Therapy

(Written in January 2009)
Karen was helpful.  I read her some passages out of this journal and the last one.  I said I felt like the bipolar 2 diagnosis had hit me like a tidal wave.  Karen kept saying nothing had changed, and that the diagnosis was just my psychiatrist speaking out of her worldview.  I can understand intellectually, but nothing shifts emotionally.  I asked if I could curl up next to her, and then I was finally able to relax and come into the present. and acknowledge that I was overwhelmed without going into the story of it.  I’m overwhelmed, and I don’t know what to do, and it’s OK that I don’t know what to do.  Karen said “You are doing it, you are asking for help, you are changing the way you are in the world.  You are doing something really different and scary.” I was OK for a while and then some part of me popped up with anxiety because I “wasn’t doing anything” and if I didn’t do something, how would I get better?  Karen said I’m not doing nothing, I’m breathing, I’m relaxing, I’m aware of what’s around me.  O yes, I’m PRESENT, present to my own experience with compassion, not making myself wrong.
Earlier, perhaps right at the beginning there was another voice that said I should just be able to get up & get out of the misery.  Right.  I should just be able to get up and walk away from low thyroid, PTSD, and bipolar 2.  Karen said this voice isn’t me, to “wrap it up and send it back to them.” But it certainly feels like me.  Well, of course it’s partly the “tough little drip that just wouldn’t quit.” She has got me through bad times by encouraging me: OK, come on now, let’s get up; you don’t want to die, you want a life that works, etc.  There’s also the various introjected voices, not so much coaxing and reminding, as bullying, critical, harshly judgemental.  Voices I learned from my father “you just want to be miserable” and my mother “It seems you don’t care,” but because these judgements don’t manifest verbally, they’re very hard for me to fight.  They don’t show up as thoughts I can counter, they show up as body sensations of stuckness, coldness, heaviness, nausea.  I feel judged, hated, wrong and bad etc. And I don’t see that I am the one doing the judging and hating.  If I try to bring compassion to the one that feels judged, it often (usually?) doesn’t work.  I’m feeling right now, as I write, that what I need is to bring compassion to the one that’s judging me, and I immediately feel myself soften, the gush of love in the heart, toward that little kid who’s doing the best she can to be good, to help others, to contribute to life, and to not feel miserable all the time, and the only coping skills she had she learned from a pair of harsh, judgemental, negative and irresponsible alcoholics.