The Truth, My Truth and Nothing But My Truth

This is my truth, I don’t know if it is true for anyone else. Before I write anything more I could have one of those disclaimers that I see on other blogs, but I hope it is obvious that I am writing a personal blog and nothing more. We are all experts when it comes to ourselves aren’t we?

When I wrote Everything I Know (Almost)…about depression, it was true to say that was pretty much all I felt confident about. Since writing that page, about 40 posts ago, I have asked many questions, talked to many people, and listened… more than anything I have listened.

In my last post, I shared a link to the following You Tube film, which has a running time of about an hour and features Professor Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist, giving a lecture on the subject of depression at Stanford University: Stanford's Sapolsky on Depression in the US (Full Lecture). For me, it provided an unparalleled insight into depression. I wish someone had sat me down and introduced me to this lecture years ago. Fortunately I have science in my background, and in my blood, so I found the lecture fairly easy to follow; Sapolsky is skilled at pitching it just right. But I appreciate that isn’t going to be the case for everybody; after all science wasn’t everybody’s favourite subject at school.

I imagine that others out there have found themselves questing as I have. I have depression; I live in a world where our popular understanding of this condition is clouded by ignorance and prejudice (understandably); and where the fragments of understanding I have collected from health professionals have felt like pieces of a jigsaw… only they don’t seem to come from the same box. I am serious about getting better, and I know I am fortunate in that attitude because my motivation for getting better stems from my relationships with other people. Not everybody is so fortunate to have the company of a supportive family – my broad family of choice. But I have said it before and I say it again now… a powerful ingredient in overcoming depression is ‘other people’, not because of the advice the can offer or what they can do for you, but because we are all the same just enough to feel compassion for each other and show each other kindness, and kindness is healing, not just in a poetic sense but in a biochemical sense.

A word about where I’m coming from. I don’t believe in science. Science is not a belief system. It is a way of understanding the world and explaining the way it works based on what we know and understand so far, given the tools we have to explore that world. However... scientific knowledge and understanding is but a dot on a very long time line hurtling towards the future… and as we travel that way, we learn more, we learn differently and our understanding shifts and improves. I accept this. Science is not faith, it should not be followed as people follow faiths… it thrives on being questioned and challenged, it does not seek to preserve itself, it evolves and it is hungry to one day arrive at a holistic picture of the world, some way to explain everything without its own internal contradictions. It is a long way from achieving this. There are good faiths with helpful messages, as there is good science too, and both worlds are susceptible to human flaws - in particular … ego. So when I form opinions on both, I try and separate out the body of knowledge and understanding from the people and the inevitable trappings of being human. History is full of stories about good faiths corrupted by our human flaws. We have done much harm in the name of religion… but I don’t blame religion… we are at once amazing human beings and only human at the same time. So for me, science is not itself a culprit for past tragedies either.

Major depression is not the ups and downs of daily life, and unfortunately taking that experience and extrapolating it… magnifying it… does not provide a better sense of what major depression feels like. So those of us with depression can feel frustrated that others seem to misunderstand and underplay the difficulties we are experiencing. And sometimes we see that others are frustrated by us, because we depressives don’t seem to bounce back and ‘cope’ like other people do.

It is clear though that there are several different components to depression. There is a reason why the jigsaw pieces seem to come from different boxes.

Of the many chemical messengers (neurotransmitters) used by our brains to communicate from one neurone to the next… a few are presently known to be implicated in depression. In simple terms, lacking in these particular neurotransmitters inhibits our ability to experience pleasure, brings on strong feelings of guilt and grief, and slows down our thinking and our movements. Unpack that, and for me this meant I could no longer feel the warmth of other people’s love; my mood was no longer instantly lifted by the things I used to enjoy like the dawning of a warm sunny day and a Monet sky; I couldn’t hear the sweet uplifting sound of my 3 year old’s laughter or feel the presence of my adoring dogs. Without willing it and unable to stop it I relived every misfortunate memory of failure and loss, every conversation, every awkward moment, and in doing so I felt utterly hopeless and responsible. I cried; felt an intense sadness that made the muscles hang from by bones, and withdrew into an impenetrable silence. The mundane activities of daily life like taking a shower, putting on clothes, grooming, preparing food, brushing teeth and exercising all became difficult, sometimes even impossible. I’d get confused easily, squint with concentration as I tried to follow conversations, seize up at the challenge of having to make even simple decisions. I felt stupid and self conscious around other people, especially at work.

So lacking certain neurotransmitters seems to have a pretty serious and noticeable effect on day to day life, so much so that it left me feeling like I was barely living at all. There are those that quite rightly argue that we cannot actually measure the quantities of these neurotransmitters in the brain before, during or after treatment. However it doesn’t then follow that the science about neurotransmitters is all nonsense. Antidepressants are big business and that often attracts conspiracy theorists, which is no bad thing… but I have yet to hear anyone argue against the way that Cocaine acts on our neural pathways in the way that I hear arguments against antidepressants.

There were times I wished I had cancer instead. I know that isn’t a good thing to say, but it is how I felt at the time. Even cancer sufferers seem to be able to know pleasure through the pain of their illness and in doing so are able to summon up the fight in themselves. Depression left me without the capacity to feel ‘fight’, and then like so many others, without the will to live.

It is common these days to be prescribed an antidepressant known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). As the name suggests, these work by inhibiting the reuptake of one particular neurotransmitters, serotonin, and so raising levels of this chemical messenger in the brain. SSRIs became popular amongst health professionals because they carried fewer side effects than their predecessors, and perhaps more significantly are safer in overdose than traditional antidepressants. It is well known that antidepressants carry a warning of “the symptoms of depression may worsen before the antidepressant can take effect. For some people, this may include thoughts of suicide or self-harm.” I think this creates confusion and takes away from the credibility of antidepressants to treat depressive symptoms. After all, if antidepressants are supposed to make you feel better, why might they increase your risk of suicide? However, I certainly recall that in those darkest of days that whilst I wanted to take my life I had little mental or physical energy to do so. It was only when I started to improve under the influence of antidepressants, and regained motivation and thinking that I could start to become serious about suicide. Recovery periods pose a greater risk of suicide that those days when we are confined to our bed sleeping the days away.

So SSRIs work by raising the levels of available serotonin reaching our receptors at the synapses, where one neuron meets another. However, serotonin, albeit a very major player and a workhorse amongst neurotransmitters, is only one such chemical messenger implicated in depression. Older classes of antidepressants increased levels of three different neurotransmitters, serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. All three are known to be implicated in depressive symptoms. Whilst raising levels of serotonin would alleviate feelings of grief and guilt, working on dopamine would reawaken our feelings of pleasure and motivation, aid with sleep, attention and memory, whilst norepinephrine would help restore physical activity. Understanding this goes some way towards understanding why for many of us, SSRIs like Fluoxetine do not provide the magic bullet we might hope for.

Then we have to consider a psychological component, as I have many times before in this blog, given difficulties that arise from the design of our human brain. To understand these difficulties is to begin to understand why it can be so difficult to be human at times, and also appreciate why we are so spectacularly different to the rest of the animal kingdom. Human beings have evolved sophisticated ‘new’ brains, the regions we refer to as the cortex, involved in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness, that have to work alongside some much ‘older’ areas of the brain that do more mundane and functional things. We have old animal instincts and drives, developed to survive a harsher world of food scarcity and hungry predators; systems that respond quickly to a world of potential threats. The flip side is that our mechanical responses to the world can be triggered by, not just real world threats, but by ‘imagined’ threats. I like the way Sapolsky describes it when he says that “our cortex whispers into the ear of our middle brain and triggers a stress response as thought we were about to be gorged by an elephant”.

I came to learn about the psychological component in more depth through therapy. I learned that my unmanaged thoughts are capable of activating responses in equal measure to real world threats. I learned that some of my childhood experiences, lived out in those impressionable years left their imprint on the design of my brain along with the genetic blueprints I inherited… and together they sowed the seeds of negative thinking that would hijack me in later life. It is possible, when we are moulding our young brains, to turn these old and useful survival mechanisms inwards and onto ourselves so we feel unsafe, insecure and in doing so destroy our self worth.

Through cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), I slowly learnt about how my childhood experiences were connected to the deep feelings of worthlessness that I had spent a lifetime trying to conceal from others. I began to see why perfectionisms was so important to me, and why I would need to break with this forceful habit. I had developed a whole life around protecting myself and hiding from others my dark truth that I was, underneath it all, nothing. Simplistically, perfectionism had been a way of elevating myself above the criticisms of others and in doing so, escaping detection.

Like an alcoholic having to look in the mirror at their own troubled face and say to that person “I have a problem”, I realised I needed help. With Judy, I learnt to tap into the negative automatic thoughts. At first it was very hard… the new brain, the cortex, would conjure its negative thoughts and whisper to midbrain with it powers for emotion, and it would respond … and just as quickly the ‘old’ hind brain would shape a physical response. In reality, I would only really be aware of the feelings like fear or embarrassment at first. Later I would learn to see how they were affecting me physically, notice the way my body crumpled from the impact with these emotions or how I would flee the scene. Later still I would learn to reflect on these events to identify the negative automatic thought, the mean things that my cortex was whispering much of the time to make me feel so emotionally battered. It would take more time still to learn how to catch these negative automatic thoughts as they popped into existence, rather than let them flow unfiltered into my midbrain and shape my emotions. Catching negative thoughts turned into challenging them… and eventually I would learn to reject them quickly. I might then feel an emotional falter, as my mean thoughts shot there way into the emotion centres of the brain… but I was now able to pull things back into shape quickly, in the blink of an eye and more importantly, behind the scenes without others realising the inner struggle. What would once have triggered a response that had the potential to send me into another depressive episode now became little more than a cognitive stumble.

When a major depression hit again, I was surprised. I understood the links between childhood experiences, my own unhelpful beliefs about myself (core beliefs) and they way these connected with my negative automatic thoughts. So why was I now experiencing another depression. I had overcome perfectionism with remarkable success. So what was this unhelpful habit that now shaped my daily life in unhealthy ways? More looking in the mirror and eventually I had the courage to see it; my dependence on others for approval. Perfectionism was not cause, it was symptom, and underlying it was this pulped self-esteem still fighting to conceal itself. My question to Judy, can I change my core beliefs… is it possible to trade in the feeling that I am worthless for something else? Judy’s reply, that isn’t certain… but what is possible is to change our ‘rules for living’.

As I understand it, once I had at my core some unhelpful beliefs about myself… I also constructed a life that allowed me to ‘cope’ with these beliefs. If I was worthless, I would need to conceal it, I would need to better and out perform others, I would need to work hard at being interesting, I would need to work harder than other people. The rules I had for myself were forming at some point in my past, in my subconscious. They propelled me through life, the hard boss in my head that saw me through achievement after achievement. I was usually the youngest on the team, the youngest consultant, the youngest assistant principal… it was a drive that others would have found unfathomable and maybe even a little bit frightening.

As life gets more complicated and the circles I moved in changed, living by my private rules became more difficult. It isn’t something I could realise at the time. I wasn’t conscious of any of these processes… I was just victim to them. Being infallible, and the best, having the highest standards… would become impossible to maintain. And as I failed to be these things, as the rules I had for myself were broken one by one, the cortex would start whispering its dissatisfaction to the middle brain, starting an emotional uprising and triggering a stress response in the old brain as thought my life itself was in danger.

The head teacher at a school I worked at didn’t believe in stress…that makes her a bit of a dinosaur. Stress, is our bodies’ biochemical and subsequently physical response to something in our environment that might pose a threat…don’t think paperwork… think big hungry mouths ready to turn you into a meal. It’s a reaction characterized by a release of adrenaline preparing you to either fight the threat or run from it, and a release of the hormone cortisol to up your blood sugar (muscle fuel), turn on access to other reserves of energy like fats, and almost shut down your immune system to divert your efforts into reacting. Stress is a brilliant reaction used by other mammals to great effect when faced with the threat of a predator, or some other immediate danger. The old and direct wiring of the hind brain wastes no time in responding to threats… saving vital seconds and possibly the difference between survival and death. We are designed to have a stress response… it is no bad thing in itself. When we take an exhilarating ride on a roller coaster or jump with nothing but a bungee cord between us and death, we are tapping into that stress response and enjoying the rush of chemicals it brings. When we are expecting a rush and get it… it is a pleasure. Feeling a stress response when we are not expecting it, by contrast can cause anxiety, panic maybe anger and all those uncomfortable feelings I’m sure you know only too well.

Sadly, for us human beings, the whisperings of the cortex can trigger a stress response too. When my rules for living were broken, when I believed I had fallen short or exposed a weakness, I’d tell myself how I’d failed… beat myself mentally. A stress response that was designed to react in a moment to immediate threats can be kept in play unnaturally by the constant whisperings of the cortex. Prolonged stress, what is called chronic stress, a prolonged biological response, not to a hungry lion, but the threats that originated from the way I viewed the world, and myself in it. It is like a madness isn’t it; well at least if lions could talk I think that’s what they would say.

The ingredients for major depression were present. A family history with undiagnosed depression, early childhood stressors, some unhelpful core beliefs, some hard rules for living, and all they needed to blend them was an activator… a stressor… I had started to live a life where being the ‘me’ I had constructed became impossible, and the flaws I saw in myself were becoming difficult to conceal. As I failed, and each day felt myself failing a little more… the stress was building and being sustained. I have since come to learn that for me, stress, be it from an external or internal stressor, can leave the door open for depression.

Stress was to become another component of depression that I had never considered before. Just beneath the surface I was becoming aware of the link between stress and depression. In this most recent episode of depression I chose to withdraw from work and other responsibilities. It wasn’t that I was working and decided to stop whilst I got better. It was that even though I couldn’t work, mentally I gave myself a hard time about it. When I did choose to take a break and told myself ‘it’s ok, I’m not expecting you to be anywhere or to do anything’ the mental punishment stopped and I could start to concentrate on getting better. It made a huge difference and was key to speeding up my recovery. Doctors will often sign off patients in the midst of a major depression, but it took me a long time to understand how to use that time to get better. I remember previous episodes where being away from work was mental torture, endless feelings of guilt and failure revolving around not being at work. Had I given myself permission to be away, as my GP had done, I suspect I would have healed much sooner. Instead I was generating and sustaining a stress response that made it impossible for my health to improve.

I realised that if I could manage stress more effectively, I could also manage and maybe even avert future episodes of depression. Clearly, the way I lived my life was not the only way to live. This is a big planet, and there are many ways to live out our time on it. It is easy to get caught up with the way people do things on our little square of the Earth and think that that is how life is to be lived, but that just isn’t so. The big decisions I had made like leaving my career in education, I didn’t realise until later, had been attempts to control and manage stress in my life. I started to look deep into myself and figure out my own values, because I was realising that the bit of the world I occupied was full of stress and played to the drives and dissatisfactions of the old brain. Fine if you are not me with my baggage, but not fine for me.

In fact, I started to realise that internal and external stressors were two separate components that could contribute to depression. It isn’t like this all over the planet, but certainly in my part of the world people are encouraged to be driven by a few things. There is the God drive to work, the belief that God wants us to work, work hard and frowns upon idleness (which is anything that isn’t working). That somehow working is bound to our morals. There is the illusion that employers everywhere use to make employees feel like they belong and that company values have brought meaning and purpose to their lives. That we are taking part in some bigger project for the good of humanity. That we should be passionate about our work. There is the drive to avoid going hungry, and more commonly there is the drive to just buy more stuff. I’m not even sure it’s about owning any of it anymore… it is more about the buying. I think many of us recognise this world, and it is a relentless and persuasive world. If I am to make decisions for the good of my health, I had better learn how to tell myself I don’t really need that second TV. Managing stress would involve more than just managing my self critical thinking: it would involve keeping this world at arms length and inviting it in on my own terms.

Suddenly, I was starting to realise why some people turned to meditation and other such devices to control their relationship with the wider world and its stresses.

Through a fellow blogger, I became interested in a study carried out by Professor Robert Sapolsky on the subject of stress. For more than 30 years he visited a group of baboons and studied them, using extracted blood samples to investigate their individual levels of stress. Baboons organise themselves into hierarchical troops and his study of these baboons showed that the higher your position in the troop, the lower your levels of stress. Another quite separate study looked at stress levels in another hierarchical system, the British Civil Service. It came to the same conclusions. So for whatever reason, those at the top of the hierarchy experienced lower levels of stress.

Now, if you take your average person off the street and suddenly tell them they are in charge, I imagine there will be some that leap at the chance, and there will be some that freeze with panic… in other words experience a stress response at the very thought. The difference, I think, would be in people’s attitudes. It isn’t that you are at the top and therefore feel less stressed. It is because you feel you are at the top and so feel less stressed. Alicia tells me she read an interview with comedian Eddie Izzard recently and the story fits here so I’ll tell it. Eddie is often asked what it is like to be a transvestite and how other people react. I gather he finds this line of questioning a little bit dull, but anyway he plays along and says that well, if you walk into a room dressed as a woman and say ‘can I have a cup of tea please’ they’ll think, right, well, he wants a cup of tea… let’s get him a cup of tea then. If instead I walk in dressed as a woman feeling a little bit sheepish and standing there not know what to say or do, they will look and think ‘oh my God he is dressed as a woman, what should we do, where should we look?’ The point he makes to the interviewer is it is all about being comfortable with yourself, and others will feel comfortable around you.

Hearing about the studies of hierarchical social groups and about Alicia’s Eddie Izzard anecdote reminded me about a little trick I had back at school. When I had some engagement to attend that made me nervous and anxious, I would pretend to myself, say to myself before I walked through the door ‘you are the President of the United States of America’, and with that thought I would enter the room confident and at ease with myself. Attitude is an amazing thing. A little world for the way we interact with the world.

Lately I’ve been trying to start the day a little bit differently. It is the reason I can’t really blog in the morning. I wake up and take myself somewhere relatively calm, and then I meditate. I use the word loosely. I have no training in meditation and I’m not trying to achieve anything with religious motives. But I’ve read about a few techniques and I’ve found them easy to put into practice. One such technique involves just closing my eyes, and concentrating on the feeling of the air moving in and out through my nostrils as I breathe naturally. What happens at first is it gets quite noisy in my head… thoughts start crashing about. I read that this is to be expected, that our minds are ordinarily so busy that when we stop and focus the first thing we become aware of is all their activity.

After a little while my mind quietens and then it seems sort of blank, a blank page that I can write on. Through CBT I learnt to manage negative thoughts, but what I would rather do is not have negative thoughts in the first place. ‘You can change your rules for living’ - that is what Judy said. So with a quietened mind I start to think all sorts of positive things about me. I tell myself about all my good qualities… I am whispering to the middle brain and I feel it starts to flush with a powerful, soothing feeling. I tell myself ‘you are the boss’ and what I mean is that I am indeed the boss of my own life. It is as though I have come full circle from those youthful days reading Nausea and realising that our purpose in life is not predestined, and the greatest secret and biggest fear is that actually we have choice, freedom… to decide our life’s purpose for ourselves. I tell myself, in this calm meditative state, that I am the boss of my life and then rest there, enjoying the feeling of a smile upon my cheeks.

When I start the day like this, devoting around 15 minutes or so to this small mediation… the rest of the day runs differently, by new rules. I no longer become anxious about what others think, or panic about making it to some place on time, or wonder if I should be doing something else. Instead, I feel an entirely different attitude washing through me. I will get there when I get there. I’ll communicate the situation and they can take it or leave it. I’ll get finished when I get finished, it will take as long as it has too. I decide what I do, and when I do it, it is without the old feelings of pressure, responsibility and guilt. It isn’t that I don’t act responsibly; it is that I do what I do because I want to and choose to, rather than because of the old feelings of I have to. More crucially, Alicia has commented on how much calmer and better I seem, and I feel it too. With a different attitude, what Judy called ‘rules for living’, I am able to operate without the old internal stresses.

I punctuate and reset each morning with a moment of meditation and a shift in attitude, to keep me on the straight and narrow. I aim to travel each day being at ease with myself, being at one with my circumstances, being distant from modern world stresses and being as much in the moment as I can be. Now… I can live this life, or I can keep writing about it. But I can’t do both at the same time. Thank you for reading.

It's All About You

The support I've gained from others through writing this blog is greater than anything I could have hoped for. I am a great believer in drawing on others to get through depression, and doing all one can to resist the drive to withdraw. I am always blown away by the trouble people take to reach out and be kind to me. To those of you who have been checking in with me from time to time... thank you so much for making me feel like you cared and for showing me such warmth. To those of you who took the time to join me and read the story... thank you for taking the trouble to try and understand. To those of you that shared your stories with me, as I have done with you.... thank you for making me feel like I belong. For those of you that pointed me to new mines of knowledge and understanding, thank you for handing me the torch to shine more light on this depression and this life.

I am fortunate to have watched the following You Tube film, which has a running time of about an hour and features Robert Sapolsky giving a lecture on the subject of depression at Stanford Universtity: Stanford's Sapolsky on Depression in the US (Full Lecture). I can do nothing less than share it with you too. I am indebted to Running Circles for introducing me to this film. A link to the film will remain on the Everything I Know (Almost) page.

As for the future of this blog... I'm uncertain at this time. Stay safe and be together in your struggles.

Yours, Med.

Fighting Talk

When the fog of depression clears, getting back to normal becomes its own challenge. Here is what I would like to be able to do now that I’m feeling quite a bit better: I’d like to be able to answer a telephone; to go back to work; and to answer the door when it knocks unexpectedly. I’d like to be able to have a conversation with Alicia about work without scurrying from the room or reaching for my cigarettes.

What is slowing me up is fear, and not even real world fear, this is just imagined fear that my brain is responding to with a quickened heart beat and a petrified body. I read in an article that the area of the brain responsible for memory may not in fact be designed for this sole purpose. The images we are capable of forming need not be memories… as we know. We are capable too of imagining futures and alternatives and possibilities that do not yet exist. In doing so humans are able to consider difficulties before they arise and plan before acting; a characteristic that has certainly helped with our survival for many thousands of years.

But for each evolutionary advantage, there is typically a draw back, and in this case my imagination is able to create all sorts of negative futures, triggered in response to simple things such as a ringing telephone. In an instant the ring of the telephone sets of a response in my brain that leads to an immediate physical change.

So what am I actually afraid of? Well, I’m afraid that when I arrive I’ll be judged – that people might be confrontational… that there might be someone with an axe to grind on the end of the phone… or that the knock at the door is somebody that ominously wants a ‘word’ with me. How likely are these events… well… not very. They are more than just imagined, they are fantastical!

My GP had an interesting take on fear. When I put it to him that I had to overcome my fear to get back to normal… he challenged me. “Overcome” he said, leaning back into his chair and clasping his hands together. “I’m not sure it is a case of overcoming it. When a soldier is trained in the army to brush his teeth, stand up straight and follow other such orders on command, it because one day the command will come to go over the top and run in the direction that the bullets are coming from. Anyone would have to be a fool not to be fearful in that situation. But the soldier must do it, despite his fear. And that is what his training has been about; teaching him to act despite his fear.” I must have one of the deepest, most reflective GP’s of anyone!

What boxing trainer Cus D'Amato taught Michael Gerard Tyson was the psychology of fighting:

“Cus would watched me … he didn't let me box he would just talk to me for two or three weeks about fighting and then the psychology of fighting, and what fighting was truly about. Fighting was nothing physical, it was all spiritual and he would say if you don't have the spiritual, spiritual warrior in you then you'll never be a good fighter, I don't care how big and strong you are. He explained that to me.”

                                                                        Mike Tyson, Tyson (the movie), 2008

This led to the incredible, unflinching stare that Tyson gave his opponents as he stood in the ring before a fight. He would walk around the ring but never take his eyes off his opponent. And the moment his opponent broke that eye contact, the fight was over, before even the first punch had been thrown.

So… I figure the longer I wait for fear to be ‘overcome’ somehow, the more the fear grows. I’m not going to overcome it; I’m just going to face it instead. After all, it’s just a ringing phone, right?

Forked Path

Several consecutive posts now have charted a steady return to good health. But what does good health actually feel like? I’m wondering if what we imagine as good health, and the reality, actually marry up. I’ve talked before about how we human beings are hard wired for discontentment, how we are striving creatures designed for a harsher world than the one we have created. So as my mood improves and my daily list of engagements starts to look like a fairly regular day, what am I expecting to feel like before I throw off the hospital gown and jump up from my bed shouting “I’m cured!”?

Where does depression end and the human condition begin?

Ups and downs are part of life. I’m not comparing the depths of depression to this ebbing and flowing of mood, but there does come a time when I need to distinguish between the two for myself and say “this is just normal”. Being human isn’t easy, that much is clear. I’ve read and talked about the difficulties that arise from have a ‘new’ brain and ‘old’ brain working alongside each other, how this predicament is fairly unique to humans, and how the old brain instincts and drives find their way into the construction of our societies.

The more I learn about the human brain, its evolution and design, the possibilities it creates and the difficulties it throws up, the more I want to understand. The more I am able to contextualise and understand my behaviours, feelings, drives, the more I am able to choose to go with them, or reject them. This is, I guess, in the absence of scientific knowledge, what our existentialist forefathers were trying to understand. Philosophy, it would appear, is the forerunner for science and it is the destiny of philosophy to be usurped by science. ‘Science’ is a word that generates a reaction in others… as it does in me. I certainly used to think of it as separate to spirituality. I thought science is how we make sense of the ‘hard’ stuff and spirituality is our way of making sense of all the ‘squishy’ stuff that is left over. But the books of science are far from complete, and maybe it is the fault of our education that we see science now as static. Maybe this is why people feel the need to choose between science and spirituality. ‘Knowledge’ is a very concrete word isn’t it, and people feel a bit silly challenging that, or thinking that it might be incomplete. But it is, and that is a good thing.

So, either I am better, or none of us are well. Whichever it is, the world as I see it now presents me with two options. Well, these are the only two options that are visible right now. Maybe you can see others. I can quieten my ‘new’ brain thinking by getting my head down and living a simple life driven by ‘old’ brain animal thinking. Such a life would be close to nature, involve the satisfaction that comes from simpler pleasures, such as surviving, mealtimes and sex to name a few. Such a life would arguably be easier to lead in another country, a less modern country, where living in this way would be in the flow of things. Here, to live like this, would be to swim against the tide. It is easy to understand why some communities feel the need to isolate themselves from the modern world in order to protect their values.

Alternatively, I can accept the tensions that exist, continue to understand them better and use my understanding to steer a path in this life, knowing that I will meet resistance and distraction along the way. Such a life will have me making decisions and life choices that others don’t understand and might even frown upon. It would take integrity and strength to follow such a path, and is made easier when travelled with others.

An option that isn’t open to me is to rejoin the so called ‘rat race’. It is a path that I have tried for a long time and my own personal flaws lead me to self destruct when I travel that way. I’m also not prepared to be a member of the medicated masses, tranquilised into getting by – that is no way to live. So I think I am standing at fork in the road, an interesting place to be, and looking down each path wondering about which one to take…

Battle Ships

I have had the most wonderful weekend and wake up this morning happy. The secret: simple things… hearty laughter, good food and plenty of it… all amongst people I love.

C wrote once in a gift to Alicia, ‘friends are the family you choose’. I keep coming back to that saying… over and over… it printed itself on my heart from the day I read it; I find there is great healing power in spending time with the people who make up our family of choice, and this weekend was no exception. My cousin is one such friend; family not by accident but because we choose him. It is good to be around him. Together we are reckless and mischievous. These are welcome youthful qualities for my 37 year old frame. Xavier is a willing partner and forms the third member of our trio. Alicia and my cousin’s fiancée fan the flames with their disapproving smiles.

The five of us took to the paddle boats on the Serpentine; Xavier, complete with lifejacket, at the helm calling for us to go faster. It is hard work on the thighs, but the best kind of exercise… being encouraged on by a three year old. How the memory plays out in my mind is surely different to how others will have experienced it, but I’m not going to let little factual inconsistencies get in the way of my story.

The Serpentine was busy with rowing boats and paddle boats, and we sought out the ‘couplings’, newly formed young couples on an early-ish date. I don’t think it was long before others figured out what we were up to and started to avoid us, but we did managed to throw one man from his seat as we collided, feigning an accident and making profuse apologies. Xavier’s newly purchased bow and arrow brought an equal measure of entertainment, satisfying the hunter instincts in us and nurturing them in him.

My cousin is, like me and others, shaped by his childhood. I wouldn’t volunteer to exchange places with him, he’s had it harder than me. For all his love and sensitivity, he is also a harsh critic and ‘grumpy old men’ conversations flow easily between the two of us. But it doesn’t go unnoticed that this criticism never, ever, extends to me. He treasures me, and shows me endless wells of kindness. I suppose that is why I relax around him, and my ‘self’ rises to the surface.

Being ourselves sounds like it should be the state that requires the least effort, a default position. But in truth, it is easy only when I arrive there, and to get there I have to resist working so hard to conceal my vulnerabilities. In an animal way, happiness comes from being flawed amongst others, and still feeling safe. So I surround myself with people I love, with people who are not afraid to be vulnerable too, and together we have the time of our lives.

Untitled

Here is the thing… I’m getting better and working really hard at getting better. I’ve become quite good at recognising negative automatic thoughts and dispatching them in all the different ways that CBT encourages. It takes effort, like most things, and it is tiring doing it all day and I even get fed up with it sometimes. But I do it all the same because it helps and I understand why it helps.

Our clever and evolved ‘new’ brains are as capable of being a negative and self critical, as they are of being creative and rational. My negative automatic thoughts are busy popping into my head all the time, not helpful but understandable given childhood experiences. At times of depression they intensify and I am more receptive to them. My negative thoughts about what will happen next, about what other people might be thinking or other such unknowns become the focus of my amygdala, my brain’s threat centre… capable of helping me to react quickly to real world threats in order to stay alive. Unfortunately, also capable of making me react in direct and powerful ways to imagined threats that I have invented through my twisted negative logic. And so as fear starts to become the overriding emotion, my day to day life becomes increasingly shaped by it and I retract from doing things and react to them impulsively as threats.

We are animals, with animal drives and wants and feelings, and we are human beings with powerful centres of memory, rational and creativity… all at once. And having a foot in each world leaves us open to all sorts of problems that arise from the way old and new brains interact with each other. 

So yesterday I met with Judy to talk about and confront what I hope will be the final hiding place of depression. Cast aside any image of me bravely sitting opposite Judy chatting away… as the word ‘confront’ suggests. I sat almost side on to her, I could barely make eye contact, my discomfort fidgeted me and I shuffled around in the chair and clasped, and re-clasped my hands. I was filled with a feeling of embarrassment, and I felt pathetic. Feelings just are, and they can’t be helped, and that’s how I felt.

It might seem difficult to see how I could overcome such feelings to talk to Judy, but that is the power of human kindness, and Judy is kind. With the addition of her kindness, the need for my courage lessened. So we talked and it turns out that there is a Psychology Part 3 to add to the Part 1 and 2 that I already knew about; triggers and a range of negative thoughts that I hadn’t considered until now. I went to Judy because, with all the work I was doing to manage my thoughts, I had become more aware… and came across something I didn’t know how to deal with.

We filled in a thought record sheet together and I was a difficult 3 o’clock appointment, finding it hard to identify the thoughts that gave rise to the feelings of embarrassment and feeling crushed. The feelings were intense… I rated them at 100%... so it is no wonder that I was finding it so hard. Again it is a feature of old and new brain integration. People who are threatened by lions don’t sit around philosophising, the new brain, with its sophisticated thinking, is suppressed and we are instead animal… ready to react quickly. I was having difficulty putting my finger on the negative automatic thoughts for the same reason. But I can wait for those feelings to subside and then put into practice the heavy lifting I’ve become accustomed to. And hope this awareness makes it easier with time to rationalise those unhelpful thoughts at the moment they arise. It will, but I’d forgotten how difficult it can be.

Pack Mentality

This morning the first words I heard were Alicia saying in a sleepy tone “look at Charlie, she’s wearing my top.” I was about to put this bizarre statement down to a bit of sleep talk, when I looked up and there was Charlie, strolling up the bed towards me, wearing a blue and white stripy T-shirt. “When did you do that to her?” I asked in confusion. It was early and Alicia isn’t the sort to wake up early to execute a practical joke. “I didn’t” came the drowsy reply, “she did it herself.” This is Charlie in a nutshell.

Our Bichon Frises are the embodiment of unconditional love, and it is good to feel part of the pack. I admit, they sleep on the bed with us every night. Molly is around five years old now, whilst Charlie was the only female from her first litter, now around nine months old. I didn’t grow up with dogs, or pets for that matter. It was the combination of my parents' religious beliefs, although I wonder how much of that is cultural and how much of it is spiritual teaching, and the fact that they grew up in Port Louis, Mauritius… where the dogs that wandered the city lived on the streets, as did other domestic animals.

Shortly after dispensing with the T-shirt, Charlie wrapped herself around my head, against my pillow and her soft smooth tummy could be felt against my skin.  A big white, curly, fluffy, cuddly, canine hat. Every night when I get into bed, Molly jumps on with me and nestles herself in close; little spoon to my big spoon. She stays there, usually for around 10 minutes until it gets a bit to warm for her, and then slinks off to the bottom of the bed for a change of temperature. She’d turn the pillows over to the cold side if she could. Right now, as I write, she is sleeping beside me. Pack love.

It is a feature of our ‘old’ brains that we experience positive feelings when we have a sense of connectedness to friends and family, when we have some sort of status within the tribe… not necessarily the leader… just not the most inferior member. I’m fortunate to have my pack, and we all gain a lot from belonging to each other.

Establishing the pack feeling amongst fellow human beings has always been much trickier, and for much of life I’ve felt like an outsider. To conceal this from others I’ve adapted many times over… trying to find comfort from an accepting tribe and never really feeling like I have succeeded. The approval junky in me finds that hard to take, and it probably explains why I sought to become a valuable working member of my tribe, given that it was so hard to be a valued social member. Of course, this entire picture is muddled and confused by negative feelings and self critical thoughts. What is clear though is that I want to feel ok in my own skin, not care so much about what others think of me, and not have my day to day behaviour steered by an uncontrollable drive to belong. The control such things have over my mood is overwhelming.

I’ve asked Judy of I can see her again a little earlier than planned. We’ve arranged to meet today at 3pm. I want to talk to her about how I can break with my approval junky habits. She helped me come off perfectionism, so I’ve turned to her again. I’m hopeful.

Dodging

This morning I woke up not feeling so great. I got out of bed to find that I was still fully clothed from the day before. I came down stairs, checked my e-mail and felt myself sinking a little further.

Alicia is a childminder amongst other things and so from time to time the house is filled from the early hours with little voices. I am ‘silly’ at heart so we all get on just fine. I like our conversations amongst the bustle of breakfast. One of this morning’s exchanges went something like this: “Please can we play with the robots?” “Sure”, I say, “but the parts are scattered here and there (pointing to the car basket, the multi-story garage and the robot box) the robot pants are in here.” “Smelly pants.” “Noooo, not smelly pant” I say, “everybody knows that robot pants don’t make smells”. The silly conversations come easy… and we all laugh.

I stepped outside for a cigarette, trying to feel what shape my day might take. It occurred to me that I should do something to change out of this slow gear. I could take the dogs for an early walk… but the motivation isn’t there and with little effort I convince myself I don’t have it in me. I’m tired, unnaturally tired.

My writing is postponed for a moment whilst a wand wielding fairy turns me into a frog. When the fairy leaves the room, my writing resumes.

This writing helps me to reflect with objectivity; I am getting better. Much better. The faulty morning is put into perspective. It doesn’t reflect the general run of things. Yesterday I cleaned for the first time in a long time. I am one of those people who enjoys cleaning, I like making things shiny. Alicia and I took on the lounge together and now it is a beautiful and peaceful space. I spent the afternoon in the back ‘garden’, I use this term loosely, clearing away months of unwanted growth.

There are many ways to measure how long someone has been down with a depressive episode. Just look at the height of the weeds in their garden, or the size of the laundry pile, or the stack of unwashed plates by the sink, or the number of unopened letters by the front door. Fortunately for me, Alicia has kept our household running as best she can and we don’t have so far to travel to get things back to the way they were; the exception being the ‘garden’. I must really find another word to describe the outdoor space at the back of our house. Garden, to my mind, conjures up all sorts of lovely images. I would sit and play in a garden, and would admire a garden. We have a small area of land covered in a mix of gravel, weeds, and concrete slabs, minus any kind of perimeter since I took the trees down last summer. I have plans to turn it into a couple of raised beds for vegetables, little pea shingle paths, a chicken house and run, and somewhere to sit and eat. It will take some doing to bring the transformation about. In the mean time, nature has been undoing the work of last summer and yesterdays pursuits were strangely familiar. The set back of depression has given everything a generous head start on me.

So when I sat down to write this morning there was something I thought I would get to. Something that I was going to confront. Muhammad Ali tells me that we don’t get far unless we stop dodging our fears. But I’ve talked about the garden and the general run of things and the thought of writing about anything else, it, is making an uncomfortable void inside my chest. Today is not the day. I’ll deal with that another day maybe.

Small Change

How’s business? That is what everyone kept asking when I started out as a handyman. Starting my own business was exciting… and I took pleasure in it. Before long I had a little van, a local advert, a logo on my polo shirt and an answer phone full of customers.

I started the business on recovering from the second major depressive episode. Our life was changing because we designed a change. Judy had done me much good, and I was starting to enjoy perfectionism now rather than being held hostage by it. People had come into focus, and everything else was receding into the background; a natural order was forming. Work brought me happiness: I saw the stress lift from customers when I did the jobs they couldn’t do for themselves. Relationships with my family were the best they had ever been in my adult life. My relationship with Alicia was enriched by a deepened understanding of each other. Xavier was seeing more of me than ever. I had broken with a well paid job in education, during the onset of a recession, and we accepted that an uncertain future was better than the course I’d been following. The changes we made threatened our way of life as we knew it… right down to our little house… but we talked about everything and made decisions together. It was a risk and it took courage to break with the entrapments of a ‘normal’ life. We didn’t have all the answers but we did the best we could. Our motto, us against the world, would once again be tested, just as it had been when we first started seeing each other. We were preparing to break with a life in which we willingly gave up our time together in exchange for money. We were getting our heads around ideas of ‘what we wanted from life’ over ‘what we wanted to buy’.

These are risks that my parents found difficult to get their heads around. They appeared to see the world in terms of security and stability. They wanted Xavier to have a certain and determined future. In their own way I suppose they thought this was the path to happiness.

On reflection, it was some time before we had a clearer idea of how we would make ends meet. I was keeping the books, reluctantly, and a pattern was emerging. Business was growing but each month our income fell a long way short… we were biting deeper into the overdraft just to pay bills and I could see there were going to be problems ahead. The problems stemmed from our old debts, serviceable (ish) in my old job but now back breaking for our new business.

My good friend (and brother to me) helped me to put a figure on the problem; something that would mean confronting our finances and my own judgements about failing. To be in debt was one thing. To admit and share this fact was another… to put a figure on it was, well, painful. But the harsh critic in me had every opportunity to thrive in these circumstances and it took some rationalising. I needed to remind myself that ill health with depression had driven us further into debt as we used credit cards to put food in our mouths and pay utility bills. It was all we knew how to do at the time.

So my friend helped me face the problem and put us in touch with the Consumer Credit Counselling Service. With his encouragement we took steps to put a plan in place before things got desperate, approaching our creditors early and agreeing payment plans within our tiny budget. We had a modest, but beautiful, marriage planned for the spring and he wanted us to start our married life together free of this worry. What he did for us, and how great a person he is, I will never find words for.

So the wind was turning in our favour. In the background however, old habits were surfacing and the business mentality was beginning to corrupt the dream we had for ourselves. The handyman business was there to help us get by; it was never intended to be the focus of life or the subject of grand expansion plans. I enjoyed the work… it was a place where people appreciated my perfectionist tendencies and where I could take pride in what I could achieve. My perfectionism had found a home and elsewhere my expectations were starting to ease up.

But vanity and drive were influencing me again. ‘How is business going?’… Well, the measure of a business is conventionally the size of its profits isn’t it? ‘Are you going to expand, I can see you with a fleet of vans in the future?’ ‘Where is your website? Get to work on it and get yourself out there.’ All these words of encouragement would start to awaken the approval junky in me, and set me to work on new and bigger projects. Jobs became pressured as customers were booked back to back. Smaller jobs were squeezed into evenings and weekends. The spaces that remained were filled further with quotes, invoicing, book work, advertising and research. Over the quiet week after Christmas I set about learning how to create a website for the business from scratch. Taking care of the site and propelling it up to the number one spot in Google searches would become another time consuming and obsessive quest, involving a steep learning curve.

The business model that pervaded my years in education, and that I had escaped from, had started to drive my daily life again. My drive came from a mechanistic will to be more efficient, productive and profitable. I didn’t need to be any of these things. None of these things were in my heart. I didn’t set out to be any of these things. I set out to earn a modest sum that would cover the bills and give our family time together. I set out to run a small business that wouldn’t grow and demand more of me. But I created a business where I had enough work for a small army of handymen… even though there was just me to respond to this demand.

An old brain hard wired to be a ‘wanter’ and ‘seeker’ (Paul Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind), my approval junky tendencies and a society built on a business model of efficiency over welfare (Madeline Bunting, Willing Slaves) had combined to draw me away from the healthy life we had designed for our family. The resulting poor choices would lead me back to old habits, abandoning activities that brought me happiness (like making pancakes for my family each Sunday morning or walks in the woods), obsessing over margins, driving myself too hard mental and physically. Without realising it, I had changed course and was steering myself towards another depressive episode, creating the conditions for it to thrive again.

So again, I learn something from the journey. And now Alicia and I are figuring out how we can set sail again and stay true to our life’s course. It isn’t as easy as pointing ourselves in the right direction and pushing off. It is clear that holding a true course is not inevitable. It is why, I suspect, so many religions are punctuated with daily ritual, because it is recognised that following our life’s path is not necessarily in the flow of the world.

Lessons

On paper, Monday would look decidedly average. But I hate looking at things on paper. A head teacher once said to me, ‘on paper, you’ve only been teaching for two years.’ It was a strategic thing to say, said by someone who wanted a bargain. I was far from average even as a trainee teacher, I loved what I did and my educational career speaks for itself.

Back then, I just worked the classroom and everyday was an exciting adventure, learning and teaching at once. When ambitious bosses saw opportunity in me they appealed to my vanity and in no time I was picking up more and more responsibility… in education that is the word use to describe things that take us away from the children! Leaving the classroom in those early days was a mistake. Not because it was too soon or any such thing, and not because I miss it now and want to go back, although it was a great time. No, the regret is a good regret, one I can learn from.

Taking on extra responsibility was a mistake because I was led by vanity into making choices that weren’t right for me. What I did for vanity! Appealing to my vanity dealt to the approval junky in me.  I remember a colleague meeting me for lunch and saying ‘well Med, what is the plan… you aren’t going to do this for the rest of your life are you?’ I remember being taken aback by the question but people always seemed to see a future for me that I didn’t see for myself. In their view it was a better future... they saw wasted potential, opportunity and prosperity ahead for me. I’m someone who was fortunate enough to be told by many, excepting my mother, that I can do in life whatever I want. It sounds like an ideal and fertile start to life but it was one I would misinterpret.

Working in education is complicated, I guess like working in healthcare or other such services where there is a strong moral component to your work. It is an easy profession to dedicate yourself to; so many good people enter into teaching with a genuine interest in bettering the lot of children and there is never a shortage of things to do that could make a difference. It is a complex relationship that our masters exploit constantly. It is difficult for many to know when it is ok to go back to their own families and pursue their own lives without guilt and fear of judgment. For many, home time comes when they are truly exhausted. It was common place for colleagues to simply sleep and eat between working days, and little else. This psychological play on the part of our English education system squeezes the life from dedicated teachers and unsurprisingly, school holidays provide much needed recovery. Whilst in theory, a model of intense hard graft and longer holidays seems balanced; it is better suited to race horses than human beings.

Pressure has a habit of flowing. In education, London’s Whitehall pressures regions with targets, which in turn tighten the screws on local education authorities with financial incentives and penalties, which in turn pressure head teachers with the same, who come down on their managers and teaching staff with a culture of winners and losers, and inevitably this pressure reaches students and their parents. Yes, we pressured children each and every day to work harder, better and faster. When you say it like that… it starts to reveal how warped our education system is. I was often frustrated by how the day to day humanitarian work of schools was overshadowed by the will to just get children quiet and back in the classroom again.

Never in my training or my career as a teacher was I ever encouraged to convey the message that what children produced in work was good enough. Sure, we would praise… but it was a sweetener to sugar coat the message about improvements. Schooling was and is about constant and relentless improvement in this county. Targets are generated like sales targets in the boardroom, the graph steadily climbing upwards. But we were not salesmen and there is no big marketing campaign. The children that come through our schools in any one year are varied and unique, but on the whole one year is much the same as the next in terms of the variety and challenges it presents. But somehow, each year… learning was to happen better, faster and more efficiently. At every layer…. from impressionable children to tired adults, we were and still are training and nurturing discontentment.

Whether others work in education or not, if they live in the ‘developed world’ I suspect they will recognise this life too.

But reading Professor Paul Gilbert’s Compassionate Mind I know too that in all likelihood our ‘old’ brains have evolved for a tougher world of scarcity rather than abundance and we are hard wired to be ‘seekers’ and ‘wanters’, always preparing for a hard winter. We are discontent by design.

In life I realise now that I passed through happiness on the way to somewhere else. I didn’t stop because like everybody else, I wasn’t satisfied. I added complexity and stuff to my life to better it, thinking that this is what ‘being the best I could be’ looked like. Since then I have found new and greater joy in Alicia and Xavier. There it is again, a liquid silver lining that brought them to me.

It is time to stop writing now. But I remember why I left a career working in schools, the choices and freedoms I was exercising and why I started my own business as a handyman. I can see again where I went wrong and what caused this most recent episode of depression. The penny has dropped and tomorrow I shall write about it. I have always liked learning, even when it comes from mistakes as it so often does.

Liquid Silver

It is difficult to be completely at odds with depression. The stops and starts it introduces to life’s journey can make me impatient and at times the entire journey appears to be derailed. Any commuter would get frustrated with that kind of disrupted schedule. But with each flicker of depression I have learnt something new and the journey, by consequence, becomes richer and deeper.

Alicia is a big protagonist of clouds with silver linings, and depression does not escape this outlook. When we fell in love, we loved as we thought everyone should. We abandoned life as others would have us live it, and stole from time to be together. Last trains to London, late starts, and early finishes… breakfasts rolled into lunches into dinners. It is how we loved and how we wanted to live. We held out longer than most, but eventually life would catch up with us, and do its best to shoehorn love into the twilight hours and weekends. Personality glitches would submerge me in work once again. Weekends and evenings would shrink, eventually becoming cancelled with such frequency that the announcements lost all notion of unpredictability.

I can recall with each depression the quest and hunger. It comes as the depression lifts as though a famine fading and a mechanism inside me drives for some kind of understanding and change. I have been someone once, who brushed depression aside, put it down as an anomaly and side-stepped any internal discomfort in a rush to get back to normality. What I felt normality held for me, I don’t know… but I rushed back like a wounded animal looking to conceal itself deep inside the moving herd. After many more wounds… I would return to the herd with less vigour and more scepticism about its ability to protect me from further attack. More and more I find myself at its edges looking at it and trying to understand it as something separate to me. More and more I see myself as something separate to it.

For a long time I have been someone who is aware of their choices in life. I make up my mind and I change it… it is plastic, and there is in those choices an exercising of freedom. I’m not indecisive unless numbed by depression. I have changed careers like other people change cars, resisted the trappings of a life’s magazines and sought out love, above everything. When a fire took from me a friend and everything I owned… I wasn’t ready to start just replacing it all. But life doesn’t let anyone off the hook that easily. The wiring in my brain, and may be the human brain, isn’t altogether ready for a life of contentment… and the world I live in plays to that fact. So every now and again I take a sucker punch and more recently those punches have had me down on the mat. I get up… and I learn a little about where I got caught out. How I was seduced or distracted by this and that, or how I neglected love. And I start again from a new position… not trying to figure out how to enjoy my time in the ring, but trying instead to get out of the ring altogether. To chase my own dreams. To keep my dreams my own. My Alicia, my Xavier, our life together.

Yesterday we stole time… and lived as we wanted to. A simple life, in each others company, with pennies in our pockets and smiles in our hearts…. And yes…. I have been taking my medication.

Inside Out, Outside In

I wish for two alternative worlds … one where I can either shake off this feeling of perpetual tiredness or one where I could stop wishing altogether. It does my morale no good feeling this way. I am a burden. I don’t think that is warped negative thinking. I just am. Alicia is bound to me by love and it must be a prison for her, constantly making up the ground that I am losing and being, in effect, a single parent to Xavier. How can anyone live with doing that to another person? But I do live, I hang about - linger, contributing nothing and draining the love and energy from the people I care about. And that is my punishment for being such a complete failure… seeing the people I love suffering because of my failings.

So that is it; that is what’s in my head. It takes no effort at all to prise the lid off those thoughts and let them loose on the page. So, time for some heavy lifting. What am I really guilty of? I’m glancing down my handout of ‘ten common thinking errors’ and I’m looking to identify which I’m plagued by in this instance. I don’t know how I’ll feel having rationalised it in this way… I don’t know if it will help. But I’ll give anything a try.

All or nothing thinking

I’m definitely seeing everything in terms of being good or bad with no middle ground or grey area.

Discounting the positive

Probably worse still, I’m having trouble seeing any of the positive… it is being filtered out leaving me with just the negative. My Alicia and my friends (new and old) are always trying to tell me that I’m doing well and that I should take stock of how far I’ve come. Walk before I run. But inside I know I tell myself they are being kind, saying kind things to help me get better and that I could be doing a lot better. That is how difficult it is to get through to me!

Jumping to conclusions

Alicia has done and said nothing to suggest that I am a burden to her. I extrapolate that from seeing how busy she is and how readily she sleeps at the end of the day. In fact Alicia gets positively annoyed with me when I suggest that I’m more trouble than I’m worth. For one, it is wearing to hear people talk in such a way but secondly she knows, and I know, that if positions were reversed I would do the same for my Alicia.

Minimising and magnifying

I’m exaggerating the importance of my negative thinking to the point that I’m reasoning my way into a justification for Alicia being better off without me.

Emotional reasoning

Because I am weakened, because it is taking time to get better, because getting better involves steps forwards and backwards, I see myself has failing even though others would not.

Ok… enough with the list of thinking errors. I have enough to work with here. I have in effect said to myself what others might say to me. But I haven’t troubled them… instead I have done it for myself and that must be a good thing. And it has helped.

Time to search the internet for clips of and an ankylosaurus, Xavier's new obsession. He’s sat beside me now as though queuing to use the lap top. We love ankylosaurs.

Burning Bridges

I did manage to get out of the house to go and do an estimate this evening. But when I got there no one was home, so I dropped by my Father’s, given that he was nearby. He asked how I was and we got talking. I don’t know if he was expecting me to say that ‘I’m better now, thanks for asking’, but I’m not… I’m getting there.

My father is a Muslim, he believes in Allah. He’s worried that I’m putting my faith in a therapist, a fallible human being, and I think he would rather see me put my faith in God. ‘You’re thinking too much’ he said, ‘just say Bismillah’, meaning ‘in the name of Allah’. It’s a contraction of the Arabic phrase Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim meaning ‘In the name of Allah, most gracious, most compassionate". Muslims say this phrase when embarking on any significant endeavour and the English translation does it no justice. To return it back to its poetic origins, a fairer translation might be to say ‘With every breath that we breathe, may we be act on behalf of the Divine Presence, the Source of all that we receive’.

Faith, for me is a leap into the dark with the belief that God is there waiting to catch you. I don’t have that kind of faith. I don’t follow my father’s God. As much as my parents have done their best to bring me up as a Muslim, all I’ve gained from it is the ability to speak words in a foreign language without knowledge of their meaning. I am separated from them both by language and religion. What I gained from my parents in terms of moral guidance, I gained because of who they are and because they are good people. I think they’d have passed that on regardless of the religion they were born into.

There is an Indian Ocean between my experiences of depression and my parents’ understanding of it. In a way I have helped to create it by concealing my depression from them. I know I’m hungry for a world with more understanding… but I think I recognise that will take time; I don’t expect it of my parents. All I ask of them is kindness. Kind words and acts are great healers; I think we’ve all felt their power.

My father’s perspective is that I never had to be conscious of how to walk in order to walk, and in the same way I don’t need to be conscious of how I think and feel. He believes that by placing a spotlight on the processes that bring about thoughts and feelings I’m creating rather than curing the problem. I’m guessing that if he knew and understood the phrase ‘navel gazing’, it would have been levelled at me by now. Whether he realises it or not, he’s challenging my learning from therapy, and suggesting I substitute it with faith.

By contrast, I don’t see myself as able to walk effortlessly: I’ve suffered a crash and I’m learning to walk again… it takes effort. I haven’t faith in my therapist, it is not belief I have in her. I’ve worked with Judy before, she helped, I’m working with her again; chances are it will help again. I’ll keep writing… I hope he will read something of what I write; I hope that it will build understanding between us.

I love you dad. x

Discipline

I’ve just sat down with Alicia and we filled out a thought record together… a CBT technique that helps to get things into proportion. My fear has been the dominant emotion and it’s making my choices for me. I’m not going anywhere until I face fear. So I sit down with the form and read the headings in all the little boxes and I feel my forebrain gearing up… relieved to finally have some footing and contribute to this debate that has so far been dominated by my amygdala.

I’ve just glanced down at the dogs stretched out beside me as I write this. They are both curly white Bichons and Charlie is resting her head on Molly’s back. For a moment I am puzzled… Charlie seems tiny and squashed. Then I realize and chuckle to myself. I have muddled what I am seeing… unable to tell where one dog finishes and the other starts. Clarity is restored.

It’s a bit like that sometimes when I have trouble distinguishing between thoughts and feelings and muddle them. I can get things out of proportion.

So here is my thought record sheet. It isn’t pretty… or clever… but it is very practical and helpful, to me at least.

Situation

I’m trying to get to work… in fact just trying to leave the house.

Feelings

I’m dressed for work. I feel an intense fear; I’m glued to the spot.

Unhelpful thoughts / images

What went through my mind was ‘I’ve failed’; ‘I’ve let my customer down’; ‘I haven’t lived up to my word’; ‘I can’t be trusted to do anything’; ‘I can’t even support my family’. These thoughts are me responding to my own negative predictions about the future and I’m mind reading negative thoughts in other people. The effect is that my core beliefs are being activated… my buttons are being pushed and the mean things I’m saying to myself add up to me being worthless.

What’s the worst thing that could happen – other people could judge me negatively and I would have to deal with that. I could live with that.

Facts that support the unhelpful thought

Well, I haven’t been there all week; and I haven’t been there all last week either; I promised I would be there this week.

Facts that provide evidence against the unhelpful thought

I’ve almost finished the job; I’ve done a good job; My customer has been kind and understanding; she said ‘you take as long as you need Med, it’s cool’; she rang mid week to ask me to do some more work.

Alternative, more realistic and balanced perspective

Med is full of hope for getting better and he is up and down, so sometimes he misjudges / overestimates what he can do.  He needs to pace himself; he’s getting better; the job is almost finished; one more week won’t make much difference – it’s not the end of the world.  His health is the most important thing.  Beating himself up this way is overreacting – it’s not that big a deal.

Outcome

I feel hopeful and calmer, the fear is subsiding.  Next time I can avoid making promises, given that I am not that great at judging things at the moment. I could have mentioned how things were going on Wednesday when we spoke on the phone but it’s still not the end of the world.  I won’t set myself up with expectations and then beat myself up when I can’t meet them; I’ll just go with the flow.