I started a new medication in May.\u00a0 It\u2019s one of a class of medications that are mood stabilizers.\u00a0 I felt very odd after taking it for the first time, and the same sort of oddness each time I raised the dose.\u00a0 I felt slightly speedy and not quite myself.\u00a0 That faded after a couple of days.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been on 75mg for four weeks, and I feel pretty solid, and solidly myself.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t been depressed in weeks.\u00a0 Sometimes I feel a little blue, and sometimes I feel total apathy, no motivation for anything.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve also been working with Karen on seeing that I really\u00a0 have gotten somewhere over the years.\u00a0 When I get depressed again, it feels like I\u2019m back in the same place.\u00a0 It may feel<\/span> the same, but I have a lot more resources now.\u00a0 I have supportive friends to call and ask for help.\u00a0 I have church as well as circle dance.\u00a0 I even have a support group for the summer.\u00a0 It\u2019s a NAMI<\/a> group that meets in St. Johnsbury.\u00a0 It\u2019s not really a peer group because most of the people are struggling with more difficult symptoms, and don\u2019t have the resources that I have.\u00a0 I do feel supported, because they acknowledge that they need help and are trying to change their behavior, and I also find it very comforting to be in a group where I seem to be one of the healthiest, instead of feeling like the weirdo in a group of normals.\u00a0 The other thing I have that I didn\u2019t have when I started out \u2014 I first started seeing a therapist in 1967 when I was 25 years old, and I\u2019ve been in therapy off and on since then \u2014 was an understanding of what I was up against: not just born defective, not just a child of alcoholic parents, not just systemic yeast, not just suffering from clinical depression, not just suffering from low thyroid.\u00a0 The biggest thing I\u2019ve been struggling with my whole life is PTSD.<\/p>\n Being traumatized in early infancy affects the development of the brain and nervous system.\u00a0 Everything I learned after that was distorted.\u00a0 Knowing about the physiological effects of trauma has helped me in trying to manage myself.\u00a0 For example, I discovered something I started calling \u201cfalse urgency.\u201d\u00a0 I went out to \u201crescue\u201d a car that was halfway up the driveway and couldn\u2019t get farther because the driveway was solid ice.\u00a0 Looking back, after I slipped and broke my wrist, I saw that the car was perfectly fine.\u00a0 Its feelings weren\u2019t hurt, it wasn\u2019t going to freeze, it was in a driveway so it wasn\u2019t likely to be crashed into, there was NO GOOD REASON that it had to be moved.\u00a0 Because of PTSD, my nervous system is always on \u201cred alert\u201d so of course it\u2019s easy for something to appear far more urgent than it really was.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve started seeing a new therapist.\u00a0 Her name is Erica.\u00a0 She specializes in PTSD and attachment issues which means very early stages, infancy, the need to bond with a caretaker.\u00a0 When I knew I was going to see her, I felt a lot of hope.\u00a0 Just before I saw her for the first time, I was scared.\u00a0 But she was wonderful, soothing and caring.\u00a0 I saw her three weeks in a row, but then she went away for a week, and I had a very hard time with that.\u00a0 Abandonment was the issue I needed to work on, and here was this woman, who I had got attached to so quickly, and she was abandoning me.<\/p>\n My friend Lynelle, who has done a lot of research into mother-baby dynamics, told me that when a baby is left alone too long, it gets apathetic.\u00a0 That\u2019s how I felt at the end of the second week.\u00a0 I had no sense of hope that she would help me, I thought things like \u201cWhy bother?\u201d and \u201cWhat\u2019s the point?\u201d<\/p>\n But after I saw her again, as I was driving home, I felt that what we were doing was real and serious.\u00a0 That made me feel contained and held.\u00a0 I hoped it would hold me through her next absence, and I was fine for the first week.\u00a0 Today is Tuesday, and I\u2019m sure some part of me feels abandoned again.\u00a0 I had a lot of things go wrong yesterday, mostly technical stuff like not being able to get my email, tracfone not working.\u00a0 Today I feel apathetic again.\u00a0 I\u2019ve just been sitting inside reading.\u00a0 No energy for working on my stories, it\u2019s too hot to go outside.\u00a0 I have a whole week to go before I see Erica again.\u00a0 Well, all I have to do is hold on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started a new medication in May.\u00a0 It\u2019s one of a class of medications that are mood stabilizers.\u00a0 I felt very odd after taking it for the first time, and the same sort of oddness each time I raised the … Continue reading