Posted by akc on August 17, 2001, at 16:17:50
In reply to Re: Pain of Recovery, posted by mila on August 17, 2001, at 9:29:19
mila,
This is a lot for me to digest -- especially today -- I very tired and the brain just doesn't want to function right now.
> recovery itself is not painful, whatever is left of the disease and side effects of medication are.
>Intellectually I think I understand what you are saying. But emotionally, I don't -- it "feels" like it is recovery that is painful. Before recovery, I would have some bad times, but nothing as painful as some of the times that I have gone through in the past couple of years. Someday maybe my heart will start understanding what my head gets.
> 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.
>Well, one of my diagnosis is PSTD, so I'm not quite sure where I fit in here. But I've not worked much on past issues in therapy. My therapist has enough on her hands putting out the current fires that get set by my episodes.
> 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.
>All I know is that I am making more progress I believe with this therapist than any in the past -- I don't even know what her "orientation" is -- I would venture to say it is a combination of a few different ones, some cognitive, some analytical, some others I don't know the label of. The difference with her than my therapist of the past is that I trust her. Trust is a huge issue with me. I don't trust. Period. It was actually during my episode in May that I took a big step in this area -- she asked me to trust her on something very huge (to take my meds) and I did. We both think that we will look back on this years from now and realize that it was a major step for me in my recovery.
> 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.
>Probably the only thing that stuck with my from a CBT course I was in back during law school was the should stuff. And I still should myself all over the place. You have caught on how I am quite the perfectionist. And I am in a field that demands perfection -- small errors truly can lose cases or costs millions of dollars. I am certain I have weak emotional skills -- anything seems to trigger me into a deep depression. That is what I cannot handle much more of.
> 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.
That I remember from my course -- there were folks there who were just one step above a coma -- as I was my first few days.
Well, by answering this, I think maybe I "get" more of it than I was realizing -- but I still need to ponder it. I still am on a rollercoster and will be for a while, I fear -- I guess that is the problem -- the rollercoaster. I just need a timeout for a while. But my biochemistry is hypersensitive, as is my emotions.
Are your exams over now? How much of a break do you get before classes begin again?
akc
poster:akc
thread:9731
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010817/msgs/9785.html