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.

Paranoia Doesn't Mean I'm Not Right

Before I checked myself into the psych hospital at the tail edges of my little meltdown/nervous breakdown, I let a few people know so they wouldn't worry. Among the people I told was a man who I report to for my favorite part-time job, the man who talked me into this job. His email reply was short, but supportive.

I emailed him when I got out, mentioning how I'd not done well on the job before I went in and wondering what he wanted to do about that. He usually emails me or calls me a lot during a week just to keep me up to date and to keep in touch.

I've had one text message, basically the same as the one he sent before I went in. And that's it. According to another member of the team, this man who supported me seems to have the same phobia that another good friend of mine (same age cohort as the man with the job): a fear that people with "mental illness" are never as stable or dependable as "normal, healthy" people and as such should be avoided as employees. At least, that's my fear and my current perception of this situation. 

And this situation and these reactions, ladies, gentlemen, and others, are why I choose to make this blog as anonymous as is reasonable and why I have not told my more stable job about it. I'm paranoid, but not a complete idiot. Just a partial one with a lazy streak.

Back

Well, for those of you playing along at home, you may have picked up on "Quitter" that I wasn't only referring to Camp Fire Girls and Job's Daughters but about my life. Raise a hand if you caught the barely veiled references to suicide. Anyone?

If you don't know it yet, I brought that bit of prose to my therapist and, on her very strong urging, I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital for Thanksgiving. 

I was in there for a week. The first two days I spent most of my time in my room. I came out to the Day Room for meals and meds, I was examined by a physician, and I went to a couple of group sessions. While the group sessions were fine, they were nothing earth-shaking. The meds were supposed to be what I brought, but the pharmacy apparently would rather bend me over provide me with their meds rather than use what I brought and somehow everything got messed up and I was off my two primary meds for three days, and off one of them for another two after that! So I was experiencing weird withdrawal symptoms as well as being in a strange place both spatially and mentally. 

Negative Space

There is a style of painting and drawing where you use the "negative space" to create a picture. Generally, the negative space is the dark spaces, the shadows, and you draw the shapes of these dark areas until ... you have a recognizable picture! When done well, it is dramatic and beautiful.

Julie has recently called me on how I note the negatives and failures in my posts but not the positives and successes, even when I mention them. I don't even see them: I am drawing and seeing my life through the negative spaces, not the areas of light. I actually have a prose piece I wrote a few years ago when I was enduring great loneliness and depression and in it I speak of myself as living under shadows and looking out onto those who live in the light. Creating a life out of negative space is very dramatic, but it's not beautiful.

I have been better at perceiving positives at other times in my life. During those same times, I was usually doing gratitude journals or going through focused visualization and affirmations before bed. Sometimes I was "faking it until I made it" — smiling when I felt like frowning and so forth. But I was doing things that directly contributed to my positive mental health, beyond therapy or medications.

This morning I spent about 20 minutes on visualizations and affirmations (and where's that damned winning lottery ticket?!) — I felt more awake and more cheerful when I rolled out of bed than I usually do. I haven't been getting much out of doing a random reading out of each of some meaningful books, so tonight I'm going to start reading the Buddhism book by Boorstein one short chapter at a time; that has made me feel good in the past and has had a positive effect on my mental state. I believe doing these activities will make me more aware of positive occurrences and successes in my life. I hope to build in a positive feedback loop. Heaven knows I've got a very effective negative loop!

So feel free to point out the positives I've missed, Julie and anyone else who wants to. As I retrain my perceptions, I can probably do with a little help. I may have forgotten what successes look like!