Of the list that Cat Whisper has posted, I find myself doing…all 10 of them.
Honestly, I have been looking for a place like this, where I can sound off whatever issues I am making mountains out from molehills and get a CBT approach to it.
I always feel that people hate me. Loath me. They are just putting on smiling facade until one day you lose your cool then they take it as the opportunity to file you off as a poor friend or a petty fellow. I examine every tiny details in the interaction, or just am cold to everyone because “they will hate me eventually”. I do my best to be likable and all that, but deep down I know at the drop of a dime everyone will hate me.
I’ve been through a series of sessions of CBT too. I sure wish I had known about all of this sooner, it would have saved me from feeling so alone. It can be very hard work. Thank you for starting this thread. I can relate to what each and every one of you are saying.
When there is a specific situation causing me confusion or pain, it helps to have the tools to really step back and try to focus on the situation itself without going into the downward spiral of focussing on my emotions and habitual response of reacting only by over-generalizing and fortune telling. Maybe not everyone hates me, maybe they won’t hate me eventually. (Crazy Chop, I do the very same thing as you do.)
The really tough part has been separating my thoughts from my emotions. They really seem like one and the same. They are not. So when I am down, my challenge is to take the time to do the worksheets in the Mind over Mood book. Ugh.
On the subject of perfectionism, I learned that all these years this was my way of coping. If my house is spotless and organized, maybe I will feel less scattered inside myself. Since I try to be the best at my school or work, I don’t have time to fix myself. No time for being social… no time to feel anxious. It gave me focus, and now I can see it as avoidance.
I’m about halfway through the Ellis book. I’ve also tried 3 medications, and Wellbutrin is the one for me, at least for now. It still has several side effects, but I can deal with them. Dry mouth? I have sugarless candy, lots of water and better dental hygiene. Dizziness? I’m moving/getting up slowly and taking deep breaths and sometimes Nauzene. Others managed similarly.
Now that I’m relatively stable in that area, I’m able to do the exercises in Overcoming and in my other workbook without thinking the whole time that either (1) This is stupid and can never work or (2) It might work for other people, but not meeee. I’m different and worse and I’ll never get out! Now it is more like, well, why not give it a shot? And if it is less effective, well, no point in blaming myself. On to the next try. Still very hard, but getting easier.
I’m glad to see this thread getting started. I too checked off every thing on that list. Disqualifying the positive and catastrophizing are my current targets.
First, I would like to wish everyone here the best of luck.
I have never battled depression in the way others have described, but I do have a deeply melancholic personality that requires constant maintenance. My regimen of choice is Stoicism, with a capital S. I mention this because the similarities between rigorous Stoic practice (largely from the Enchiridion of Epictetus) and CBT seem absolutely remarkable. Here’s an example:
This is from an extremely antiquated translation, but it reads well nevertheless. The core of CBT, I believe, has been quite well understood for a long time.
I agree with this. Perfectionism is really destructive.
One thing that CBT helped me do is accept things about myself and see that they’re not “bad,” but they’re just the way I am. If these behaviors cause problems, then it can make a lot more sense to find a way to mitigate the problems than to change the underlying behavior.
An example–I had always heard that you should deal with the mail as soon as you walk in the door, or at least go through and discard the junk mail immediately. I really thought I was supposed to do that. But as soon as I walk in the door, I have other priorities, like going to the bathroom, getting dinner started so my kid wouldn’t starve by the time it’s ready, etc. Also, I’m a usually a little stressed out when I walk in, so I just don’t want to deal with the mail right then. I know some people put it in a designated place like on a hall table, but when I tried that, it would just pile up and I’d put other things there and it would get really messy, and frankly, I just don’t want to deal with the mail every day. So for years I beat myself up about not taking care of the mail “properly.” I’d stick it someplace and misplace or overlook things and then I’d feel worse.
But with CBT, I came to accept that taking care of the mail as soon as I walked in just wasn’t going to happen. And that’s okay. I just had to find a way to deal with the “stick it somewhere and lose it” problem. So my idea was to get a large basket and put it on the shelf by the door. Now I just chuck everything in there when I go in the door, junk mail and all. It gets kind of full but I don’t have to clean it out too often. If I’m looking for bills or something, I know just where to look. If I ignore it for a few days, it doesn’t matter because it’s all corralled in the basket.
Now some of you are probably saying “duh, why didn’t you just do that in the first place?” Well, it’s because I couldn’t get past that perfectionist ideal of how I was “supposed to” deal with the mail. And the way my thought processes worked, I just naturally chalked it up to more failure on my part. I beat myself up for not being able to do it the “right” way. It never occurred to me to work with my natural tendencies than against them, because my natural tendencies were obviously (to me) inferior.
So CBT helped me change those thought patterns. Dealing with the mail is still somewhat stressful. I still let it pile up too much in the basket and ignore it for too long sometimes. So that’s something I have to work on. But “better” is my goal rather than “perfect.” In the meantime, it’s manageable. And if I do let it pile up too much, I don’t hate myself because of it.
It’s a really nice change. And it’s happened in so many areas throughout my life.
Sorry, you’re dead wrong. It may not be the right therapy for all disorders, but I can’t imagine why you say it’s only good for a “focal, localized misconception.” I was suffering from a whole universe of misconceptions and negative thoughts. And little by little, CBT is correcting them. My mail example is just one small thing, but extrapolate that to every area of my life. My thinking was totally screwed up. Now it’s not so screwed up anymore.
And I’d like to know what type of therapy you think works better.
Hey, CBT may not be for you, but it has been proven effective for an incredibly wide range of problems. And don’t forget that there are many different approaches to it. My therapist doesn’t give me homework, for example. Maybe your therapist was taking the wrong approach for your issues.
Interesting! Zen Buddhism (which BTW can be entirely secular and materialist) has some very similar concepts as well. Attachment is the source of suffering, and all that.
I wanted to say to olives (but forgot, because I’m not perfect ), that one thing you posted really stood out for me -
That actually strikes me as a positive step forward - next comes anger, because you’re starting to believe that you don’t deserve to feel so bad all the time. Believe it or not, it sounds like you are moving forward. I had moments much like that when I was recovering from anxiety; I was working on replacing my negative thoughts with more positive ones; I distinctly remember one day, after a particularly busy day of thought replacement, thinking to myself, “Am I ever going to get to just think a thought again without it being so much work?” The answer to that was yes. I was building a habit that I use to this day.
I get the measure of how bad, no, how lousy, most people are at guesstimates from how they react to mine. Well, not to getting the estimate, but to how close the final value ends up being to the actual one. People consider 200% errors normal :eek: I have to remind me to stop kicking myself if I go over by half an hour on a month-long guess
It is not your fault that most people run estimates from their ass.
Call it catastrophizing, fortune-telling, or just borrowing trouble, but I have the hardest time giving up my habit of running awful scenarios “so I’ll be prepared.” I’m so much like Harry in the following conversation:
Like when that crib recall came out, I felt compelled to re-enact in my mind the experience of the mother who came in to find her 10 month old dead, caught in a gap between crib and mattress. Like, with me in her place, and trying to feel what she must have felt. Why would I do this? Because I’m crazy. I think I have an underlying belief that by doing this stuff I’m somehow inoculating myself from future tragedy. I’m trying to stop.
It is my belief that the “trying to be prepared for anything that happens” attitude stems from an underlying lack of self-confidence. A truly self-confident person knows that they’ll handle whatever comes up; you don’t have to be prepared for every possible scenario.
There are some practical similarities between Buddhism (with which I have a great deal of sympathy) and Stoic therapy. But Stoicism is highly telological and proceeds by logical argument, and Zen is pretty much the opposite on both counts.
Here is another gem. This is from the first chapter of the Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius. The author is currently (wrongfully) imprisoned for treason and is about to be executed. He laments, taking refuge in the Muses of Poetry.
Philosophy arrives and drives them out. She’s annoyed with him and tells him so, and then spends the rest of the book demonstrating to him logically how a man facing impending torture and death can still be happy.
This translation is from 1905, so I don’t imagine issues with posting the entire passage. I think it’s well worth reading; I have read the entire Consolation several times and have translated most of it myself.
I like to think I am a little better put together than Ignatius J Reilly, though.
There is one somewhat similar treatment but helps work with those with under- or overdeveloped senses of emotion. Again evidence based, and is what I’m on as well as CBT. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. DBT is aimed more at those with borderline personality disorder, those that require help with emotion regulation and deals with how to cope with certain situations before being able to deal with why someone thinks about that situation in the first place.
I still agree that CBT is an absolute godsend, and with DBT it is really helping change my life for the better!
DBT is fantastic (and technically it is also a kind of CBT). I recently wrote a research paper on it and learned that it has even been proven effective for substance abuse and comorbid diagnoses. My husband is reading Linehan’s book and receiving DBT training as part of his Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Research currently underway is indicating that DBT may not be so narrowly applied – it is showing proming results in RTCs with depression and anxiety as well.
The most remarkable thing about Linehan and DBT is that it is the first treatment really to take individuals with borderline personality disorder and reject the stigma so frequently attached to them. A BPD diagnosis was once the kiss of death, and she transformed it into something treatable using an approach that honors the sufferer with compassion and respect. She excoriates the stigmatizing language used in the DSM-IV against sufferers of BPD, and rejects the assertion, based on evidence, that any attempts of suicide/self-injury are ‘‘manipulative.’’ When you think of BPD as a coping strategy for severe trauma, the behaviors make so much more sense.
I celebrate this, as my mother suffers, untreated, for this disorder. I feel like I am the only one who has ever seen her in a sympathetic light because she has done many objectively horrible things. But I have always recognized her actions as coming from a deep core of pain, and I love that Linehan is doing that and backing up the fact that compassion works using hard scientific evidence.
I also love DBT because it is based in Buddhist philosophy. I once suffered extreme problems with emotion regulation and in all honesty was probably a hair’s breadth away from a borderline diagnosis (I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD, which is basically PTSD with more pervasive and severe effects as the result of captivity/repeated interpersonal trauma: psychological fragmentation, the loss of a sense of safety, loss of coherent sense of self, trust, and self-worth. There is often a thin line between CPTSD and borderline.) It was ‘‘the middle way’’ preached in Buddhism that helped me become more grounded. Core concepts like acceptance, integrated thinking, impermanence, etc. are key both to DBT and Buddhism.
UC, thank you so much for your help. It’s amazing to me how hard it can be to identify my own irrational thoughts. It’s striking to me how my choice of self-expression can effect how I view a situation. For example, even as I wrote, ‘‘I have a bazillion memories’’ it never occurred to me that silly hyperbole was actually making my view of the situation worse. All those little exaggerations we let ourselves get away with, thinking they aren’t a big deal… they can have a big cumulative affect. I really appreciate you tackling that one, because sometimes life is seems so messy, and complicated. When we can label our reactions to the experience it just makes everything seem more… clear.
Cat Whisperer, that’s a good point. I never even thought of ‘‘I am so tired…’’ statements as maybe, a positive thing. But if I look back at the positive choices I’ve made in my life, they were usually predicated with an, ‘‘I am so tired…’’ Must be a sign of good things to come.
I’m happy to report I’ve done my exposure every day so far this week! And… it’s getting boring… which means it’s working
To resurrect this thread, there is a software program called emotions manager 2000 that is free and fairly user friendly which you can use to categorize and address negative emotions. I enjoy it.
Does anyone else who’s been through CBT ever find themselves being tired of analyzing their feelings? I’ve done 3 intense group CBT sessions, and my therapist uses it somewhat, but some days when I’m having some sort of emotional upheaval (for good or bad), the thought crosses my mind that I sometimes wish I could just FEEL things, instead of having to THINK about them right away, and then decide if it’s “ok” if I feel them.
It’s not all the time, but I occasionally feel like I’ve lost some of that “in the moment” thing because of my destructive thinking habits.
I had a moment like that years ago, when I was working very hard on my anxiety. I don’t do that anymore; thinking positively really does become a habit. It sounds like you’re still building the habit of positive thinking, and things are more difficult and less natural when you’re still in the building stage.
I have anxiety, not depression (although during sever anxiety attacks that last weeks, I get depressed). I did want to pop in to say to anyone interested in CBT not to give up. I’m in round 3 (second time with current psychologist, one year after my last session), and this time…I’m actually “getting” it.
It’s hard. It’s work. But I’m actually feeling some mental and physiological rewards…and they’re awesome.
The first time I had depression from anxiety, I didn’t even know what the hell was wrong. It sure as hell ain’t “the blues.” It felt like a death eater from Harry Potter got to me. I did not feel human. I understood what people mean when they say they are a shell of a person. It’s nothing like when I’m “depressed” (bummed out) about every day stuff.
), that one thing you posted really stood out for me -
