My Thoughts Hurt Me

Some time back, a woman I know online wrote about her young daughter's newly discovered OCD and said that her daughter's thoughts hurt her. That's what obsessive thinking is like: your thoughts hurt you. They beat at you without stopping.

Most of my obsessive thoughts are divided between being abusive to myself ("Stupid! Ugly! Fat! Irresponsible!", things that mostly have never or rarely been said to me) and visualizing bad things happening (such as using a knife to cut vegetables and cutting my hand open, or standing near a ledge and falling over to my death ... things that have never happened to me). Even benign thoughts such as getting a song stuck in my head hurts; I most often get such "earworms" that are of sad songs, songs of lost love and loneliness. And having any song stuck in my mind on a continuous 24/7 loop (whenever I wake up, there it is) makes me want to drill holes in my head to let the demons out (thus the reason why some cultures still practice trepanning).

So Karen the Phenomenal Therapist and I are going back to working on cognitive therapy instead of the other therapies for the time being. As she put it, better to work on what currently has the greatest negative effect on me. And my negative thinking is almost literally killing me. After all, you have to talk yourself into suicide, and I almost did. 

There is no rational reason for me to consider myself so worthless and disgusting, but I frequently do and what you believe about yourself tends to become true. I have come to believe that I don't have integrity or follow-through, and that I will eventually disappoint people, especially people I work for, and they will eventually become unhappy with me. Ta da! It happened with someone at work who I was working for. The fact that this occurred due to "broken thinking" that led to a self-fulfilling prophecy is besides the fact, almost like a coincidence, in the way my mind considers it.

So yesterday I began wearing a couple of wide rubber bands on my wrists (representing two different issues) to remind me to think about what I'm thinking and feeling. What am I saying to myself? How do I feel when I do so? 

As we get into the book that Karen recommends, which I've ordered for myself, I'll learn how to fix my broken thinking so I won't always have to be on the lookout for it. But by then, I will have developed the habit of mindfulness, which is a good thing to develop. 

The book is SOS Help for Emotions; Managing Anxiety, Anger & Depression by Lynn Clark, Ph.D, just in case you think it might be useful for you or someone you know. So far, it looks good. 

I hope we get through the book fairly quickly, because I see myself going nowhere good as long as I keep thinking the thoughts I currently think.

The Art of Focusing

As was obvious from last night's post, I am feeling overwhelmed and not at all like I'm "handling" anything. I feel my greatest accomplishments are a) not dying, and b) not screaming. The only reason I wasn't hyperventilating today was because of one of my cute little quirks I have when I'm tense: I was holding my breath.

I'm one of those people with a noisy mind. Music, musings, conversations, commentary — it's all going on in my mind all the time. My mind is rarely quiet. It's quieter when I write, but then there is frequently my "talking" as I write and there are other things in my mind that may or may not make it onto the screen (or the paper, if I'm going low-tech). One thing I've noticed is that the more anxious I feel, the greater the noise in my mind. It's like the noises are faster and more shrill, winding up like the "hamster-wheel" meltdowns I've experienced in the past. There's a correlation, but I'd say that the increased anxiety probably causes the more agitated noise rather than the other way around.

The noise and anxiety and near panic were almost making me sick today. I have a lot of stress places on my body, and my stomach is one of them. During times of extreme stress and extreme physical and mental tightness, I've actually lost a great deal of weight, even when there wasn't much to lose. I have high hopes for this phase, because I'm sure as hell not hungry and when I do eat, the food ends up feeling like a solid lump in my stomach. Add to this some exercise due to the work I've got to do back at my mom's house and I should drop a good 10 pounds easily in two weeks. If I had a scale to measure myself on today, I'd do it, but I'll have to wait until I get to the house.

The noises in my mind today seemed to be ratcheting my anxiety higher, like a positive feedback loop, and I was quickly working up from panic to screaming, so I tried some mindfulness and meditative techniques to see if they helped. I focused very precisely on exactly what I was doing. I allowed myself to hear the sounds around me, such as the refrigerator compressor or the table fan. I felt my clothing on my body and focused on my cup of tea as I carried it to the couch and as I sipped it. If a bit of song slipped into my mind, I tightened my focus, listened for sounds around me and outside. 

This level of focus exhausted me. I don't have the discipline or the skill to maintain it for very long, so my quiet moments were short and choppy. But they were there. And when I was that focused, paying that much attention to what I was doing, I wasn't aware of anything other than what I was doing: I wasn't aware of panic and anxiety and hamsters and wanting to puke. 

So there are very good reasons to practice this kind of focus. Maybe doing so will save my sanity, what there is of it. If it keeps me from puking or screaming, that's a win right there! I think the anxiety/panic connects to the hamster-wheel meltdown — they are all part of the same craziness. If paying attention in an aware way calms the craziness pieces, it's worth taking the time to practice. And it will take time and energy because my mind just is not able to focus for that long. It's very hard work.

Of course, I'm likely to forget how focusing helped me today. Maybe having it written down here will help me remember, because I have a tendency to forget things that benefit me, or things I like to do, or things that will get me to where I want to be. Makes me want a personal secretary who, while telling me what appointments I have to attend and what phone calls I must make, will remind me to pay attention and to go for a walk and who'll make sure I have salads for dinner, too.

I know, I know. Post-Its. Lots less expensive than a personal secretary but they probably won't go out and get me lunch.

Inattentiveness

It's almost July. It's 2011. I'm missing large portions of the last year. I could point to what's caused that, except that I've experienced this before off and on. While the latest missing time has at its root the events and grief of the last year, it ends up coming from not paying attention, from not being present. 

This past year, I didn't want to be present for many things and so found ways to occupy my mind and my time in a wasteful way (I won't tell you how many of the LOL cats I've seen on icanhascheezburger.com.), all for very good reasons, but I haven't always had good reasons. I have left my attentiveness behind because I was sad or stressed or anxious or tired or lonely. So I end up missing large chunks of my life.

And now we are halfway through 2011, almost exactly a year ago that I had to go be with my mom. Various people said "oh, you are getting such good karma, next year will be spectacular for you," and other similar things. Well... I haven't seen it so far. But then, I've still got my sadness goggles on and may have missed the spectacular. I hope it comes back.

Paying attention makes time seem to move more slowly, because you are experiencing nearly all of it. When you are putting your attention into mindlessly surfing the Web or watching hours and hours of TV or doing anything that allows your mind to kind of fuzz out, time flies. When you are in a rut and don't look up, time flies. When you are trying very hard to ignore your life, for whatever reason, then time flies and weeks, months, maybe years can go by when you aren't paying attention.

Do you want more time in your life? Practice mindfulness. Be in the present. Pay attention to right now. The more of that you do, the more time you have to be in.

Once I get my sadness goggles off, I'll join you.

Decent day — good day

When I was thinking of the title for tonight's post, I thought "I've had a good day.  A decent day." The fact that I downgraded it from good to decent struck me. Why do I so often diminish the good, but the bad is always way up there — awful, horrible, terrible? When I exchanged greetings with someone I know around the complex, he said he was "good" and I said I was "not too bad." Am I afraid that I will attract The Bad by giving attention to The Good? It's weird, whatever it is.

Therapy Day today. I still hadn't done my homework, so we talked about all the other crap. Then I learned that while I thought I'd been doing cognitive therapy in the past, I hadn't done it in the orderly manner that Karen does it. 

We were discussing, hell, I don't remember all of it specifically.  We discussed my living in the past and the future. We discussed my meltdowns of last week. Then she asked me if she'd gone over the Cognitive Distortions checklist. No, she hadn't, and I'm glad she thought to do so today. I have a lot of the distorted thinking patterns on her list. For example, All or Nothing thinking, where everything is black or white. When my meltdowns occur, that's the first place I go. Or "Mental filter: you pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water." Might as well put my picture on that one. One bad thing can color the rest of a predominantly good thing for me. 

My current homework is to note these distortions when I think them, label them, then replace them with corrected, undistorted thoughts.

I've been in therapy for over half my life. I was told that much of it was cognitive therapy. But I've never had it targeted this well or been given such specific information and ways to deal with it.

My other homework is to get some balance in my life with the computer. I've let the computer be my escape from reality, my distraction from thinking or living. Now my intention is to use the computer as a tool — for writing, for communicating, for doing work — and to not use it for escapist activities. Nope, no planning any prison breaks on the computer for me! Oh, not that kind of escapist. And if you check out my blog list down on the right, you'll see "zen habits." In my previous post I mentioned the blog author's book, Focus. Well part of that book talks about becoming addicted to the computer and allowing it to control you rather than the other way around. Luckily for me, this book has come to me at the right time to help me with this specific task. Oh, and with the next one.

In order to deal with my forever living in the past and the future rather than the present, my homework is to practice mindfulness and get out of my head. Think outwardly, not inwardly. Yeah, that will be easy. I worked on it while on my short walk. "Oh look, pretty trees. Ow, my feet hurt. Listen to the birds. The sun is in my eyes. Smell the scent of trees and pine needles and dust. My feet still hurt." It was like dragging a toddler along on my walk! Which, in some way, I guess I was. That inner child thing.

And, of course, I need to continue on my trauma homework.

It's a whole lot of work, certainly. I must make it a priority or I'll never do any of it. And at my advanced age, it's high time I stop suffering from my past and fearing my future and simply begin living my life. Because being miserable has lost its glamour somehow.