Posted by noa on February 7, 2003, at 11:49:12
In reply to Re: How much do your moods define you? » likelife, posted by Dinah on February 4, 2003, at 12:26:26
I haven't had time yet to read all the posts on this thread, but I will get to them.
It makes perfect sense, Dinah. Somewhere on this board, I wrote a post about my TV metaphor. I'll see if I can find it, because I don't know if I can rewrite it now.
I used to really fight to be the NOT depressed Noa, except that when I was deep in a depression, it was nearly impossible to imagine being not depressed. This also made me extremely anxious when I wasn't depressed, always on guard for depression pouncing on me when I wasn't looking.
When I started getting better in my mid-late 20's I liked to think of the depression as being a thing of the past. I didn't own it as part of me. So when it would come back, I was devastated. I remember when I saw a therapist briefly after I first moved here, in my early thirties, and she confronted me with the idea that I have had a life long depressive disorder that comes and goes in waves, but the waves never get very high, I felt so defensive--I wanted to prove to her that I was past my depression and this was just a stress reaction. But I came to see her idea as right. She was the one who prompted me to look into antidepressants. I had taken prozac before for two periods of about 10 months each. At that time, the medical thinking was that short term use worked. But since I think this therapist was right, short term use was not the right approach for a recurrent, chronic dysthymia plus major depression.
I only saw her briefly because she was working out of her house and one time I arrived maybe 5 minutes early and rang the bell and she came to the door in a towel and that kind of freaked me out, so when our contractd 10 sessions ended that was it. When I decided I wanted to go back into therapy, I found a different therapist. Anyway, the work with him focused a lot on bringing together this split in how I experience myself--depressed and not depressed, to accept both as part of who I am. Accepting the depressed part has helped to make me less hypervigilant for any little downturn. I had developed a lot of anxiety around every little down mood, and the panic would lead to more depression.
I'm still working on this. I feel like right now, although in some ways I'm functioning better than I have in recent years, in other ways, I am sort of steeped in awareness of these deeply embedded core feelings of horribleness that I used to work so hard to escape from . I still do a lot of escaping from them--mostly mind numbing idlesness--but I am also more aware of them being there, part of me. Problem is, I feel they are unchangeable. My therapist used to say they can change but now he is saying that because I feel that they are so etched onto my very being, that it isn't about changing the core feelings, but learning to somehow accept them but not let them be in control so much. He keeps reminding me that it is ok to exprience myself in different ways at different times (I am better when I am in structured settings, or able to borrow purpose and meaning from others because it is hard for me right now to be motivated just for myself --eg, I am doing well at work right now, but home life is rather stagnant).Anyway, I am glad you brought this up, because I think that mood disorders really do make it hard to have a consistent experience of one's self.
poster:noa
thread:2464
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030203/msgs/2536.html