I'm in recovery from depression, anxiety, and co-dependancy. I've been in therapy on and off, but mostly on for about 15 years. I like to think of my therapy now as getting rid of maladaptive behaviors. I had a lot of maladaptive behaviors. I used to get agoraphopic, have panic attacks, sleep awfully and at weird times, eat not enough or too much, date the wrong people, care about what the wrong people thought too much, take on other peoples problems, be influenced by other peoples feelings too much, and basically not live MY life how I really wanted to live it, I also had a temper, I still do, but few inantimate object get broken and yelled at now, and it causes me less distress than before. I also took nearly every psyche med known to man at one time or another (that could be a whole different blog post!).
I've come to realize that I hate diagnoses. I never fit one well enough, and I had it change too much, and you know what, your diagnoses doesn't really matter. And what you have isn't that different than what everyone else experiences, it's just that you experience it to the point where you are distressed enough by it to go seek out a psychiatrist or therapist.
So I didn't really click well with therapy until around 2009 when I was finally done dating total assholes. I wish my therapist had just say me down back in 2005 and said, "look, your boyfriend is a shithead, for godssake, dump his ass, you could do so much beter, he is bringing you WAY down." But therapists aren't supposed to say stuff like that.
So I did a bunch of truama therapy and and found a good therapist that deals a lot with co-dependancy issues. I'm not cured, but I have a way better grip on what exactly my form of maladaptive behavior takes and where it comes from. Knowing hepls a lot but it doesn't cure it all the way. For instance now I can say, "oh shit, I'm caught in a shame spiral!" But I'm still bad at preventing a shame spiral or getting out of it without a full blown anxiety atack and a small dose of anti-anxiety med. I fully embrace the possibility of making a mistake, but do really bad at the "after the mistake we..." part of it. I have to reassure myself a lot.
What is really great is that I finally actually feel like I'm a pretty great person. Deep down I do have this great self-esteem, but I've lived inside this framework of low self-esteem and caring too much about the thoughts and actions of others that it is hard to break out of the old habits for good. For now at least.
The kind of awesome, and kind of crappy part of this is that a lot of my therapy now is not how to deal with my own maladaptive behaviors, but how to deal with all of you guys' maladaptive behaviors, yes YOU, you reading this right now. Everyone has at least one silly thing they do that does not help them and influences someone like me who is highly influenced by others' feelings and actions. This includes people I love dearly, even my own husband.
But honestly you all have no idea how much I think about all the projecting you all do.
I've also noticed how much anger people have, some of you have WAY more than others too. Anger is something I've lowered a lot in myself, and I do get fed up with things sometimes and then bitch about them. But, seriously, some of you are loose cannons poised to be set off into angry mode and the first sniff of something being not quite right. You don't seem to get the concept of expecting the best in people and that everyone is trying to do their best. There are a few of you have have seriously thought about blocking on facebook just because of how many times you have turned my words into a fight when I wasn't looking for a fight at all. Then I spend way too much time just trying to NOT fight with you while you are fighting with me and then eventually I just stop, or sometimes you do.
I am very surprized at how much de-escalation I must do sometimes. This is something I did not notice a few years ago when I was a very angry person myself.
There are a lot of people who need to take a breather and assume that people mean the best. You waste so much energy on creating arguments with people that aren't even there. And then you often lable yourself as the "victim."
And I also notice some of you who are actually really awesome at not doing this, you get your point accross without personally attacking people, you patiently explain things, you only get really angry when something is truely awful. You roll with the punches and don't let the actions of others rule your life. Congrats. I wish it was appropriate to send out a little e-Card saying, "I've noticed you seem to have good mental health!"
What I'm trying to get at is that I feel like after having been in so much therapy and after spending a lot of time on introspection and comtemplating what really is the best way to live a happy life that I can see the opposite in other people. And I see it a lot, because we are kind of a fucked up human race right now (no judgment, I've been there).
So now I spend my therapy sessions talking about how to deal with the other crazy people in my life, instead of dealing with my own crazy. Because my own crazy is a lot better now. Not totally better, but a lot better. Oh and I hate the word crazy used by anyone but me if referring to me (crazy, right?) so don't think this means you get to call me crazy. I will not want to hang with you if you do.
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