I know. And I know I can’t wait for clarity, either. I have to create it, or pretend it’s there, or fuck knows what.
Good things have happened in my life - work, school, etc. But I don’t seek them out as often as I should. I need too much downtime, because achieiving means it’s time to open up to the real negatives in life along with the positives. Then I have to climb two walls every day - my negatives and the real world ones - and mine only build a higher and higher wall.
That is, until I realize how to create my clarity and just go ahead. Usually I don’t, and I achieve things and then discount them or don’t follow up. I’ve done a lot in life I don’t care enough to tell the Dope about, because it’s tiring just to reflect on it. It should be nourishing. It seldom is.
msmith537, I’ve gotten into it with you in the past and I don’t want to do so again. I’ll only say that I think of you as someone who believes it’s your way or the highway. I’m fine checking out the highway - maybe it goes somewhere neat.
I’ve been greatly helped by CBT, but this is where CBT starts to break down for me. Clever people will always find a way to rationalize even the most irrational thought. We debate with ourselves and we can totally set up the positive side to fail. The problem is the idea that you have to do anything with your thought. You don’t have to do anything with it. You don’t have to fight yourself. You don’t have to view thoughts as obstacles to be crushed. You don’t have to have it less often. All you need is to learn to recognize it for what it is.
I’ve learned to recognize the stories I tell myself. Oh, this is my I’m Going to be Fat Forever story. This is the My Life is Nothing but Pain story. This is the Everybody Will Hate Me story.
Sometimes I treat it like a game. If I have a really persistent thought that is distressing me, I will imagine my stream of thought being performed by muppets (usually singing vegetables or fish.) It’s hard to take ‘‘I hate myself and I want to die’’ so seriously when it involves a chorus line of cheerful critters. I learned this and a lot of other so-called ‘‘defusion’’ techniques from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. ACT is different from CBT in that it ditches the concept of rationality, the concept of ‘‘overcoming obstacles’’ or whatever, and just plunges full speed ahead into ‘‘this is my life and I’m going to live it according to my values.’’
Sounds good. I’ve been conditioned to believe that The Truth is that entity which Hurts. Corollary: only what hurts is true. My logical mind rejects this, but my psyche keeps coming back to it, like a compulsive cutter to his blade.
Thing is, I recognize other people’s stories. Mine often don’t even get verbalized - I would have to question feelings instead of thoughts. That may be one reason why it feels like a slap in the face to do it.
Music - mostly the fact of it, as I struggle with the ethos of it.
Humor - the universal solvent.
Words - the best way I have of experiencing and sharing. I find I understand very little in life tacitly - there must, almost always, be words.
Animals - along with music, the only exceptions to what I just said about words.
People - little bits and facets of them mostly, and once in a while (not never, just not enough), just opening up and being easy, being “us.”
Kindness. Caring. Honesty is valuable, but never at the expense of the first two.
I’m out of ideas. I don’t often think of myself as a person of values. Values, to me, are things your whole life is dedicated to. I’ve never lived a fully dedicated life. I have to find forgiveness for that.
I like olives’s Muppets thing. I sometimes give my inner critics the voice of Goofey or Elmer Fudd. The voices can be heard, but they are given all the importance they deserve.
You just brought up a really great technique – write your feelings down. Explain, in excruciating detail, exactly why you’re having an emotion response. Get the logic down. A day later, it’s going to look awfully silly.
I’m open to a process. Just not *your *process. It takes all kinds to make a world. (Ironically, by being adversarial in a safe format like the board, you’re actually helping me feel justified in defending myself as one of those kinds.)
Doug, 12 years ago I was a bitter, angry man who hated himself, hated his life, hated the world and everything in it. And I decided that I didn’t want to be that way anymore, and I definitely wanted to live. It’s been a long hard road that could definitely have been shortened with a little bit of CBT, but as above you have to want it.
Start with thought training. We reinforce our mental habits and state of mind through constant repetition. Creating conversations or scenarios in our head for one example. Start with trying to catch yourself when you do this and change the subject. Just stop, let it go, turn in another direction. Don’t turn it into self-punishment, because that’s just more of the same. Just stop, let it go, change the subject and move on. Think about something cool, or something that makes you happy, or even something as basic as walking through the steps you need to do to accomplish some basic task. Anything ‘not negative’.
It will take some time, but within a year or two, you will be surprised how it changes your thought patterns and ultimately, your perception of of the world.
I don’t really have much experience with this stuff, but it seems to me that your thinking is… too abstract. Not grounded enough. Occasionally, usually when trying to fall asleep, I find myself with similar thoughts–often revolving around death. In the bright light of day I don’t get these thoughts, and I don’t get them when thinking about real things.
So my completely unfounded suggestion is to find something concrete to think about instead. Find a hobby you love; anything that will occupy your mind on problems that actually have objective solutions that are grounded in the real world.
I doubt the negativity will ever go away. It will just be diluted by the real stuff–not abstract, fake positivity, but thoughts that don’t go in circles and instead lead to actual changes in the world, however small. It doesn’t have to be important. I just know that for me personally, I only have these kinds of thoughts when I have absolutely nothing else to think about, so it’s a good thing that I almost always have something to think about.
I don’t know that this approach will work for everyone. It may require a bit of obsessiveness itself–the ability to think about a problem to the exclusion of other things. Maybe this can be cultivated. Every minute you spend obsessing over, say, the tomatoes in your garden, is a minute you aren’t having negative thoughts.
I have my obsessions. They may be keeping depression at bay, or they may just be keeping boredom at bay. I certainly can’t call them into service during a bout of self-negation, because that is the obsession that dwarfs all others. It’s as if you like marbles and cake, then tell yourself you have to eat the marbles instead of the cake.
As for affirmations. Might you find yourself, say, having to turn back to your positive scenario every 2 or 3 seconds at first - then finding you’ve lost it and can’t recall it? I just tried it with “pot roast.” Not a negative, anyway (unless you hate pot roast.) Felt kinda like this:
pot roast depression pot roast depression depression DEPRESSION pot roast ENDLESS INCAPACITATING DEPRESSION GODDAMMIT LISTEN TO IT pot what???
The act of creation shuts off my damn spigot. In my case, it’s not negative thoughts that spew out of it. It’s repetitive nonsensical mental noise. But both are wasteful and destructive. The only thing that keeps me from falling into the abyss is keeping my eyes trained on other things.
If you aren’t engaging your body in activity (making something, exercising, having sex, eating, etc.), then you’ve got to engage your brain (reading, writing, music, intellectual conversation, movie-watching, etc.)
If you’re into animals, buy a field guide and a pair of binoculars and become a birder.
Or get a star chart and learn the constellations.
Every time your thoughts start turning inward, stop yourself and find something constructive to do. Keep yourself so busy that every night you collapse in bed, too tired to think.
This will sound cheesy, but can you think of a historical or present-day role model that you can aspire to be like? Someone whose life was/is just as hard and as tragic as yours but they still managed to do something fantastic? I know I imagine Harriet Tubman kicking my ass whenever I start navel-gazing.
I love these suggestions of distractions. They are excellent.
I would add a little twist on that though, if I may.
Distracting yourself from depressing or obsessive thoughts presupposes that the depressive thoughts are the inevitable monster at the door. You can keep them at bay for a while, but eventually you have to let your defenses down and they will get you in the long run.
That works great in the short term, but in the long run it’s a losing battle.
And as long as you are trying your hardest to keep the monster at bay, it will still hold power over you.
There’s a wonderful parable about a monster that was terrifying a village. None of the villagers would confront the monster because they knew it would eat them. But one boy decided to walk up to it. The closer he got, the smaller the monster became. When he finally got right up to it, he found that it was a tiny little squeeking thing that couldn’t harm a fly.
I would like to suggest that instead of distracting yourself from depressing thoughts, consider that the depressing thoughts ARE the distraction. Return to what is real, right now. Focus on what’s true, instead of obsessing over what’s untrue.
And yes, there’s a lot of truth in getting out of the house and doing fun things.
It is not an easy book to summarize since it is very long and covers an enormous range of characters and themes. I mention it because much of the book is about toxic hyper self-conscious relationships between people and their own thoughts, especially depressive and addictive ones. Much of the book (and its only moral hero) is set in an AA halfway house, and the author really lays out the paradoxes and feedbacks of FOLLOW THE PROGRAM. He spent his youth as an addict and lived in a halfway house.
Much of the book is an exploration of the relentless logic of depressive and addictive thinking. This comes out through film theory & criticism, close analysis of tennis, game theory, the philosophy of AA, and in countless other ways in a thousand pages of painful self-consciousness. The author, David Foster Wallace, knew what he was talking about and hanged himself a few years ago when his endogenous depression resisted all treatment.
People dicker back and forth over whether Wallace is “pretentious” and other pointless non-issues that completely miss the import of what he is saying. But for people who have ever experienced this stuff, it’s practically prophecy. I read it this summer for the first time and relate to it profoundly. I’ve read almost every other piece that Wallace has published in the past six months.
It’s not a depressing book. It’s a book largely about depression in which some terrible things happen, but it is absolutely not depressing. It takes depressive cynicism head on and offers some serious answers.
ETA: The book is also completely hilarious. I really don’t want to overlook that.