So a few people are giving me grief about my lack of blogging lately. Well, actually they just asked why I haven't been posting. And mention that they check my blog every day. And that they've been disappointed every day for weeks. Does that count as giving me grief? Yeah, I thought so too.
Anyway. I agree that my blog has been pretty lame lately. The really sad thing is that not only is my blog pathetic, I am apathetic.
Get it? I love word play. Ahem.
The thing is that I just don't feel like writing anymore. Stuff happens, and I think of posting. Sometimes I even start to write a post. And then I stop. The writing doesn't flow like it used to. The process of *composting sentences, proofreading, and editing is more work than I want to do. I'm just not feeling the blove anymore.
Oh - here's something funny: Just yesterday The Motherboard posted a comment informing me that she moved my blog to the "Funny Ladies" category on Mormon Mommy Blogs.
If you know me, you know that I love irony. So I just couldn't resist a wry smile at the fact that just when I achieve "Funny Lady" status, I'm not funny anymore.
It's funny, right?
*Yes, Crazy Lady, I put that in there just for you.
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Monday, January 12, 2009
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Depression and Personal Revelation
When I first descended into the pit of depression, one of the most striking and alarming changes I noticed was that I no longer had ready access to the Holy Ghost. I felt literally cut off and alone, spiritually. A great many fervent prayers were sent heavenward, pleading for help and comfort, anything, something please Lord give me something to hold onto! Where was the Comforter when I needed Him the most, like all the faith promoting stories I'd heard in church? I felt cast adrift in a black sea, with no compass nor oars nor wind for my sail.
I teetered for a time on the edge of faith. What was the point of going to church, taking the sacrament, praying even, when all was hollow and bleak? I was just going through the motions. The temple brought no relief. Nothing brought relief. It was a black time.
Attending church was excruciating--having to keep a "I'm fine" smile on my face for three whole hours was almost more than I could manage. But every time I considered quitting church, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't do it. And the reason always came back to the same thing: I had four children I had promised -- no, covenanted -- to teach the gospel to. And even though I couldn't currently feel it, I remembered the times when I had felt direction by the Holy Ghost. I knew the gospel was true. It was all true. I didn't know how I knew it, but I. Did. Know. And I knew that if I stopped attending church, if only due to apathy, my children would be more likely to fall away sooner or later. I knew I must not allow that to happen. And so I kept going.
Discovering that I really did have a solid testimony of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ is one of the most treasured lessons I gleaned from my experience with depression. Even now, years later, I still don't enjoy the clarity of communication from the Spirit that some people do. I rarely "feel" the Spirit as strongly as the people around me at the usual times, like baptisms, testimony meetings, etc. I've learned that comparing myself to others really doesn't accomplish anything other making me feel like a loser. I've come to accept the fact that this may be one of my "thorns of the flesh", so to speak. It may be that the heavens will remain silent for me for the rest of my life. Perhaps one day I'll experience the miracle of hearing God's voice in my heart again. Perhaps not. But I know that whatever happens, I will stay faithful. When the Lord comes, he will find me waiting. And that's enough for me.
I teetered for a time on the edge of faith. What was the point of going to church, taking the sacrament, praying even, when all was hollow and bleak? I was just going through the motions. The temple brought no relief. Nothing brought relief. It was a black time.
Attending church was excruciating--having to keep a "I'm fine" smile on my face for three whole hours was almost more than I could manage. But every time I considered quitting church, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't do it. And the reason always came back to the same thing: I had four children I had promised -- no, covenanted -- to teach the gospel to. And even though I couldn't currently feel it, I remembered the times when I had felt direction by the Holy Ghost. I knew the gospel was true. It was all true. I didn't know how I knew it, but I. Did. Know. And I knew that if I stopped attending church, if only due to apathy, my children would be more likely to fall away sooner or later. I knew I must not allow that to happen. And so I kept going.
Discovering that I really did have a solid testimony of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ is one of the most treasured lessons I gleaned from my experience with depression. Even now, years later, I still don't enjoy the clarity of communication from the Spirit that some people do. I rarely "feel" the Spirit as strongly as the people around me at the usual times, like baptisms, testimony meetings, etc. I've learned that comparing myself to others really doesn't accomplish anything other making me feel like a loser. I've come to accept the fact that this may be one of my "thorns of the flesh", so to speak. It may be that the heavens will remain silent for me for the rest of my life. Perhaps one day I'll experience the miracle of hearing God's voice in my heart again. Perhaps not. But I know that whatever happens, I will stay faithful. When the Lord comes, he will find me waiting. And that's enough for me.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
This book is the source of the depression and anxiety tests as well as the cognitive behavior therapy ideas that I am going to be talking about on this blog for the next few days. If you scored higher than you'd like on the depression checklist, I highly recommend that you buy this book - it goes into far more detail about how to improve your thinking habits and therefore your mood than I could ever do on a blog. If you're not sure you want to own it, you can borrow mine, or check it out at the library. This book is seriously a must read if you want to explore a non-medication approach to dealing with depression and/or anxiety and improving your quality of life.
On second thought, you can't borrow my copy. I need to re-read it again and apply its lessons in my own life.
So, you've taken the tests. You didn't like your scores. What now?
From the book:
"Because depression has been viewed as an emotional disorder throughout the history of psychiatry, therapists from most schools of thought place a strong emphasis on "getting in touch" with your feelings. Our research reveals the unexpected: Depression is not an emotional disorder at all! The sudden change in the way you feel is of no more causal relevance than a runny nose is when you have a cold. Every bad feeling you have is the result of your distorted negative thinking. Illogical pessimistic attitudes play the central role in the development and continuation of all your symptoms."
In English: depressive emotions are caused by negative thoughts. Most of these thoughts are learned habits that are so ingrained that we don't even notice we're thinking them, and so we go on unaware that we are sabotaging our emotions by our own bad habits of thinking.
"Your emotions result entirely from the way you look at things. It is an obvious neurological fact that before you can experience any event, you must process it with your mind and give it meaning. You must understand what is happening to you before you can feel it. If your understanding of what is happening is accurate, your emotions will be normal. If your perception is twisted and distorted in some way, your emotional response will be abnormal. Depression falls into this category. It is always the result of mental distortions."
Translation: You interpret events in your life with a series of thoughts that continually flow through your mind. This is called your internal dialogue, or self-talk. If you interpret an event in a distorted way, you create an illusion that will make it impossible to see things as they really are. Your feelings are created by your thoughts and not the actual events; illogical and distorted thoughts produce the negative set of emotions that we call "depression". These unhealthy ways of thinking are called Cognitive Distortions, and everyone who exhibits symptoms of depression has a nice little collection of them. You may think you don't. Wait and see.
Here's a the list of Cognitive Distortions. We'll spend some time with each one in detail in future posts.
How's that for giving you a lick of the lollipop?
Don't want to wait for me to explain them all? Get your own copy of Feeling Good.
On second thought, you can't borrow my copy. I need to re-read it again and apply its lessons in my own life.
So, you've taken the tests. You didn't like your scores. What now?
From the book:
"Because depression has been viewed as an emotional disorder throughout the history of psychiatry, therapists from most schools of thought place a strong emphasis on "getting in touch" with your feelings. Our research reveals the unexpected: Depression is not an emotional disorder at all! The sudden change in the way you feel is of no more causal relevance than a runny nose is when you have a cold. Every bad feeling you have is the result of your distorted negative thinking. Illogical pessimistic attitudes play the central role in the development and continuation of all your symptoms."
In English: depressive emotions are caused by negative thoughts. Most of these thoughts are learned habits that are so ingrained that we don't even notice we're thinking them, and so we go on unaware that we are sabotaging our emotions by our own bad habits of thinking.
"Your emotions result entirely from the way you look at things. It is an obvious neurological fact that before you can experience any event, you must process it with your mind and give it meaning. You must understand what is happening to you before you can feel it. If your understanding of what is happening is accurate, your emotions will be normal. If your perception is twisted and distorted in some way, your emotional response will be abnormal. Depression falls into this category. It is always the result of mental distortions."
Translation: You interpret events in your life with a series of thoughts that continually flow through your mind. This is called your internal dialogue, or self-talk. If you interpret an event in a distorted way, you create an illusion that will make it impossible to see things as they really are. Your feelings are created by your thoughts and not the actual events; illogical and distorted thoughts produce the negative set of emotions that we call "depression". These unhealthy ways of thinking are called Cognitive Distortions, and everyone who exhibits symptoms of depression has a nice little collection of them. You may think you don't. Wait and see.
Here's a the list of Cognitive Distortions. We'll spend some time with each one in detail in future posts.
- ALL OR NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance in one area falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
- OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
- MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.
- DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
- JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
- MAGNIFICATION OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other person's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."
- EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
- SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
- LABELING AND MISLABELING: Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "What a jerk!" Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
- PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
How's that for giving you a lick of the lollipop?
Don't want to wait for me to explain them all? Get your own copy of Feeling Good.
Monday, July 14, 2008
My score on the BDC
Okay, I was going to wait until tomorrow to post this, but people are apparently afraid to post their own scores. So I'll post mine.
Today when I took this test I scored a 29, which is higher than I would have guessed it to be. That is almost as high as I scored when I first went into therapy in the spring of 2001. Back when I wished I could just die because I hated my life so much and thought my kids and husband would be better off without me. So, I guess I've been in denial about how bad I've been feeling about life. I mean, I knew that I've been slipping a bit in recent weeks, but I didn't think I'd score that high.
Now, it is important to recognize whether you are feeling down because of a recognizable event; pregnancy hormones, significant personal loss, etc. Everyone feels down sometimes, and for good reason. But if you find you've been feeling low for a period of time, certainly more than a month, you need to take steps to do something about it.
I believe that for myself, at least, my depression is much much worse when I fall back into old, destructive habits of thinking. I talked a bit about some of these habits in this post. These patterns of thinking can be changed, and when we make the effort to identify and change the way we think, we can begin to feel better rather quickly. It takes conscious effort, but it can be done.
So, starting tomorrow, I will begin posting about the habits of thinking that produce the negative feelings that make us feel depressed. This project is probably gonna take more than a week, isn't it?
Today when I took this test I scored a 29, which is higher than I would have guessed it to be. That is almost as high as I scored when I first went into therapy in the spring of 2001. Back when I wished I could just die because I hated my life so much and thought my kids and husband would be better off without me. So, I guess I've been in denial about how bad I've been feeling about life. I mean, I knew that I've been slipping a bit in recent weeks, but I didn't think I'd score that high.
Now, it is important to recognize whether you are feeling down because of a recognizable event; pregnancy hormones, significant personal loss, etc. Everyone feels down sometimes, and for good reason. But if you find you've been feeling low for a period of time, certainly more than a month, you need to take steps to do something about it.
I believe that for myself, at least, my depression is much much worse when I fall back into old, destructive habits of thinking. I talked a bit about some of these habits in this post. These patterns of thinking can be changed, and when we make the effort to identify and change the way we think, we can begin to feel better rather quickly. It takes conscious effort, but it can be done.
So, starting tomorrow, I will begin posting about the habits of thinking that produce the negative feelings that make us feel depressed. This project is probably gonna take more than a week, isn't it?
Emotional Health Week (or longer)
Ok so I think it's common knowledge that I struggle with depression. I have my ups and downs, and currently I'm fighting against a down cycle. Blogging has become less interesting to me, and I don't wanna just whine on here, so I am posting less.
I could blog daily about my negative thoughts and feelings, but dwelling on them doesn't make them change and it seems that expressing how I feel just makes people feel bad and not know what to say. So I decided to talk instead about solutions for depressive thinking.
First order of business: The Burns Depression Checklist.
Sometimes I think I'm doing okay, hanging in there, and then I take this little test and realize just how poorly I'm doing emotionally. That motivates me to dust off my Feeling Good book and work on improving the way I'm thinking.
Why don't you play along? Answer each question as best you can and add up the numerical score at the end.
Post your results in the comments for this post.
Oh, you want to know what my score is? Ahem. I'll post it tomorrow.
I could blog daily about my negative thoughts and feelings, but dwelling on them doesn't make them change and it seems that expressing how I feel just makes people feel bad and not know what to say. So I decided to talk instead about solutions for depressive thinking.
First order of business: The Burns Depression Checklist.
Sometimes I think I'm doing okay, hanging in there, and then I take this little test and realize just how poorly I'm doing emotionally. That motivates me to dust off my Feeling Good book and work on improving the way I'm thinking.
Why don't you play along? Answer each question as best you can and add up the numerical score at the end.
Post your results in the comments for this post.
Oh, you want to know what my score is? Ahem. I'll post it tomorrow.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Bad Day
Yesterday I thought I was losing it. I sat around and did nothing productive all day, avoiding housework, cooking, the works. By the time my poor neglected husband got home, there was no dinner waiting, the kitchen was a mess, and I was near tears.
"Hi, how are you?"
"Mmm"
"How was your day?"
"A waste. An absolute waste. I did absolutely nothing today. I'm a bad wife, a bad mother, and I'm probably going to hell! Oh, and since I'm already hell-bound, I decided I don't want to go to the temple with you tomorrow after all. I don't want to do anything. I just want to go get in bed and go to sleep and never wake up."
Silence.
My husband knows the signs of depression. We've been through this before. He knows that when I get like this, nothing he can say will make me feel better. He knows that when I get in my downward spiral, that I take anything he says and twist it into something bad. So he just came up behind me at the sink and put his arms around me, and held me while I cried.
But I knew what was bothering me.
"I have to kill some more chickens. At least two of the cockerels are crowing, and it needs to happen today. And I don't think I can do it."
"Do you want me to help you?"
"Yeah, that would be really nice. I don't think I can do this myself."
So he changed his clothes and sharpened the hatchet and found a stump to stretch their necks on, and I wiped my tears and held their little bodies tight while he chopped the heads off of three of my cute little cockerels. Then we dipped and plucked them. Once they were done, my mood improved dramatically.
My big mistake was in letting those extra male birds live. I should have had Tom dispose of them as soon as they arrived, before the kids even knew about them. But they were soooo cute! And I figured I might as well raise them along with the others, and they'd add to the freezer when their time came.
But then the kids named them. And they got cuter. Really beautiful, some of them. And I felt differently about them than I did the dumb, ugly meat birds. I didn't take any enjoyment out of killing the meat birds, but there was no emotion invovled. Everyone knew they were destined for the freezer. But these cockerels had pretty feathers, and they were active and funny, and we'd get them out to do bug patrol in the yard, and they were so fun to watch. And I got attached.
I'm still sad that I had to kill my feathered friends. But I'm so glad my husband rescued me from my avoidance induced depression. And I'm relieved that is all it was about. I don't wanna go back to those dark days. Ever.
"Hi, how are you?"
"Mmm"
"How was your day?"
"A waste. An absolute waste. I did absolutely nothing today. I'm a bad wife, a bad mother, and I'm probably going to hell! Oh, and since I'm already hell-bound, I decided I don't want to go to the temple with you tomorrow after all. I don't want to do anything. I just want to go get in bed and go to sleep and never wake up."
Silence.
My husband knows the signs of depression. We've been through this before. He knows that when I get like this, nothing he can say will make me feel better. He knows that when I get in my downward spiral, that I take anything he says and twist it into something bad. So he just came up behind me at the sink and put his arms around me, and held me while I cried.
But I knew what was bothering me.
"I have to kill some more chickens. At least two of the cockerels are crowing, and it needs to happen today. And I don't think I can do it."
"Do you want me to help you?"
So he changed his clothes and sharpened the hatchet and found a stump to stretch their necks on, and I wiped my tears and held their little bodies tight while he chopped the heads off of three of my cute little cockerels. Then we dipped and plucked them. Once they were done, my mood improved dramatically.
My big mistake was in letting those extra male birds live. I should have had Tom dispose of them as soon as they arrived, before the kids even knew about them. But they were soooo cute! And I figured I might as well raise them along with the others, and they'd add to the freezer when their time came.
But then the kids named them. And they got cuter. Really beautiful, some of them. And I felt differently about them than I did the dumb, ugly meat birds. I didn't take any enjoyment out of killing the meat birds, but there was no emotion invovled. Everyone knew they were destined for the freezer. But these cockerels had pretty feathers, and they were active and funny, and we'd get them out to do bug patrol in the yard, and they were so fun to watch. And I got attached.
I'm still sad that I had to kill my feathered friends. But I'm so glad my husband rescued me from my avoidance induced depression. And I'm relieved that is all it was about. I don't wanna go back to those dark days. Ever.
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