I’ve been wondering about how people solve their psychological problems. There’s lots of advice on the internet about how to deal with these problems, but most of it seems very naive. Like it was written by people who never had these problems and who think that means they have solved them. An example would be a person who never gets depressed and thinks that he knows how to deal with depression because he never gets depressed.
This thread is an attempt to get advice from people who were actually successful in dealing with their problems.
I’m not going to make any strict definition of what’s “psychological.” If you think your problem somewhat qualifies then post your story anyway.
Therapy, medication, and honesty. Honesty is most important. If you cannot honestly look at yourself and accept your weaknesses, you can’t beat depression.
A few years of talk therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, a lot of energy, and a determination to ‘work my program’ today (for every today that comes along).
It sounds really simplistic, but I cut out eating a lot of sugar, white bread, and caffeine. That went further than almost anything else. I make sure I eat fibre and not go ten hours without eating. I also have (finally) established an almost-perfect sleep schedule of seven hours a night. (This is all enforced by my husband. Strictly! )
Plus I’m out of a very stressful situation, which also helps. I almost never have panic attacks anymore, and they used to be crippling and embarassing.
That makes sense, actually. I’ve been hearing more and more about a connection between body state and emotions. If you take care of your body more, it follows that your emotions will lift as well.
One thing I’ve been doing lately is smiling for no particular reason, keeping an upbeat song on my earworm player, and walking with a bounce in my step. It does wonders for my mood.
I dealt with fairly minor social phobia by, well, deciding I was going to get over it. I started analyzing my thought processes and essentially self-ridiculed me out of them.
Bolding mine. Those dudes, clueless as they may seem, may be on to something. There is an entire field of psychology dedicated to understanding what makes happy people happy – it’s called ‘‘positive psychology.’’ They have found that behavioral and cognitive patterns are very different between populations of happy vs. unhappy people. The esteemed psychologist Martin Seligman, for example, found that generally happy people possess three very important attitudinal traits – they view setbacks as temporary, not their fault, and only affecting a limited part of their lives. He has a book called Learned Optimism that discusses his findings in detail.
My answer to your question would be ‘‘very slowly.’’
I have always suffered from depression and anxiety, but it took me a while before I hit rock bottom, and an even longer while to crawl out of that pit. It started getting really bad my sophomore year of college – I started having flashbacks (PTSD) and ended up in the hospital for suicidal ideation. I had to withdraw from school for the term but I returned the following term, even though I was barely attending class and my grades were suffering somewhat. By junior year, I barely made it out of bed most days, rarely got out of my pajamas, and even more rarely left the house. I was heavily medicated, gained 50 pounds, had to register as a disabled student and reduce my courseload, and just generally hated my life and wanted to die every single day.
So what happened? Well, that’s part of the challenge of this sort of thing… I made a lot of good choices at the age of 22, and all of them no doubt contributed to turning my life around.
First, I decided to temporarily withdraw from school. Not for the term, like before, but indefinitely, until I got my life back.
Second, I dealt directly with the root of my problem: my repeated inability to set boundaries with my mentally ill mother. I made a mix CD with a lot of inspirational songs on it about learning to live without abusive people (‘‘I Will Survive’’ etc.) Next, I wrote a 6-page letter to Mom detailing her abusive behavior and stating that I was no longer going to tolerate it. The letter ended our relationship indefinitely. As the grief set in, and my desire to go groveling back to her intensified, I listened to the mix CD and cried a lot. Over and over and over. For months. And eventually, a miracle happened–I learned that I could, in fact, live without my mother’s approval. I had finally cut the umbilical cord.
Then, I got a part-time job I knew I could do well. I worked as a catering delivery driver and set-up person, which required exceptional customer service. Since I’m great with that kind of thing, and quickly gained recognition and greater responsibility, it was a real ego boost and helped me restore some faith in my ability to succeed. I worked diligently at making a habit of things people do automatically – bathing, brushing my teeth, putting on make-up, etc.
So things were looking up, but I was starting to stagnate. I had switched therapists, but I was still doing psychodynamic therapy.
My husband (then-boyfriend) is a clinical psychology student with a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy orientation. He felt very strongly that my therapists were not helping me because they weren’t using evidence-based treatments. He pressured me, a lot, to try CBT. I had asked my therapists about it several times but they insisted that CBT was not appropriate for people with PTSD or people with complex psychological issues stemming from a history of trauma.
Which brings us to the final step in this healing process-- I began to educate myself. I read every book and peer-reviewed journal article I could get my hands on. HOLY SHIT my therapists were wrong. Wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong. Turns out half of therapists out there feed you complete and utter bullshit. My husband bought me a behavioral activation workbook called Overcoming Depression One Step at a Time, and it was like a lightbulb flicked on in my head. The results were immediate and significant.
I went to my psychodynamic therapist and told her I was switching to CBT. She tried to convince me otherwise, but I didn’t take ‘‘no’’ for an answer. And that was the beginning of the end of my torment.
At 23 I stopped taking the medication, lost the 50 pounds I had gained, got married, returned to school, and aced the fuck out of my senior year of college. I graduated With Honors on what was probably the most triumphant day of my entire life. I am now 27 years old. I’m a full-time graduate student at an excellent university and I’m acing the fuck out of those classes, too. I also have a healthy, drama-free relationship with my mother, who eventually contacted me with a newfound respect for my autonomy and a genuine desire to turn over a new leaf. No-one who meets me has any idea I have psychological issues or ever did.
I still have PTSD, anxiety, and depression. It’s kind of a chronic thing. But recovery is really a relative thing. I’m genuinely happy with the way things are, and have found a way to accept the psychological issues I still have while working diligently to improve them. It’s easy sometimes to forget how far I’ve come – I went through a period of severe depression last semester, but it only lasted two weeks and I didn’t miss a day of class. THAT’s real success.
I guess all of this can be summed up as self-advocacy. The moment things changed for me was when I really started to believe that I knew what was in my own best interest. I learned to trust myself again.
Oh, yes, I never realized until I saw a nutritionist how much food affects mood. That and exercise make a significant difference for me.
I smiled about your husband enforcing healthy sleep behavior. My husband’s support and, frankly, stubborn nature, has been such a huge influence on my ability to overcome my issues.
It can sort of be a PITA to be married to a behavioral health professional – any ‘‘woe is me’’ story is usually met by him taking me by the hand, sitting me down in front of a desk, handing me a bunch of charts to fill out about my irrational cognitions and not letting me go until I’ve successfully disputed them. I hate him at the time, but it always works.
(I mentioned this in a recent post – I totally nailed him the other day when he started bitching about what a terrible therapist he thinks he is. I went and made him fill out his own damn charts. HA!)
Many of my barriers to losing weight were psychological. Thank god I’m not an emotional eater, but for the longest time, I told myself I was cute, healthy, and social enough for my liking, and so there was no reason to make an effort. I could do it if I wanted or had to, I just didn’t want or have to.
I don’t know what triggered it, but I started hearing this internal reply: Oh really? You can, you just don’t have to? Sure, uh huh, right… It was a skeptical voice, and if it had a face, I’d probably want to slap it. But it did do me good, because I started thinking whether I could. Not whether I wanted to or had to, but if I actually had the brains, will, and discipline to do it. Unconsciously, it played off my dislike of being a hypocrite.
So now I’m about 40 pounds down, not because I want to look or feel better (though I do) but because I absolutely had to prove to myself that I could indeed do what I said I could do.
I’ve basically rewired my brain when it comes to dealing with my bad habits, tendencies, thought patterns-- I work around them and make them non-issues. I attack the same old problems, but from different angles. For instance, I hate eating breakfast. I’m never hungry when I get up. But knowing that breakfast was part of weight loss, I made myself start eating it. I do what I can to make the meal positive. I eat foods I like, and allow myself to be fairly generous with the portions. I eat either on the walk to work, at my desk at work, or leisurely at home, whatever my whim at the moment is. By making it stress-free and pleasant, I’ve choked down breakfast every day for six months now.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Prozac, and Xanax (low dose)
I’ve always had at least mild dysthmia, even as a child, and seem to be experiencing major clinical depression every 10 years or so. In the past I’ve suffered through the major troughs and then rebuilt my life when I emerged; this time around I finally went to a psychiatrist who diagnosed severe anxiety disorder as co-morbid with the depression and put me on meds that make me feel like I imagine “normal” people do. Relief and joy are not strong enough words to describe how I feel now.
I’m fairly smart (college professor) and introspective and at first I was absolutely humiliated that I needed drugs as a crutch. I’ve now come to regard the meds as a needed fix for a brain that has some bad wiring in a few sections.
The CBT has helped me decide that life should be kinda fun and it’s okay to follow your heart. I was raised in an extremely conservative religion that depends on guilt as a central controller and therapy is helping me shed my “insty-guilt response.”
And this! I have a penchant for self-sabotage when circumstances are too smooth and secure; realizing and curbing these impulses has been paramount to my own healing.
I totally missed this. You’re so right. You have to be up-front with yourself about yourself or else you’re never going to have the motivation to change. You have to be willing to call yourself out on your own bullshit but you also have to be willing to hold your own hand and say, ‘‘You’re gonna get through this.’’
I think over the years I’ve had some psych issues building up and it’s bothering me but given that I’m living at home right now and I don’t want to let on how bad it is to my parents I’m considering if there’s other alternatives to getting into the local psychiatrist, which I understand is a 3+ month wait.
Besides self help books are there any good online resources?
I don’t think you can really solve most deep seated psychological problems. You can just reduce their negative impact, reduce destructive coping mechanisms and make them more bearable as you live your life. I don’t think there is a ‘cured’ state after something truly bad happens. There are always going to be some negative effects. However there are positive effects too. For example, the depth of human connection you are capable of after you experience severe humiliation, rejection or isolation is much deeper than you’d have w/o it. You can find yourself getting more meaning out of events other people might not find meaningful. Your level of compassion for yourself and others can end up going up after you work through a traumatic event. So there is good and bad, but no point of true recovery IMO. In a lot of ways, I am a more peaceful, serene and compassionate person than I’d be had I not gone through things I’d gone through. But there are still days I am curled up and barely able to move for an hour or so.
It really is a mix of things though. A big thing for me was self compassion and honesty (both with yourself and someone you trust like a therapist or close friend). You need the honesty to face your failures, humiliations, terrors and helplessness but also need the self compassion to learn to forgive yourself, to accept your failures and limitations, accept the compassion others have to offer (you can’t really accept compassion from others if you can’t give it to yourself in my experience. If you hate yourself, you will only focus on other people who hate you too) and to try to bear the periods when the negative events overwhelm you.
That has been a big part of it for me. Self compassion, at least one supportive person you can talk to and an honest, realistic assessment of your situation (rather than one filled with denial, minimization, and general attempts to avoid/suger coat reality).
Another thing that helps is nutrition and generally trying to keep your brain physically healthy and resilient. Which can come in many forms. Various vitamins, minerals and supplements to avoid deficiencies (magnesium, selenium, B vitamins, methyl donors, omega 3s), regular exercise, etc. However in my experience the self compassion and honesty is more important.
No. You have to have a trained professional help you, either a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Online, just about the only thing useful are self-tests to diagnose depression. However, those tests will also mis-diagnose schizophrenia or manic depression, which are far more serious and life-threatening.
The good news is that most companies and health plans will cover psychological counseling. Schools and universities usually have counseling services on-site, and free or low cost to students.
In high school I almost fainted when I had to get up and talk in front of the class. Public speaking is quite a common fear, evidently.
In grad school I was a TA so I had to get up and give lectures to 100-150 people at a time. I did a little reading beforehand and what everyone recommended was:
a. Write down what you’re going to say.
b. Practice. Out loud, in front of a mirror, repeatedly.
c. Know what you’re talking about.
d. Look around and make eye contact.
The first few times I was a little uncomfortable but then I got into it and had no fear. If you asked me to get up in front of a Superbowl crowd and deliver a lecture on probability and statistics (or just talk about anything at random) I’d have no problem doing it now.
I’m still shy about some things (good luck getting me to dance) but public speaking isn’t one of them.
An online resource isn’t going to shovel through your self serving BS - which many people here have mentioned is a big hurdle in overcoming your issues.
The best online advice from an article usually isn’t pleasant and the article can’t push you into following it. You need a live person to do that.
I’ve wasted countless hours reading articles that I never followed. I’ve always found a way to rationalize not following advice that would cause me to do unpleasant things. When I talked with my therapist she basically gave me advice I heard before, but she also dealt with how I rationalized not following it. It was only after I realized how I was lying to myself that I could begin to make progress.
Is your local therapist - with the three month waiting period - the only therapist around? Make an appointment with him, and in the meantime, search for another therapist and read all the articles you want.
I’d say it is the de-facto biggest hurdle. Counselors I meet continue to be amazed that I was able to do it, since the likelihood of success is so low. Once, I went to an AA meeting, and the entire room couldn’t do it.
)
But it did do me good, because I started thinking whether I could. Not whether I wanted to or had to, but if I actually had the brains, will, and discipline to do it. Unconsciously, it played off my dislike of being a hypocrite.