Posted by Racer on July 6, 2004, at 14:08:14
In reply to Re: Withdrawal, therapy, feeling boxed in, posted by gardenergirl on July 6, 2004, at 7:15:09
Sorry, I'm just being a little flippant about it, but Pegasus hit on something kinda MAJOR in her suggestions. It just can't be as easy as eating some chocolate, huh?
Yes, I think there is something I'm suppressing pretty strongly, and I think it is a big part of my withdrawal, and it is bothering a lot, and I'm not really able to get to it myself. There are so many different spices in my stew right now, it's impossible to identify any of them individually -- but they do add up to a unified taste.
At the end of the last session, my new T said that tomorrow we're going to talk about "me" -- rather than just the stuff that relates to "me against the agency", which is most of what's happened so far, since getting medicated is a priority for me right now to try to stave off my next collapse. So, tomorrow morning there will be more structure and less of me starting a word and going from there. I'm not sure I can get to the issue of withdrawal tomorrow -- for one thing, when I'm this far removed from my own emotions, it's almost impossible for me to remember that I have them, let alone bring up the lack. For another thing, I am in a total Jack Friday routine: "just the facts, ma'am," and I get to decide what constitutes a fact, and what is "only" opinion or emotional reaction. (Again, that's the scary part of it for me: I know that when I'm repressing my emotions this much, they're *primed* to bust out and that it's likely to be ugly when they do. NOT something I'm looking forward to.)
It's as though I'm trying to protect myself from the emotional pit of depression by totally rejecting my emotions, just *pushing* myself to "do things" to keep it away. Now, this isn't all bad -- I can count the material benefits of this withdrawal: clean windows upstairs and down, reorganized closets, scrubbed down the kitchen walls and cabinets, vacuumed the ceilings (cobwebs), etc. The problem is, there really is a limit on how many times in one week one can clean the same bathroom, you know? (And I can't seem to work the same miracles on the Bigger Projects that would extend the miracle beyond the trivial, things like filing all the stacks of papers that my husband manages to generate and then stack on the dining room table with no thought of ever *putting away*, for instance.) So, I keep running around, doing little, trivial cleaning jobs around the house, trying to stay ahead of whatever is chasing me. I'm afraid to stop, because I'm afraid that it'll catch me, even though I'm not entirely sure what it is.
Even though I started this out with a flippant subject line and opening, I really do appreciate your responses. I have been avoiding my journal, since that would kinda require me to think of something to say beyond, "cleaned the bathtub in the master bath and scrubbed off the scale buildup while I was at it..." Since I still haven't completed my writing assignment from last week -- OK, haven't even started it -- I think today I may make an effort to write the assignment and a journal entry. If nothing else, maybe that will help me figure out what I'm hiding myself from, what it is that's chasing me behind that Scary Monster mask. And I also promised an email to a friend about something else related to this, and maybe writing that along with her response will help with this.
{{sigh}} Why can't chocolate fix this? It would be so much easier.
poster:Racer
thread:363216
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040703/msgs/363507.html