IFS
Had my first real IFS session with a real IFS-trained therapist, and . . . I didn't get past the initial relaxation exercise without breaking down and crying.
Haven't had motivation to work lately.
Had my first real IFS session with a real IFS-trained therapist, and . . . I didn't get past the initial relaxation exercise without breaking down and crying.
Haven't had motivation to work lately.
I'm definitely in a depressive rut. I don't know why I feel like that's such a profound thing to say, especially for me. I just think it's important to honor feelings like that, especially when they're as simple and free of conflict as this one is. I guess it helps me avoid CPTSD spin-outs, too.
. . . after some reflection, I wonder if I'm not depressed so much as releasing some of the unhealthy anxiety that has been driving me since I was . . . uh. . . . born. I get this idea from the fact that I'm doing something that I've only done in very rare periods of my life: procrastinating on work and not constantly looking for work to do. I know these are things that most normal people do instinctively, which is why they so easily become bad habits. Right now I'm lounging on the couch writing my little blog while my wife thinks I'm preparing to teach. I almost never play that kind of hooky. And the times when I have been this easy-going have tended to be the happier periods of my life. I also think I might not be depressed because I'm actually feeling more confident in my work and relationships lately, and I'm getting better rest and exercise. It's easy for the trauma survivor to mistake a change in pace for the all-too-familiar downward spiral.
It also feels like I'm no longer trying to take neurotic control over the world around me -not in a particularly assholish way, just obsessively “doing” all the time so as to not feel the guilt of resting and being passive. Anyway, that's how it feels now that I've had a good cry about it.
Ok, this has been a good example of writing helping to clarify my thoughts and feelings. I need to do this more often.
And fuck AI.
It took a few days for me to get up the motivation to try my new resolution at all. I just don't . . . want to do it. I don't want to meditate or do cardio. I'm definitely depressed. I don't think I've had quite this flavor of depression in a long time. My usual energy is actually quite nervous, always looking for and usually finding things to do to occupy my mind. I'm always trying to think of things I can do to “save time” later, even though I never seem to take advantage of that time with rest. An avoidant anxiety, to be sure. But lately I just can't care what I'm doing. I'm fine whiling the day away getting high and playing games on my phone. I don't want to improve anything. I don't want to work. I don't want to exercise. I don't even want to rest. I just plainly and petulantly DON'T WANT TO. And I feel this strange moral right to not want to.
I think I'm just crashing, to be honest. I finally got some real rest this weekend after weeks of one stress after another. That's probably the only reason I had the energy today to hold off on weed until 3 pm (my daily life is extremely boring), do 30 mins of cardio, and do a token “meditation” session just sitting there ruminating. Baby steps.
It took a few days for me to get up the motivation to try my new resolution at all. I just don't . . . want to do it. I don't want to meditate or do cardio. I'm definitely depressed. I don't think I've had quite this flavor of depression in a long time. My usual energy is actually quite nervous, always looking for and usually finding things to do to occupy my mind. I'm always trying to think of things I can do to “save time” later, even though I never seem to take advantage of that time with rest. An avoidant anxiety, to be sure. But lately I just can't care what I'm doing. I'm fine whiling the day away playing games on my phone. I don't want to improve anything. I don't want to work. I don't want to exercise. I don't even want to rest. I just plainly and petulantly DON'T WANT TO. And I feel this strange moral right to not want to.
I think I'm just crashing, to be honest. I finally got some real rest this weekend after weeks of one stress after another. That's probably the only reason I had the energy today to hold off on weed until 3 pm (my daily life is extremely boring) and do 30 mins of cardio early in the day. Baby steps.
Several factors are colluding and pretty much necessitating that I make some changes for my physical and mental health. I'm starting to get winded after alarmingly little exercise, and being high all day is becoming more of a burden than a crutch, so I really need to cut down on the weed and start doing 30 minutes of cardio each day. I also had my first session with a trauma-informed therapist today, and he advised me to do ten minutes of meditation each day, so there's another reason to cut out the weed.
I'm not very good at sticking to habits like these, but I think it will help if I keep thinking of the problems and solutions as all interrelated, as I just described. Once again, I feel like I'm starting a new period of my life, with new habits and attitudes, and the changes seem to be coming about naturally, in a weird way. It's surely because of a lot of hard work on my part, but I also feel like I'm just maturing out of things that have served me poorly at best. With the exception of the past couple years, I don't think I've been happy in 20 years, since I was 19.
I've been dreading turning 40, and I'm still not looking forward to it, but there are certainly worse ways to start a fifth decade.
My narcissistic parents are being especially nauseating today.
Everything is so fucking dramatic with them.
They emotionally blackmail and plead with me like children.
These are the stupid fucks who raised me.
Today in the garden I got caught up in a ridiculous activity: trying several different methods, manual and electric, to remove a splitting wedge that I had foolishly and needlessly pounded into a stump, because I had set it in a place too thick to split. I wasted over an hour on this endeavor, and the wedge is still there. I gathered and bagged up the chips and sawdust for mulch, just to have something to show for my efforts.
Thing is, I didn't really need the wedge or the wood I would have gotten, and that kind of time-wasting usually bugs me. But this time I noticed a certain clarity and calmness of mind afterwards and realized that I had lost myself in the activity, in a healthy processing sort of way, exercising my creativity. Sometimes when this happens, especially in the garden, I think that this is my way of learning to play as an adult, and not only play, but reap the psychic benefits of it.
I think I made a minor breakthrough in my CPTSD recovery today. I was thinking about my emotionally immature parents' particular style of neglect, which involved providing for all of my physical needs while completely ignoring a child's need to be guided through developmental stages and to be taught age-appropriate skills. I was thinking especially about the very basic skills that my parents never bothered to teach me at a young age, like tying my shoes. I spent many years embarrassedly asking peers or teachers to tie my shoes when they came untied, sometimes pretending some reason I couldn't do it myself. As I got older, these missed skills, like cooking, doing laundry, dishes, etc., piled up, and I became adept at avoiding doing or talking about skills that my peers had but I didn't.
This isn't the breakthrough. I'd been thinking about that for some time, and I knew that I had some trauma around issues of competency and intelligence because of it. Of course it's hard for a kid to deal with that vulnerability, even more so completely alone, so that aspect is traumatic enough in itself.
The breakthrough today came when I realized that childhood me must have wondered why his peers had these skills and he didn't, and I wondered what childhood me thought the explanation was.
Of course, what childhood me actually thought is less important than what my inner child spontaneously blurted out when I first pondered the question, which was, “I wasn't good enough for my parents to teach me.” That is probably what childhood me thought. Now another thing I was thinking about today is how children can lose their sense of humanity when a parent is extremely neglectful or hurtful, because the parent's perspective defines the young child's world and sense of self. And then it hit me. By avoiding revealing my ignorance of those skills (which is the same as pretending I had them), I was doing much more than avoiding uncomfortable embarrassment. I was defending, or perhaps faking, my human dignity, which my parents' neglect seemed to confirm I never had. So my sensitivity about competence is really about this anxiety about falling out of the human community out of ignorance.
I haven't yet figured out how to really process this realization, but I feel I connected some important dots.
As I approach my 40th birthday, I happen to find myself also desperately needing to quit drinking, so this has been a reflective time for me. I feel like the past 20 years have been tainted and partially lost to my drinking, and I'd like to pass this benchmark looking forward to a very different 20 years (god willing).
And so I want this to be my mantra every time I consider reaching for a drink. I like it because it boils the matter down in a way that makes sense to me. I can't deny that alcohol has stolen months, possibly years, from my early adulthood. I count as stolen all the days I was too hungover to function, all the days I spent hating myself, all the days I spent frantically fixing or covering up some drunken fuckup.
Definitely years.
It is a fact that alcohol has only subtracted from and never added to my life. By never drinking again, I'm virtually adding days to my life and losing nothing. Never touching a drink again adds everything and subtracts nothing.
How many days will I gain? Probably even more than I lost. I find the thought encouraging, anyway.
I hate the fact that I'm returning to this blog because of another fuckup in my marriage caused by CPTSD and drinking. I'm too disgusted with myself to continue writing, actually.
Later: I'm trying to keep things in perspective. I'm trying to remember that I became this way because of my parents' severe emotional neglect and that the impulses and flashbacks I have aren't my fault.
I have a hard time writing about these things. Probably because my emotions themselves are so conflicted. Sometimes I feel doomed to repeating old habits, like all my efforts at recovery can do nothing but space out my breakdowns a little more and make my misery a little less constant. Other times I feel recovered, like I've truly turned over a new leaf (like when I came up with the title for this blog); or at least that I have no choice but to keep moving forward. But moving forward like this is disheartening and terrifying. Am I fooling myself by thinking I can change? How many times can I disappoint myself and get back up again?
I don't know what to do. I wish it were enough for me to get up in the morning and do the things I need to do without some other part of me getting in the way. I need to do parts work. But I also knew that I needed to do visualization and grieving, which I did, only to screw up again later on.
It's a strange thought, but I would rather experience constant failure from a healthy person's perspective than live my current, somewhat successful life with my damaged perspective. Why is my own head such an enemy to the very many good things in my life? It makes me feel like I don't deserve them.