Posted by mila on August 17, 2001, at 9:29:19
In reply to Pain of Recovery, posted by akc on August 16, 2001, at 15:32:22
Hello AKC,
recovery itself is not painful, whatever is left of the disease and side effects of medication are.
treatment (in my experience and from the methodological perspective) does not require 'dealing' with the issues from the past. The only disorder I know of where it is actually needed is in PSTD.
as we all know there are different kinds of therapy, and although there is a rather startling conclusion from the meta studies of them, that the choice of the therapist's orientation doesn't matter much for the successful outcome, only the quality of client-therapist relation, I respectfully disagree. the relationship is number one prerequisite, no doubt, but what is actually being done matters a lot. In order to recover, you have both to receive a support for the brain and support for the mind. good medication gives us enough calm to be able to be rational and proactive. Therapy gives us tools to raise above the illness, because you cannot heal it if your thinking-behavior is AT the level of the illness or from within it.
when I was undergoing CBT the realization that 'cure' is not content-oriented was very startling to me. the logic underlying the healing is "not to deal with 'causes', external or internal, by talking about what happened, but with present emotional states". there are gazillions of causes in our past and more in the future for us to experience anxieties and depressions. CBT and practice or what i learned from it in life build up an exquisite resilience in us, making us impervious to the emotional devastations. REsilience is THE key word here. Studies of victims of child abuse show that only a small portion of sexually or otherwise abused children are severely damaged by it. these are children who lacked 2 things 1)emotional resilience, 2) one kind person to whom to confide. In therapy when we have a good relationship with the therapist we find a person to whom to confide, but the resilience has to be built too,and the therapist has to have the skills to train you in resilience building and maintenance. In my personal case, my support person was my husband, and the resilience training I did with audiotapes of Lucinda Bassett. As I was learning my lessons from the tapes, I was having unbearable bouts of anxiety and depression, but they had nothing to do with my past tragedies and were caused mostly by my then terribly low self-esteem and weak emotional skills. I wanted to succeed, but the material to learn is not easy, and skills require time to develop and strengthen. Meanwhile any small 'failure' to get an A+ in emotional lessons was sending me down the drain over and over. first, you claim the mountain of 'panic attacks', as you do it you experience panic attacks that the mountain of learning is horribly scary itself. then you move into the fear of failure swamp, and you fear to failure this part of the journey. next come 'should rules' and you battle your own unrealistic expectation with success in this part of the training. then you deal with anger and mood swings all the time being angry at yourself and moody that you don't do as well as needed. and the list is going on and on for there are 15 challenges like these to go through. In the end I think I 'graduated' with D+ :))) but that made an enormous difference, and what happened afterwards in life gave me plenty of opportunities to solidify my knowledge and master the skills further.
in some weird sense CBT course treats the person 'as if' they have no depression/anxiety, or regardless of the disorder manifestations. the only requirement is not to be in coma at the time of the treatment.
best wishes
mila
poster:mila
thread:9731
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010817/msgs/9780.html