Posted by mair on March 15, 2005, at 17:14:48
I vascillate between thinking I'm ok, and thinking I'm plummeting into a major depressive episode. Alot of how I feel depends on how well I'm working. Yesterday I got to work and couldn't do much other than move paper from one end of my desk to another, while occasionally playing solitaire and obsessing about all the work I'm not doing. So, predictably, I was too anxious to accomplish much in therapy today and I was back to that place where I'm not a great contributor in therapy because I have too many thoughts and I can't put them together long enough to communicate them to my T.
Last week we started a thread of discussion that seems interesting and relevant to me and not immediately threatening. Basically she wanted to go back and revisit my work history to see if that could help explain why my whole sense of self seems to hang on the shaky precipice of how I judge my work performance. My T told me she felt that it would be a helpful exercise and that she had introduced the discussion to give me a break from weightier matters. But today I couldn't even imagine being able to hold my attention long enough to really analyze my work history or anything else for that matter. And there was far too much coming to mind to be able to talk about any one thing. It brought to mind what my T has said to me before about the difficulty of making any headway in therapy when the patient is too depressed to work at it.
Driving back to my office, I felt this great sense of despair - that things weren't going to turn around on their own, that I wouldn't really be able to get any relief from therapy because I wasn't in a place where I could really constructively contribute, and that there are no medical solutions that would have an immediate enough impact to make going to work tolerable. I strated doing this thing I do occasionally where I try to remember where all the gun stores are where I live, and I was trying to remember if there was one between my office and my T's office.
The rest of the work day was actually ok mostly because I got too busy to obsess about stuff, but as soon as I got home I started thinking again about how I can't go back to where I was when I first got really depressed - where I would spend whole days staring out the window and feeling just persistently anxious. I got through it, but I came to accept it because I had been diagnosed with depression and had just started treatment and was trying to find meds that might work. However, it really did hurt me financially and professionally, and having done so much better since then (despite short lived down periods), it's just not acceptable to me to go through that again. I have a son in college and a daughter who'll be going in another year or so - I can't afford to let everything slip. And to me there is something just so overwelmingly shameful about being in my situation.
So just a little while ago, my T called me out of the blue to tell me she's going out of town tomorrow and wouldn't get a message on her office machine if i left one. (I've never left one for any reason other than to ask to reschedule and appointment). She told me if I wanted to talk to her to leave a message on her home machine and she would love to talk to me tomorrow night. I see her anyway on Thursday, so it never occurred to me that I'd want to talk to her before then. I never even mentioned the S word in our session today so she can't be worried about that. She's never called me before like this.
I was actually more thinking that if I can't work at therapy, I should at least bow out of it until my head is in a place where I can make some progress. It's not as if there's great comfort to be drawn from just sharing my pain - I'm too ashamed to feel much pain anyway.
mair
poster:mair
thread:471416
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050315/msgs/471416.html