Posted by mair on March 10, 2005, at 17:05:53
In reply to Re: Let us know how today went, o.k.? (nm) » mair, posted by annierose on March 10, 2005, at 12:13:26
From my perspective it went pretty well although maybe for some of the wrong reasons.
I told her that we had to stop talking about anxiety disorders because it was too confusing to me; I told her I understand myself to be a person with a depression history who has alot of anxiety problems as well, but I don't want to make it any more complicated than that. Giving me a GAD dx isn't going to change the treatment, at least not the therapy portion of it. She agreed with me that it wasn't going to change things, escept that she'd like me to be taking more xanax to control my anxiety. She told me the significance of the anxiety discussions is that she wants me to understand and accept that the extent to which I get anxious about things I haven't done at work, for instance, is outside of the normal range. She believes my anxiety tends to set off a chain reaction of mushrooming anxiety and self deprecatory thinking, and she'd like to help me forestall the chain reaction.
I also told her that I thought I'd hit the panic button too quickly in my statement that I've lapsed into another major episode of depression. What it really boils down to is that my mental state is usually a factor of how good I feel about the way I'm working and the quality of my work. And I have been more productive over the last couple of days and some of the unfinished items which have produced the largest measure of anxiety are getting addressed, albeit slowly. This morphed into a discussion about how much my self esteem is tied up in work issues and we started reviewing my work history to see if we could determine when I started attaching so many negative judgments to how well I do with my work. I think this review can easily eat up a whole bunch of sessions.
She never asked me if I wanted to come tomorrow for an extra session until I was getting ready to leave. I told her no but I did make an offhand remark about having maybe wanted to discuss this in today's session. I don't know if she picked up on that or not.
The upshot is that it was good because it was a controlled and easy discussion. It was also good in my view because I never had to get to the issue of why I don't think I want to come more often. That's a far riskier discussion in my view. And if we keep pecking away at my work history and I continue to be a bit more productive at work, maybe I won't have to talk to her at all about why it's so hard for me to talk about things that probably place me in a negative light.
Giving credit where credit is due, I honestly think I could talk about the things we did cover with seeming ease because I wrote about them here first. It really does help me organize my thinking. I think I'm pretty logical - I really don't deal well with free ranging discussions or venturing into topics I haven't analyzed for myself first.
Thanks so much
Mair
poster:mair
thread:468762
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050305/msgs/469360.html