issues for me, still not yet resolved. So here I am today feeling disoriented, seeing no
I went to see the movie An Act of Valor again. I had been with friends a week ago and was blown away. Well, if you’ve seen the movie or heard what it’s about “blown away” might have some connotations I don’t mean. It’s a fictional movie starring real Navy SEALs. The producers decided to use the SEALs themselves because there was no way that actors and stuntmen could do what the SEALs already knew how to do. Their first mission in the movie is to rescue an American CIA agent who has been capt
When I was in my OCPD mode I had a sense of myself defined by my tasks and roles in life. That structure fell apart when I had the breakdown, but I fell into a sea of emotional chaos. Now I have the sense of self that I described on my previous blog. I was discussing it today with my therapist. It’s kind of like this round ball that I can carry around with me and trust that it will guide me in more or less a good direction in my interactions with people. Very, very different from what the OCP
Anybody who has a history of trauma is at risk for some form of dissociation. For more info, you can look at the website of the Sidran Institute. When I first went to therapy with my current therapist she described my condition as “narcissistically wounded and fragmented”. She put major depression, DDNOS, and PDNOS as the diagnoses on my insurance receipts. I’ve been in therapy with her for about 20 months. For the first year and a half we concentrated on getting to know the fragments or pa
I can’t bring myself to tell anyone if my feelings are hurt. Even today with my therapist. I know that’s irrational. Well, if I cut my feelings off and be totally in my Rational Self I could say it. But then it would be as if I were reporting my feeling from afar. My feelings wouldn’t really be there in the room, so to speak. So instead I told her that I couldn’t tell her if felt hurt. Later in the session I did tell her about a small thing which had hurt my feelings, something she said i
I saw a thread that was on the forum briefly yesterday. I was apparently removed for inappropriate content and I can understand that. But it makes me sad to think about the possible reactions of one the people who has been a regular contributor. Someone working on his stuff, not perfect, but what are the options? Several years ago I used to “joke” about going to the walk-in clinic at the funeral home. There is no such place, of course. But if society rejects those of us who are clueless, an
Seems to me there are two different kinds of respect that I can feel for people. One is just a basic respect for them as a human being. As in “we hold these truths to be self-evident; all people are created equal. . .” (paraphrased from the USA's Declaration of Independence from Britain) Another sense of respect is a social status kind of thing. We all have different talents and strengths and people “look to” others for their superior knowledge or power about different things. For instance,
To me the notion of trying to “change” when you have a personality disorder is a bunch of bunk. It’s rather a notion of putting yourself in a situation where you can be changed. Now that it’s happening for me I think I’m in a pretty good position to say that. Not that I didn’t try to “change”. Before I fell apart 10 years ago I could set myself goals of how I “should” behave differently and could frequently do those things. But “changing” according to a set of goals is NOT changing the under
It’s been 13 years since John died and I still don’t want to live, without him. I loved him very much, and felt that he loved me. I could not grieve then. And I still have a hard time with it. After he died I felt that my belonging was back with my family of origin. Emotionally, anyway. Most of them lived several hours away from me and didn’t want to move back really close. But in trying to understand who I was without John, I felt that I “belonged” to that family. In the last 10 years I ha
In the almost 50 years that I have been in therapy, off and on, I’ve done a lot of reading. Psychological theories have changed, therapies have changed. Almost 15 years ago I completed the coursework for a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology – not clinical. I had one (required) course in abnormal psychology. I didn’t do the general exam or write a dissertation, so I just have a master’s degree in psychology – but in that process I learned how to read academic and professional literature and put it
