October 30, 2012

• CBT (Part 1)

  So this morning was my first in what will be many sessions with my cognitive behavior therapist. I feel like if I write down my experiences in both my personal journal and on my blog, that I can kinda supplement the help I get from my therapy. So this will be part 1 of who knows how many parts of an ongoing journey to therapeutic healing. I will tag a few people who expressed interest in either my journey specifically, or the journey generally. @megabyyte @light_blue_fables and @heytherejoann

  So this morning around 11 I arrived at the facility depsite Frankenstorms best efforts to keep me from my appointment. I was really nervous while in the waiting room after signing in and did my best to pass the time until he came out to get me by reading The Economist. It’s not the best in the world but it was the best of what was available there to read.

  The actual appointment didn’t really delve too deeply into the past or into my dreams or anything like that. Remember this is just the first session and CBT deals with practical approaches to everyday anxieties. So today my doctor and I set out to write down some goals.

  Goal #1. Try to get to a point where I can be alone at night. This is an area we talked about for quite a bit because when I was in the midst of the onset of my Schizophrenia my sleep was terrible. I had to listen to music every night to keep from being utterly overwhelmed by everything that was happening to me. In October of 2007 I lost a night’s sleep….then another night’s sleep…then another and another and the cumulative stress broke me and I had to be hospitalized for the second time. I tried during the next year to live on my own again(I still had my apartment at this time) but every night I would freak out because I was alone. I would do everything I could to try and get to sleep, but only nightmares came. That effort lasted a month in mid 2008. Eventually I knew it was going to lead to a relapse and called my Mother to come pick me up and I’ve been living here ever since. She isn’t going to be around forever and if I am going to have any kind of independence if something happens to her, I need to be able to live on my own. So this is priority number 1 for me.

  Goal #2. Try to get to a point where I can be around dogs and not feel anxious. This is an area that we also talked about quite a bit. After our house was broken into back in 2010, we got a decent sized dog to be a home protector. She was the nicest, most innocent dog ever(and thruthfully was no protecter), but because everyone else worked or was in college, she was my responsibility during the day. I’m am whole-heartedly a cat person and love the low maintanence quality of cats. Innocent or no, Rosie(that was her name) was a 180 and I was worried about her 24/7 non stop. I’m a bit of a worrier and every time she would send any indication that she wanted to go outside I would take her out. Most of the time we just walked around. But the constant worry, boy how it got to me. I started losing sleep(RED FLAG!) and having nightmares about some kind of anti-peta group coming to get her. Losing sleep caused me to eventually start to physically shake with anxiety over whether I was going to relapse or not. My Mom knew that was the signal that we had to give her up. Fast forward to this year and now my brother and sister in law have a dog and I am seriously struggling to enjoy their company because I never see them without their dog around. I refuse to tell them just how much Leanard affects me, though they knew I am in CBT to get help for dealing with him. Again, he is a perfectly nice and innocent dog. Neither Rosie nor Leanard were pitpulls or anything like that. Just medium sized 20-30 lb dogs with a happy demeanor. I have no idea why they trigger me so much but I aim to find out over the next six month to a year.

  Goal #3. Try and get to a point where I can go to my youngest brother’s wedding. I went to my best friend Brad’s wedding in 2010 and seeing all these people from high school(or worse – didn’t know at all) really got to me. I don’t regret going to his wedding at all and one day I intend to meet his wife, but his wedding set the stage for what was to come in 2011. My younger brother’s wedding. Around June or July the anxiety for what was coming with all the relatives(who for some reason are ALL extroverts) and other individuals who would be there just started to affect me to the point where I took my brother to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and afterwards took him to Raising Cane’s where I told him I would be unable to attend his wedding. I told him this in July and his wedding wasn’t until December, that’s how much the anxiety was getting to me. Talking to my doctor at the time about all the symptoms I was feeling and the absolute dread of that wedding was got me diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder. So even though my youngest brother is in college and is nowhere near a marriage-calibur relationship with his current girlfriend, I have set the third goal to be for me to be able to attend his wedding.

  So that is a wrap up of what was discussed today. I appreciate you reading all of this and I’m sure you now know quite a bit about what makes me tick. Yeah, suffice it to say, there’s a lot going on upstairs and not all of it is pretty. I just hope I can remodel a little bit so that it can be livable. And oh, my therapist asked if he could read my journals from 2007. I’ve never let anyone else read any of my journals so that would be a big leap of faith for me. But I think that once he and I have built a rapport that I will give him the journals to read so that he can trace the timetable of the onset of my illness.

  Until next time he asked me to buy a book called ‘The Feeling Good Handbook’ which is a monster 750+ page book. I bought it before logging onto Xanga and put it up at the top of this post. He is going to buy it as well. He told me there would be homework during all this so yeah, got some reading to do!

  Anyone who responds to this post will get a mini from me. A little cookie at the end of a long post.

  • 2:59 pm
  • 23 Comments