Therapy (post session 2)

(Continuation of Therapy session 2.)

I walked out at the end of my second session excited for the next week. I had in my hands techniques, book suggestions, homework, and a name for a psychiatrist. I met my wife down in the parking lot, and asked her if we could stop by the bookstore on the way home. On our way to the bookstore I started reading over the papers I was given.

The first section was about Thought Stopping techniques. They are for anytime I’m aware that I’m entertaining (yay! Party in my head) thoughts that are unwanted, negative, etc, or are out of proportion to reality (possibly totally fantasy). You are supposed to either say stop out-loud or imagine the voice in your head. Along with this, you can think of a big red stop sign, and even wear a rubber band around your wrist to snap whenever you need to stop your thoughts.

I think the rubber band thing is a bit much, if your thoughts are already about people thinking you are strange, always wearing a rubber band around your wrist isn’t going to help your image. In addition, it mentioned not to snap it too hard, I imagine suggesting that you cause yourself a little small pain is probably safe, but what if someone decided they really like it. Then they are going to walk around snapping that rubber band harder and harder. Again, this can’t be good for you image. You already think you are “crazy,” letting others know it for a fact is not a good plan.

All silliness aside, I felt a bit validated by this first section. I had been employing my own internal thought stopping process for many years now. I use it when I find myself “flashing” back to a past event in my life, when I am obsessing over a previously “worked out” thought (something that I already analyzed, figured out the whys, and made a decisions about), starting to mentally panic, or don’t have the time right then to dig into a thought. First, I’ll close my eyes and try to make my mind fade to black. If that doesn’t work, I’ll tell myself in my mind to Stop! Following that up with a very quiet but out-loud “shhhhhh” if it is needed.

I do have to be very careful with my thought stopping techniques though, it can be a fairly nasty trigger back to my LDS childhood. All the dumb little stupid ideas that are repeated, over and over, in Primary or by my parents, to supposedly help you “avoid” temptations or from doing or thinking “bad” thoughts. Singing a song in my head or out-loud, thinking of a scripture or reciting one from memory, or start saying a prayer is totally out; as if that wasn’t obvious. Sometimes just that idea that I’m trying to “control” my thinking puts me right back into my childhood with my sister. So, over the years I’ve found some specific techniques that work for me and don’t make the situation worse.

Focusing on the here and now was the next section and is for after you have done a thought stopping technique.

• Look around at the forms, colors, light patterns that surround me. Don’t think about the actual things you are seeing, just focus on the color, shape, or pattern.
• Focus on the sounds around you.
• Focus on your touch sense. The texture of cloth or your skin, touch something, focus on your feet pressing against the floor.

The general idea here is to bring you back into reality, and to distract yourself from picking up the original thought again. I felt even more validated this time, because I have been doing those exact things after stopping a thought. I like to look around the room and count all the items with a specific color, or find shapes. Feeling the tendons in my hands or tracing a vein in my arm with my eyes works well. I’m guessing that you might have to be careful you don’t get yourself into a ritual, if you are susceptible to compulsion. However, I’ve never had a problem with that.

The next section explained Diaphragmatic breathing. You know, eight second inhale through the nose and eight second exhale through “straw shaped” lips. Again, this was something I do throughout the day as well, whenever I feel stressed, or have been working on a tricky piece of code for a few hours. I like to close my eyes, sit up straight, and start breathing quietly. It’s a good way to have a little meditation session and clear the mind before starting another task. The section also mentioned thinking calming words and sentences, images or phrases. I don’t really like to do this; it might be a good idea for others though. My main goal is to clear out the brain with my own chatter; the last thing I want is more words floating around in there.

Finally was the biggest surprise and validation of the entire day, the list of distorted thoughts. I read though each of the 15 listed out on the paper and read their descriptions. I realized that throughout my life I had suffered from each one of those thoughts, some more than others. Some of them I had already recognized over the years as being “dishonest” thoughts, others I had suspicions about their usefulness or validity. Some, I had decided to allow to be continued to be processed because they had a minor success rate. Others I had thrown out of my “valid” thought list many years ago. When I have blogged in the past, or talked to others and said I only have one main core belief and that is being honest, honest with myself and honest with others. That “honest with myself” part was I, not allowing myself to have, what this paper was calling distorted thoughts. There it was in black and white. I had always believed that some of those thoughts were just plain dishonest, and here they were.

I had validation at last! I could finally put into words this thought process I had been “suffering” from all my life. I thought I had been suffering from something that isn’t healthy, but actually, I had been doing CBT nearly my entire life. I had this internal list of “dishonest” (distorted) thoughts that I was ever vigilant in trying to identify. As soon as I started to feel bad, sad, anxious, depressed, etc, I would try to figure if it was because of one of these distorted thoughts. If it was, I would automatically force myself to think of the opposite or a more realistic outlook on the situation. This in turn would return my feelings back to the “neutral” or previous level they were at before I had the emotion change. I had been doing this for so long, this all happens in an eye blink of time for those thoughts that I had on my internal shutdown list.

Now I had more proof that some of these other suspect thoughts were actually in the end not helpful, dishonest or distorted. I had been allowing them to take up some of my mental thought processing time, and now I could just add them to my internal list and stop worrying about them. I’ll discuss this a bit more a little later, because I talk about this with my therapist in session 3.

I’m sitting in the car reading over these papers as my wife is driving to the bookstore. Every few sentences that I read, I’m talking out-loud to my wife explaining what the suggestions are, and how I’ve been doing these things already. I’m telling her all about the specifics of what I do and now I can explain the why. It was nice finally to be able to have words to explain what has been going on in my head all these years. I’ve been living inside my head my entire life and until you see your own thought process out there in print, it can be very difficult to explain all the intricacies.

Filtering – Oh my, how my sister used this on an hourly basis. This is one that affected me for a couple of years when I was very young. I was emulating my sister for a while, but then I realized that it wasn’t “honest.” I can remember her running into her room quite often, crying her eyes out and sobbing out-loud that I hated her, and only did mean and bad things. Or that our older brother A, was only ever mean to her. She was filtering out the good and only accepting the bad of situations. It was a great manipulation to use on me for many years, since it would make me feel sorry for her and end up giving her the thing she wanted, or doing her chores, allowing her to get her way. Part of the time, I think she honestly suffered from this distorted thought, and other times I know she was just manipulating me. Because it was being used against me often, I realized early on in my life that it wasn’t honest and I needed to be very careful to always look at the “big picture,” the good with the bad. This is a tough one though, and comes up as a natural thought (belief) fairly often, but my defenses are strong against it, I usually catch it and dispose of it without any effort.

Polarized thinking – I can thank the LDS church and my dad for this one. Not everything is black or white, good or bad. I don’t have to be perfect to be a success, and failure is not defined by not being perfect. A lot of this one went away when I finally threw away all the religious garbage in my head. It does pop up occasionally when I’m having a hard time at work. My dad required perfection from those around him, and from himself, especially with regards to work. This one was already on my internal list to watch out for, and to combat it I force myself to think about less than perfect results and what would “really” happen if those occurred. I try to think of multiple success criteria when doing tasks so that I don’t feel I have to be perfect to be successful.

Overgeneralization – Conclusions based upon a single incident or piece of evidence everything must follow the same. This is a tough one and an easy one for me. I hadn’t added this to my automatic internal shutdown list yet, because I felt it was somewhat useful in specific instances. I would allow this one to pass on through and let it process a bit to see what feelings would follow. My mom was heavy into this one with her “anti-science” health woo stuff. So, for those instances I knew that a personal experience (anecdote) is not enough to make a conclusion. That was the easy part. The hard part of this one is to remember that just because “all” or most of my experiences (more than one for a specific conclusion) have been a certain way, doesn’t mean that all experiences will follow suit. I try to remember the rules for statistics and chance, and that seems to help. I still have personal and social trust issues because of my experiences, is it overgeneralization? To a certain degree, yeah, it is, but boy howdy, it is difficult not to fall for it.

(I’ll continue the list of 15, and how they affect me in the next post)