Posted by JLx on July 9, 2006, at 15:59:53
In reply to Re: Doing well? » JLx, posted by heaven help me on July 9, 2006, at 15:11:45
Hi Mary,
Glad I could say something that resonated. :)
Since you mention "negative thoughts" as one of your symptoms, you may really like "Feeling Good". I'd heard about that book for years somewhat vaguely but never read it until someone on one of these boards mentioned it helping her. {Same with "The Power of Now"). "Feeling Good" is also one of the three books voted most helpful on the Psychology board. Just to give you an idea, here are the cognitive distortions it discusses:
ALL OR NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance 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 another. 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 definitive facts that convincingly support your conclusions.
*Mind reading -- You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.
*The Fortune Teller Error -- You anticipate that things will turn out badly and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact.
MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) 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 fellow's imperfections).
EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the 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 towards others, you feel anger, frustration and resentment.
LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. 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: "He's a louse" 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.
My eyes bugged out when I read those as they were my habitual mode of thinking! I really have learned to catch myself now and try to turn them around in my head immediately, such as reminding myself that "feelings are not facts" when I'm feeling something like discouragement.
Part of going the alternative route (unless you can find a knowledgeable practitioner) is narrowing down where to start as trial and error is the only way you will know what works for you. I found the brain tests on this site to be helpful: http://amenclinics.com/ac/tests/ Maybe you could show your results to your new docs.
Dr. Amen is a psychiatrist specializing mostly in ADD/ADHD but what he says about the brain relates also to mood disorders. "Supplements to Enhance the Brain: A Summary of Ways to Optimize Brain Function and Break Bad Brain Habits"
http://amenclinics.com/bp/articles.php?articleID=10What can be especially tricky about supplements is that they often work synergistically. Before I started taking magnesium, for instance, I had tried various things and concluded they "didn't work". Tyrosine, which is an amino acid precursor to dopamine, was one. It made me feel rageful and mean. (As did Wellbutrin, also a dopamine booster). This is part of the problem with the trials they try to do with supplements -- they often treat them as drugs expecting them to do something alone that they aren't designed to do alone.
I've also come to accept the limitations of supplements, however. What I hope to achieve with supplements is to give my brain a chance to work right physiologically...the rest is up to me.
JL
> Thank you for taking the time to write. I REALLY appreciate your input and experience. I am going to print off your post and try to work my way through the things you suggest. I also get to see a new pdoc, and a new MD over the next couple weeks. BOTH of them are not adverse to using alternative methods. So, Lord willing, I will also make it to "well". God grant that we all may. Thank you, again.
> blessings
> mary
poster:JLx
thread:664920
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20060704/msgs/665510.html