Deep thoughts #3 --- Deep thinking

I'm a thinker. I've always considered myself an intellectual, but I also have considered myself very emotional: a "feeler" as is described in the Myers-Briggs Personality Types. But a previous therapist told me that few people actually think about their feelings, like "what am I feeling?" "why am I feeling this?" "what does this feeling mean or related to?" and that sort of thing.

I was stunned. I thought that everyone approached life that way, or almost everyone. I feel. I think. I look at each of those things from the other perspective to understand myself. Apparently not everyone does this. It somewhat explained some of the areas where my mother and I lacked rapport. I think my brother was probably more like me in this than like our parents.

So I think all the time, even when I shouldn't. I think when I'm trying to sleep. I think when I'm on the toilet or in the shower. I even think during sex when I shouldn't be thinking (or rather, back when I used to have sex), making orgasm a very difficult feat for me, one worth cheering for when it did happen. I do it even with myself! (So I understand how frustrating it can be for a lover ....)

My mind doesn't turn off. And if there are no deep thoughts currently needing attention — or my medications are turning me into a zombie — then my mind plays with superficial or tiny thoughts, the way a kitten plays with a piece of fluff. Back and forth, back and forth. I've also just recently learned that this back and forthing, as much as my mind does it at any rate, is part of obsessive thinking. That explains a lot, too. Like how some thoughts won't leave, much like Daffy Duck getting stuck in taffy, repeating the same movements back and forth over and over again until I would like to scream. But I don't because my mother taught me not to make scenes.

If only my mind would get stuck on positive thoughts, that would be acceptable. But, of course, my brain gets stuck on the negative things, or disturbing thoughts or images (Never, ever, EVER watch even a tiny film clip about the Human Centipede movie. Don't even look at the poster. Just. Don't.) In addition, I have a vivid, creative imagination and a vivid, detailed memory. Do all obsessive thinkers have the same kind of imagination and memory? Are all people with such memory and imagination obsessive thinkers? Am I the only person I know whose mind does this to them?

For the most part, I love my mind. I love the detailed memory and imagination, I love the vividness and the full-sensory details they provide me. Some of my dreams are unbelievable! But the obsessiveness has got to be controlled. The latest drug that was supposed to handle that is probably the one making me a zombie. Maybe we can handle it with therapy; I'd love to cut down on the medication, for certain.

Do you have a love-hate relationship with your mind?

The balance between gravity and flight

Tonight, I and several friends spent time on Facebook accomplishing a group project and it spawned a great deal of activity; double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking; and laughter. It has also left me with the jittery feelings that come when I let loose the dogs of hypomania, to completely destroy a phrase. The feeling is the same as when I was in college and didn't know about mania and mood swings and crashes as anything other than the regular feelings I experienced and assumed that many others experienced as well. 

In my 20s, I always encouraged and followed that emotional arrow as it flew up and up, past the birds, then the clouds, sometimes clear into the lower Earth orbit. The arrow would halt there, for a moment, balanced almost perfectly between both up and down forces, and that moment of balance was better than alcohol, better than pot, better than sex. However, gravity always won and the emotional arrow would plummet down, faster and faster until it achieved terminal velocity and crashed into the solid Earth, leaving me exhausted, in a vicious mood, confused, and often ill. 

When my first therapist first talked to me about controlling my highs in order to control the crashes, I was ferociously against it. I was convinced I would lose my personality, be some dull drone. I knew I would lose my creativity and my whimsy and spontaneity. It was another 3 years or so before I gave in and, tired of the crashes, began to recognize and control the arrow as it flew upward. I was relieved beyond words to see that it didn't kill my creativity or those parts of my personality that I valued so much. In fact, I think it made those facets better by virtue of my achieving some control. Later, when we decided to go further and add a medication layer of control, I wasn't so dead set against that. I'd grown accustomed to and grateful for control and the loss of those crashes.

In the past few years, I've also learned that I do have a cycling mood disorder and that the medication doesn't remove the cycling, it only dampens it. The rest is still up to me. I didn't have any awareness of those cycles until a friend who had gotten to know me very well and who has a keen perception pointed out to me that I fell into these phases where I would feel as if rabid hamsters were running on wheels in my mind and I couldn't control them. During those times, I would become dramatic and sure that the very worst thing that could happen would happen. These phases happened, he pointed out, every three weeks. Nothing I could lay to female hormones. 

Now that I've become aware of those three-week events, I've been able to perceive and control them. Over the  years I've come to appreciate control. So do my OCD and my PTSD and my hypervigilance and my regular anxiety ....