Depression and what it's really like

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.

or what he said.

thanks for the support, dudes and ladies. last night's session went well, we worked on relationship stuff. i'm learning what the core of my problem is, i'm deathly afraid of getting close to people and asserting my boundaries/rights, etc. makes sense ... i was supposed to have thanksgiving with my two older brothers, but they blew me off to see a football game together, so i'm on my own. which is par for the course with my family. bunch of rotten bastards.

Damn, where are you? Maybe an ilxor can adopt you for thanksgiving.

nj. i'll be alright. just realizing now i'm probably better off without my family in my life for a while. like, if i want this therapy stuff to work, i need to start seeing myself and other people in a new context. in the context of my family i'm pretty damn worthless and have no recourse to change that, but they'll manipulate my emotions to keep me around ... for what, exactly? not like they want to spend time with me or do anything except treat me like less than a person to feel better about their own bullshit... it's a crappy relationship contract, in therapist terms. i'm sick of living like this, so they can all go to hell while i make a new life for myself.

you know what sucks ass? they're literally 3 miles from my apartment, but they still don't want to see me. "hey matt, happy thanksgiving! uhhh ... maybe in a couple of weeks or something you can come up here and hang out ... anyway, talk to you later! YEAH! BIG GAME! WOO!" same thing happened with my mom, didn't come see me graduate law school for no reason whatsoever. the rest of the fam' talked to me for about 15 minutes before bailing on me. spent more time that day with my friends' family than my own. then they make me feel like they don't want to spend time with me because i'm bad or evil or something, when i've opened my heart to them so many times. what a bunch of assholes. yeah, slightly alcohol fueled rant here.

They certainly sound like assholes. Have a good night and try not to get maudlin drunk..!

Damn, that's rough. Easier said than done, but try to get far away from those asswipes if you can. If not physically, then emotionally. Don't despair---there are a lot of people out there with awful families who end up building their own awesome families of friends.

The following happened in the past 48 hours:

- Property manager for my house comes by... The owner is putting it on the market, so I'll have to move out in the next month or too. I'm hoping that whoever buys it will want to keep it as rental property and keep me on, but in the meantime I have to deal with agents/buyers coming by.
- My mom calls my sister up and complains about severe pain in her foot. Overnights in the hospital, but tests don't find anything.
- My sister learns that all the lights in my mom's house have burned out and that my mom has been navigating around the house by flashlight. Mom is 88 and has been a severe hoarder for ALL her life*. So yesterday I go down to replace all the lights. I haven't been there in some time - 3 to 4 feet tall glaciers of unopened mail, old clothes and junk have left little moraines of paper and trash everywhere. It's one thing to talk about records and events that happened ten or twenty years ago, but I find things of mine I haven't seen in forty years: stuffed animals, books, toy cars, a ceramic dinosaur I made in elementary school. Everything is covered in a half-inch layer of dust that leaves filth marks on your hand when you pick it up. Kept it together long enough to change the lightbulbs, but damn that DMT-strength rush of forgotten memories is overwhelming. Could actually feel the long-term storage synapses fire up again and bring back all the emotions of being 12 and having to go live with my dad.

On the drive back last night from changing the bulbs (two and a half hours in heavy holiday traffic) I decided to offset everything and make a pumpkin pie (have fresh roasted pumpkin in the fridge), but needed to get some brown sugar. Two different grocery stores in Glendale were completely sold out and as I got back into the car to find a third store I noticed a flood of disassociation come on so strong that I thought "OK, so this is what it feels like to completely lose it (whatever 'it' is)." Did find brown sugar at store #3 and the resulting pie was so good that I broke down and cried for a hour.

Not happy about potentially having to move. I'm still out of work and have been fighting for table scraps at the moment (fuck hiring a 47 year old when we can hire a college n00b for cheap). Considering throwing what I want to keep in storage, liquidating the rest, and just get a plane ticket for somewhere else. Didn't want to post this on the Thanksgiving thread as people are having a good time, but just to get this off my chest: I have zero emotional resonance with what a family is so fuck that and fuck all these goddamn holidays.

* Before you ask, no one else in my family (which is really just my sister at this point, my dad died 24 years ago, and my brother has been estranged from everyone for 15 years) really felt motivated enough to get help for my mom. Think it's too late now and my sister is adamant against rocking the boat.

o man, sorry

i am familiar with the hoarding

It's basically impossible for me to watch any of the Hoarding reality shows.

Lots if free-floating depressive anger today (both outwardly and inwardly directed)

It's been a hell of a week. Best wishes and vibes to you, ET.

xpost yeah emilys, i think that's what i have to do now. there's this love you feel for your family, but sometimes it just keeps you somewhere you shouldn't be. at least new relationships can start clean ... that's the good thing about therapy, it's helping me learn stuff and confront fears that's kept me stuck my whole life. sadly, the future's brighter without my family than with.

Best wishes to you too, Spectrum.

Elvis, no apologies are necessary on this thread! That sounds like a damn intense day.

Spectrum, glad to hear you wanting to take care of yourself. It's possible when you're stronger you'll be in a better position to negotiate and communicate with them. Then again some people are not interested in communicating. Sounds like there is a lot of detachment going on. Maybe your family has no idea how shitty they make you feel? As I've said, I'm often surprised I can hurt people because I'm so self-focused and feel like I don't really affect anyone. Maybe they need to know, at least your brothers. But for now try to focus on things and people who make you feel good.

Yeah, I hear that ... those thoughts ran through my own head a few times. But it's like...

Whenever I try to talk to anyone in my family about this stuff, they never accept responsibility and they shift the blame to me. I confronted my mom about ditching my graduation, and she said I was overreacting, and I actually believed her, and then I apologized for it! Then my relationship with her seemed OK for a while, then she drags me into some fight she was having with my grandfather, and she tells me he never loved me, he cared about his other grand kids more, shit like that, and it was a real headfuck. All the while within my relationship with her, it's perfectly OK for her to ditch me on her whim because she never apologized or showed any remorse whatsoever about it. If I do actually stand my ground I get called "the most selfish person in the world" by my other family members. It's always been like this. and I've been stuck in it my whole life.

Same goes with my two older brothers ... sometimes things are pretty OK for a while, then they act real friggin shitty towards me, and I say it annoys me, then they laugh it off or place the blame on me. My one brother even said flat out, "I don't respect you," after I confronted him about insulting me to other people in front of my face, smacking me upside the head, demeaning me, etc. He makes me feel like I ran over his dog and then pissed on its corpse, then sold heroin to his kid, etc., when I tell him I don't like him being a jackass to me.

Everyone in my family, immediate and extended, are absolutely friggin miserable, and I don't want to end up like them. I love them to death, but I keep getting dragged in ... and my role as garbage dump/nonentity never changes because they never admit they're wrong -- I'm always wrong. and if I do something wrong, I apologize profusely and crawl to them on my hands and knees with a gold plate filled with fruits and spices from the far east, etc. Maybe they take advantage of me because I'm sensitive and have a high need for love, who knows.

If it means going my own way, fine ... it's not like they were ever really a part of my life anyway, except in my imagination. They're all fucked, and if they can't see it or don't have the guts to break out on their own, it makes me sad, but it's not my life. I've tried too hard to help them with love and shit, but the abusive family system is way bigger than I am.

damn that's long.