Depression and what it's really like

if it was your first session you likely spent it doing intake, i.e. unilaterally disgorging lots of your personal & family history. Go back next week.

My first session was just an infodump, he only asked questions and I didn't get much out of it. The next week was a lot more helpful. The fact that you did get something out of the first session sounds promising - hope it works out for you, Spectrum.

is that a standard procedure? could the process be mechanized in any way do you guys think?

no, it couldn't.

maybe that was unnecessarily curt. the intake interview is essential for the therapist to get a sense of who you are, and so that they're able to start working out what topics you're going to want to focus on and therefore help you more effectively. mechanized it would be of little or no use.

also, i've dumped a therapist after an intake interview: that was enough to let me know that we weren't going to work out, and that timing was perfect because i hadn't had to invest very much in the therapeutic relationship yet.

i like this therapist because she seems to take a holistic approach to treatment: cognitive behavioral with understanding the roots of the problem and ending with setting and achieving goals... emotional, mental, and practical. that sold me on it because it makes sense to me, and if she thinks in that vein then it may be a good sign. i'll see. it's also the first time i'll be sharing this stuff with another human being, so that'll be real swell, too. i just want to get on with life, the world's too cool to spend everyday in a private nightmarescape.

the world's too cool to spend everyday in a private nightmarescape

I need this engraved on my bathroom mirror.

yay, Spectrum!

My awful mood of my last posts lifted a lot as soon as I started my period this week. The issues are still there, but don't seem as pressing. It also helps that I got out of the house and walked a good bit and saw some folks. My blood pressure was really high during one of my walks, though (made the mistake of checking it on one of those drug store machines), so now I am staving off the googlies with all my might and hoping not to lapse back into my health anxiety, which is its own peculiar flavor of hell.

the worst :(

wow, how the hell have i never posted on this thread before? denial is some shit

it's not good in the long run, no, but some days it has it's uses. sorry, rev.

i'm so depressed tonight i'm apparently fucking up its/it's.

that sounds glib, but sadly i'm serious.

just checking in to say that i feel... all right. which is fucking great in terms of depression. (i feel like "good" is too much to ask for. "all right" is the ultimate goal of what we take all that medication for.)

The almost 35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of common men, not even in his despair at not making a difference, or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he'd clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as a sort of a failure the grand ambitions which he'd judged himself a failure were somehow exceptional and superior to the common run's--not anymore.

ugh god i'm gonna totally stay up until 5 am re-reading this now, i can feel it.

Hey, guys. Just saying hi. Stick with it, emily. Also, strongo. Yay, jbr!

thanks, l. i am planning on "medicating" myself to sleep and then dealing with everything tomorrow.

That's okay, the sun will come up tomorrow no matter what you do, so that's one thing you can assure yourself you can't possibly have any effect on.

not...yet, anyway.

i am planning on "medicating" myself to sleep and then dealing with everything tomorrow

strongotm

god is a crul ringmaster

<3

Holy crap Strongo what is that Terry Schmidt thing from?

David Foster Wallace, Oblivion.

that is a sad quote, indeed

I think I get some form of depression which combines with feeling unproductive/extreme procrastination from time to time, but always feel it's too minor to bother anyone with when I'm feeling it combined with a feeling that I'm not up for doing anything anyway. When I'm feeling good I tend not to think about it and just enjoy being in the mood to be productive. Does anyone which experience think this is a fairly common scenario for people who suffer from depression?

yes.

i mean hopefully it's not too serious, and if yr productive periods outweigh yr unproductive periods that's a good sign. but yes, depression and not giving a shit enough to do anything go kinda hand in hand.

Yes. Depression makes it very difficult to feel motivated. When the depression lifts, even for a short while, it's a lot easier to be productive.

Well, I've always had "bad days" and never been the most motivated person especially concerning things I'm not into. Going through a divorce at the moment which seems to be making things worse than normal I think.

I haven't really been in any way productive in months :/

Any news from spectrum & the late great?

oh god i feel worse than ever tonight

sup

i'm ok, maybe

hey emilys, thanks for asking. i wish i had gone to therapy sooner, even after two sessions i'm starting to see how twisted my own thinking is, and that the problems i thought i had weren't the problems. good stuff.

so the therapist's been helpful with that, but i don't know what to think about her insistence to not blame my parents. i know what she's talking about regarding taking responsibility for my problems today ... i do blame 'em and everyone else when things go wrong and that makes me helpless. but there's another dimension: my parents totally warped my sense of reality growing up, and i'm only now starting to understand what the heck they did.

i mean, the 'rents weren't your run of the mill bar flies who screamed at me and locked me in the closet. my mom's a pretty intelligent woman ... went to college at 14, fluent in languages, and mean as hell. her dad was a psychological operations officer in the army, worked in propaganda, etc., and made a very lucrative career in public relations. my mom knew how to twist reality and manipulate people really well, and she played a long game on me and I'm still confused as fuck about a lot of things. my dad's a charismatic dude, his dad was a self-made man and career politician, and he knew the power of relationships pretty well. they both worked in concert to make me into a completely ineffectual ball of mush and made me believe I was born fucked up and hopeless and had some real jollies about it.

Not like by calling me worthless, but through like ... suggestions, selective memories, completely false memories they pulled out of their asses, referencing things that confirmed this reality constantly, humiliating me, and they punished the fuck out of me if I didn't do what they wanted... or for any and every reason under the sun, and left me to rot when they weren't interested in me. So on top of this warped sense of reality of being mysteriously fucked up from birth from my thoughts to my emotions down to my soul, and fearing for my life because of it, I have absolutely no life skills to speak of except working a job and doing all the weird shit I learned from them to get by.

I feel like I need to be deprogrammed or something, but my therapist wants me to drop my parents as a subject even though I'm only understanding now what the heck happened to me. Her approach is helping me see things in a new light, like with identities and just asking me questions I never ask myself, but I'm afraid if I drop my parents as a subject I won't fully understand what the hell happened. Next sessions tomorrow, so I'll see how that goes. Wow this is long; god bless if you made it through.

bonus is, i talked to my boss about therapy when i imagined i was doing a bad job (turns out i'm not), and learned she had a similar childhood with manipulative, self-centered parents who used her and left her to raise herself. we could both tell we had similar backgrounds i guess. so it's nice feeling i'm not alone. there's this bonding aspect therapy has i guess.

Yay, I'm glad you feel like it's already doing some good! But this stuff with your parents, I don't think it's really the therapist's job to tell you what you should and shouldn't talk about it. My understanding is that she is supposed to be their more as a mirror, allowing you to clarify your own feelings by talking it out. (There are different therapeutic approaches, though.) It may be that she is not insisting you drop it, but offering the perspective that you have the chance to reframe how you think of things. You can't get resolution from your parents, but you can understand how some of your thinking might be distorted and messing you up, and how you might change it. But if you need to talk about this, it's not really her right to be like, "no you can't talk about that." Try to tell her what you've said just now. You just started seeing her, so give it a bit more time. If you feel like she's still being dismissive, there are other therapists out there.

Nothing a therapist suggests as useful should be taken as an imperative. If there is a point to her advice not to spend your efforts talking about your parents, then she should easily be able to explain the point.

It may be (guess coming here) that you already have a fairly sound appreciation of the ways your parents have done you harm and at this point you need to release your attention from that past in order to apply it to other problems having solutions. Your past, however arresting, is not going to change. If changes are required, they must be made consciously and in reference to your present and future.

I'm glad you are finding value in your sessions. Good luck moving forward.

woah, just had a crazy thought. trying to capture any phenomena in language and thought is completely doomed for failure because these things exist outside of language, concepts, etc. any time we try to understand something or answer a question, we're doomed for failure because we're trying to capture something out of its natural state. so like, my parents and what they said about me growing up ... they're completely incapable of understanding who i am, because they have no ability to know me or understand me... all we have as human beings are incompatible mechanisms for knowing what's around us. the same with me ... the question "who am I?" is inherently flawed because i exist outside of these thoughts and ideas... no answer can ever answer that question. any attempt to capture it will always be a misunderstanding on some level. i feel a little freer now realizing that.

thanks emilys. i'll see what happens tomorrow. i'd like to talk about my parents, but i don't want to fall into the victim trap and absolve my own personal responsibility to my life.

and thanks aimless, too. it's taken a long time to pull myself out of all that shit, and new things keep cropping up everyday.

You can talk about your parents until the end of time, but that may or may not be a good tactic for reconfiguring maladapted patterns of thought.

^^ pithily otm

yeah, there's too much shit i need help with in the present day and it boils down to thinking wrong and not knowing how to do stuff. don't wanna waste a lot of time, either, therapy is $$$

changing your thinking, as simple as it sounds, is very very difficult, especially when you've spent decades telling yourself that everything you do is shit. it will take effort and patience, but it is worth it.

Yep. Plan on a one-to-one ratio between time spent building up defense mechanisms and time spent breaking them down.

lovely, got about 25 years worth of crap to work through then. complication is my parents designed me into a servant with no rights of my own, so i don't even know how to be a human being in a lot of ways. this is gonna be fun.

are there pro bono therapists like there are lawyers?

Had a very similar experience with my old boss, Spectrum, even though my background is a little different from yours. Last year when I was feeling quite depressed, I noticed that I was doing a worse job at work. I kind of apologized to my boss and nearly teared up while doing so, and he said just the right things, mentioning that I was still doing great work (in his eyes), if I need time off I should take it, etc. Found out that he had also done therapy earlier in life and had struggled with many of the same issues. It really was nice to not feel so alone. Continued best of luck!

many offer a sliding scale to uninsured clients; the psychology today therapist finder lets you filter on this criterion. xp

are there pro bono therapists like there are lawyers?

i don't know about pro bono but there are sliding scale therapists for sure. a lot of non-profit or city-funded health organizations have no-cost mental health services, if you can get in, but it's very much a get what you pay for situation in my experience. don't go expecting the hour in the couch of tv drama fame.