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Cognitive Behavioral Therablogging

I’m in the last week of my group therapy and my favorite thing has been learning how to take note when my mood takes a dive (I jot it down in a little notebook) and then reassess the various situations that lead to the worry/stress/sadness. 

It’s one of those things that sounds pretty logical, and when I try to explain it to people, a common reaction is, “That’s obvious, I already think through stuff like that.”

But we don’t really already do that. Many of the depressed people I know are highly intelligent and one thing that holds them back from coping with their depression, in my unprofessional opinion, is that they think they are too smart for therapy. It’s natural to think we can just figure this all out on our own. The stigma attached to therapy and medication doesn’t help either.

So I’ve been explaining CBT to a few friends and some of them scoff at first because who needs a little worksheet to tell you how to live your life? Well, as the worksheet puts it, “When you face difficult situations that are hard to figure out, pen and paper will always be more effective than just thinking it through.”

This resonates with why I find Tumblr to be a useful space for working through thoughts and ideas. Writing things out for a Tumblr audience is, I think, another way of slowing down and considering the what I am thinking and feeling.

But the CBT stuff is what I need for my internal demons. The above image is a version of a worksheet for Thought Challenging, one of the strategies for overcoming negative thinking. There are several versions of the worksheet out there but they all make you do the same thing:

1. Briefly describe the situation that upset you.
2. Describe your response: how did you feel and what did you do?
3. Write down your automatic thoughts about the situation.
4. Evaluate your thoughts: Are they accurate? Do they consider the whole truth? 
5. Reinterpret the situation.

I’m just beginning to practice this technique. It takes commitment, and it takes time, so I’m thankful that I have the time and space in my life to work on this stuff right now. I think this could go a long way in helping me as I transition through the end of my PhD and beyond into whatever the hell is next. It’s not for everyone, of course, but I wanted to put this out there for interested parties. 

One of my CBT group leaders is a dead ringer for Kate Middleton. It’s kind of pleasantly distracting?

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I keep starting to write this post and then stopping. The impulse to share is immediately followed by a voice in my head saying, “If you share too much, people will judge you.” I’m not worried about the content of my sharing so much as the act. Why I would care in the first place is another question.

I want to talk about mental health and the maintenance thereof. Being open about my depression has never been a problem for me. I learned at a young age that it is better to talk about it with those I am close to than it is hide it and have them end up scared and worried and confused when I hit a rough patch. I don’t want to be pitied or felt bad for. I want the people who care about me to know that I understand what is happening and I can find my way out, it just takes time.

But what happens when you talk about it with people who aren’t close friends and family? After fifteen years of learning how to manage my own mental health I am trying group therapy for the first time. I am approaching like an anthropologist, of course, because I don’t know how else to do it. Participant observation is what we call it. 

I have mixed feelings so far. Part of me wonders if something like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (which this mood management group is based on) differs all that much from, say, the Landmark system, or even The Secret. Sure CBT has the psychology stamp of approval, but that doesn’t make me any less suspicious. That said, I’m trying to check my suspicions at the door and commit to this to see if it is a useful tool for me.

I’m going to attend all five sessions and form a full opinion after I finish. But this is something I’m doing right now that I thought I might not be alone in, if anyone wants to share their own experiences with this sort of thing. 

(image via)

It’s like homework for your Cognitive Behavioral Therapy group.

Telling old lovers about your new boyfriend— is it ever not weird?

Nothing like a humbling conversation with your father to remind you just how financially fucked you are. :(

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beenthinking:

hollygonightly:

With every pretense of mettle and pride stripped away, you email him because he already knows and because it seems he Gets It. A week has passed since the gorgeous Glacier wedding, the one filled with a mountain of love so overwhelmingly epic, that it left you changed. Left you systematically empty and fulfilled, if that’s scientifically possible. We’ll say it is, for argument’s sake, because we sit here at this late night/early morning hour searching the internet for something that makes sense. For something to hold onto.

My plane touched down at BWI late last Sunday night and I welcomed the inky darkness of the east coast sky to cloak the damp mess that arrived. I left the Minneapolis terminal in tears, apologizing to my mother, with whom I’d had the unexpected delight of spending five hours on an extended mid-day MSP layover. Only I wasn’t patient, wasn’t kind and found myself regretting all of it as I waited for my boarding class number to be called. She apologized for saying silly things and I apologized for being unappreciative and we had a kind of moment where our hearts reached across words and miles and we cried together, while pretending to be unaffected and strong. Scandinavian women are fierce in their love. We simply say, I Know, and we do. This embodies so much about why it hurts so much to leave.

While the cabin of commuters retrieve their luggage from overhead compartments and jostle for aisle position, I sit motionless, but for the quiet heaving of my chest. I cough and clear my throat, trying to play off allergies, but it’s transparent to my center seatmate that I’m upset. He touches my arm, with intention and firmness, sensitivity and swiftness, and asks if I’m okay. I proclaim with a waver that I am, thank him for his kindness and immediately wish I could hug him awkwardly at the waist.

At this late hour, I send out a barrage of white flag text messages, inviting the kind of digital embrace to supplement the one I won’t be receiving at baggage claim. Most of my pleas are suspended in the night sky and the glow of runway lights, but I finally connect with a friend and we share my drive home filling the silence with stories of broken hearts and longing for home. He tells me of the ex-girlfriend for whom his heart still aches and I can relate, feeling as acutely upset leaving Minneapolis this time as I did five months ago. Time has not healed any of our heartbroken wounds.  I ask if there’s a statute on feeling homesick (heartsick?) and we decide there is not.

I follow the white lines of I-70 as we talk about wishing we could let go, break free, get gone and grow hope in whatever comes next. We cheerlead each other and give some reprieve from the transparent fist pumping and self-talk we’ve grown tired of producing for ourselves. We agree to meet later in the week for a platonic meal of food, hoping it might produce enough meat and heart and sustenance to feed our souls and cure what ails us. It doesn’t and it won’t, but I’m happy to have had it. For a night, the connection made me feel whole and human and alive and a part of a city that still never quite feels like home.

I haven’t yet found the words to tell you about Chris and Erica’s wedding and how it transformed and touched us all, but I can tell you I’ve never witnessed a more emotional exchange of vows. Have never witnessed more raw and unbridled emotion from a couple or the ferocious tribe who supports them. Rooted in everything that came before - transgressions and regret – and everything that lies ahead - the mystery and the doubt – it felt more like a baptism and a rebirth than a matrimonial commitment. Hearts were reborn, vows were offered like alms, like offerings to God, to one another, and to the all spirits who proceeded this moment as opportunity to bear witness to this act of courage. Because as we all know, marriage is hard fucking work and if you’re not afraid it could fail - that half the time it does fail - it probably will.

And the most beautiful sentiment about this wedding wasn’t even the idyllic location or the authentic enthusiasm or even the most ethereal bride I’ve ever laid eyes on. The most memorable feature of this wedding was strung together like the hand-made pompoms that swayed above us in the vast mountain sky. The message was simple: hope and grace and love and happiness can all coexist with the feeling of brokenness. They are lifted higher into the sky because of it. This fire, this light, this glowing demonstration of heat and passion couldn’t be possible without the hurt that gave it breath, that gave it life. This love is not a showy blue flame; it does not flicker and dance. This love is a single ember, smoldering and steady; when stoked and supported, it can burn infinitely. Can outlive us all.

On my drive home, he asks, if I’m afraid at 35, that I’m running out of time and I shrug at the notion of forced timelines and body clocks. Our hearts are equipped to go hungry, to go without, I tell him. They can survive and recover the way other organs cannot. They feel ache and pain, pangs of loneliness and of longing, but unlike the belly, a heart can find nourishment in lyrics and poetry and glacial sunrises and smiles and handwritten notes and in late night phone calls with men who broke your heart even though you will proclaim they did not.

He asked me to explain what it felt like to experience a level of commitment like the kind marriage requires and I confessed I could not. Mostly because I was cocky and overconfident and more committed to a china pattern than I ever was to him. And I wonder, how does anyone possibly know what loyalty looks like if you’ve never forsaken another? How could you really know how to be gentle with another human heart if you have never crushed something good with the weight of your own foot?

I’m convinced more than ever that real love is born in the ashes of the everything messy that came before. Like Mother Nature’s rebirth after an earth-scorching wild fire. Like a seedling fighting its way through the dense wet earth in search of light, to find air, to find sun, to find all the ingredients that will provide nourishment and potential to grow deep and tall and strong. Maybe real and true love isn’t ornate and delicate like an orchid or an iris. Maybe it isn’t meant to be pedestalled and adored. Maybe it’s been in the weeds this whole time. Hardy and resilient. Roots like steel, clawing their way into the earth, determined to make a home. A desert flower is just a name, after all. The real test of endurance comes in the preparation for extremes and in finding the hidden wells of water. In trusting the mystery of it all.

It’s a hard thing to know how much you want to give away. Because it’s almost impossible to write about a wedding or a marriage without sounding like a flaunting 22 year old asshole on Facebook. Because it’s hard to know how far you can crack open the quietest, loudest, deepest day of your life before some gust of overfamiliarity or casualness blows it all away. I want to protect this. And I want to share this.

While I get lost in the grappling silence, Holly figures out how to do it. How to watch someone else transformed and explain it as though you’d crouched in their lungs and been burned right along with them.  I told Chris the other day that the world needed empathy more than anything. What I mean maybe is that the world needs more people like Holly.

Holly, who makes me want to write. Makes me want to twist just one leaf off this tree of life and scribble onto it as many tiny stories of this giant day as will fit, before I think better. So I will tell you quickly about how my little brother stood in the middle of the wedding (which went on and on and on from songs to poems to prayers to advice and story sharing; so fat and wonderful and just as languidly verbose as I am). How he called me his second mom and thanked Chris for cutting me free, for giving me back to myself. For giving me back the ease and peace and joy and freedom and shameless ridiculousness I maybe never even had as a child but should have. And now I do. 

I want to tell you about my dad ringing our prayer bowl in the wind, and the metal ommmmmmm that lifted our silence and all our unspoken prayers up and off to the dusk and the mountains like gliders, like planes made of hands out speeding car windows, like kites. Like kites.

I want to tell you about Chris and the sound of his vows. The words we wrote and rewrote in a humid messy kitchen weeks and days before, hot glue and yarn and muslin stuck to us like shrapnel. These words that felt solid and right from that distance. And then, we stood in front of this petite audience. This team of witnesses and accomplices. Our tribe. And someone clicked off the safety. Sliced the guy lines. Cued the explosives.

This was the cusp. And then we were over it.

All. These. Words. We thought we knew how to mean and until then we didn’t know Anything, because saying them up there? Somehow they tumbled and spun into oceans and sandbags, ten million times their previous weight. Tumbled into weightlessness and orbit, strung us up to the stars. Because, finally really, I realized this IS the wonder that’s holding the stars apart.

You know?

So yes, Holly gets it exactly. Something in the reverence of this land and this moment, in stepping into this decision under the holiness of mountain ranges risen up like elders or God. Something about it cracked us to our knees and we held these promises up to each other like tithes and penance and thanksgiving and threats to the world. Do not come between me and the ferocity with which I intend to carry this out.

Two days later his uncle emailed us. Said he was too reserved to stand and share but there were some things we needed to know. He talked about each of our responsibilities in this marriage, and how 50 percent won’t come close to covering our shares. He needed us to know this.

And his uncle, the retired naval admiral, ended with this: “Your vows were very challenging. If and when you fail them, raise your hand, admit you messed up and pick yourself up and do it better then next time.”

His wisdom — flat and true as stones — strung on to all the advice our tribe had already proffered, hangs around us now and grounds us. I am humbled by the years it took them to earn this. By the love the people we love have built and rebuilt and rebuilt and how they’re willing to teach us how to do it better.

Because my dear, I want to do it better.

Every once in a while, I watch him twisting his ring with his thumb and I think what I said then:  If I believed in karma instead of grace, I might say it took me this long to meet him because I needed time to make and then atone for so many mistakes. I needed this long to become a person who could equal your character.

Good thoughts, good writing. 

Another academic cliche ticked off the list. 

I repeat: Wait until the divorce is final. 

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Goodbye ETF party

What do baseball and abortion have in common? Asking for my Facebook feed.