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.