braveheart
Member
This is just a kind of stream of consciousness rant in a way. But I could use some listening. Just being heard.
I am having a day's leave from work today. [the day is almost over now, as its nearly 4pm here...] A well deserved rest. Therapy [and living] has been really hard work lately. Really painful. Really a struggle. It amazes me each time I emerge from the dark places in my mind that I somehow carried on my life when I was soaked in despair and rage and pain and [self-]hatred.
I know my diagnosis, the main medical one, is recurrent depression.
But.
I have been depressed, of one shade of grey or black or another since I was 17-18. I am now nearly 37.
I did lots of yoga development work. My first counsellor thought I didn't need further referal for treatment, because the yoga psychology was all I needed. Um.
I was meditating daily and trying to 'be spiritual' but was also hitting myself and crying uncontrollably in the shadows.
I didn't enter therapy of any kind until I was 30. I did have 6 weeks sessions with the council's teacher counselling scheme way back when I was 26 and my employer was basically bullying/overloading me. But that barely scratched the surface, the best thing she ever did was loan me a book on the Inner Child which made me realise that the way my family had been when I was growing up was actually dysfunctional...She didn't even say I was stressed, never mind depressed. But I kept a lot hidden. I was still labouring under my father's threats to me growing up that I would be put in a strait jacket and sent away to a home for bad children, would be locked up and the key thrown away....
So, yes, then..to 6 months with a counselling psychologist, who thought I needed to be in Kleinian analysis... [and, yes, she was right, because the Kleinian aspect that the therapist I have now integrates with the other aspects she uses with me... really helps....] but I stayed with her anyway... and 9 months with an existential phenomenological therapist who wasn't really on my wavelength..
..I finally made it to my current therapist.
A year or so in, we agreed I needed some medication help, anti-depressants, I went to the GP, who gave me efexor, which didn't really help, made lots worse, but they kept me on them for a year...until it became 'blindingly obvious' that this was the wrong medication, I was refered to the psychiatrist, who got me on remeron.
Meanwhile all the time I'm working as hard as I can in therapy, and getting better by the day.... slowly, gradually, thoroughly.
The psychiatrist said I have long-standing treatment resistant depression.
He also refered to my diagnosis as 'depression, anxiety, panic attacks and other problems because of things that happened to me in the past'. *breathes*
Officially, its Recurrent Depression.
The thing is, I have days, hours, when I get remission from the Dark.
Not weeks.
But c'est le ICD-10. Or something.
Anyway.
Yesterday I had a really really good therapy session. Really starting to break free from The Dictator that I was talking about in my thread in the PTSD forum over the weekend. Its a real breakthrough. Although the effects from this will filter through gradually....
I wonder if this will start to lift my depression, as I gain some sense of power within myself separate from this internal demon, whose ways have penetrated all my life, my feelings, my actions, for so many years.
I don't know exactly what it would feel like to not be depressed. To feel fully alive much of the time. I have... moments.
But what joy it will be to be able to walk down the road and feel that I actually am ok to exist, that I am a person who is real, whose feelings are ok and who people areen't out to hurt.
It is possible.... I have hope...
I am having a day's leave from work today. [the day is almost over now, as its nearly 4pm here...] A well deserved rest. Therapy [and living] has been really hard work lately. Really painful. Really a struggle. It amazes me each time I emerge from the dark places in my mind that I somehow carried on my life when I was soaked in despair and rage and pain and [self-]hatred.
I know my diagnosis, the main medical one, is recurrent depression.
But.
I have been depressed, of one shade of grey or black or another since I was 17-18. I am now nearly 37.
I did lots of yoga development work. My first counsellor thought I didn't need further referal for treatment, because the yoga psychology was all I needed. Um.
I was meditating daily and trying to 'be spiritual' but was also hitting myself and crying uncontrollably in the shadows.
I didn't enter therapy of any kind until I was 30. I did have 6 weeks sessions with the council's teacher counselling scheme way back when I was 26 and my employer was basically bullying/overloading me. But that barely scratched the surface, the best thing she ever did was loan me a book on the Inner Child which made me realise that the way my family had been when I was growing up was actually dysfunctional...She didn't even say I was stressed, never mind depressed. But I kept a lot hidden. I was still labouring under my father's threats to me growing up that I would be put in a strait jacket and sent away to a home for bad children, would be locked up and the key thrown away....
So, yes, then..to 6 months with a counselling psychologist, who thought I needed to be in Kleinian analysis... [and, yes, she was right, because the Kleinian aspect that the therapist I have now integrates with the other aspects she uses with me... really helps....] but I stayed with her anyway... and 9 months with an existential phenomenological therapist who wasn't really on my wavelength..
..I finally made it to my current therapist.
A year or so in, we agreed I needed some medication help, anti-depressants, I went to the GP, who gave me efexor, which didn't really help, made lots worse, but they kept me on them for a year...until it became 'blindingly obvious' that this was the wrong medication, I was refered to the psychiatrist, who got me on remeron.
Meanwhile all the time I'm working as hard as I can in therapy, and getting better by the day.... slowly, gradually, thoroughly.
The psychiatrist said I have long-standing treatment resistant depression.
He also refered to my diagnosis as 'depression, anxiety, panic attacks and other problems because of things that happened to me in the past'. *breathes*
Officially, its Recurrent Depression.
The thing is, I have days, hours, when I get remission from the Dark.
Not weeks.
But c'est le ICD-10. Or something.
Anyway.
Yesterday I had a really really good therapy session. Really starting to break free from The Dictator that I was talking about in my thread in the PTSD forum over the weekend. Its a real breakthrough. Although the effects from this will filter through gradually....
I wonder if this will start to lift my depression, as I gain some sense of power within myself separate from this internal demon, whose ways have penetrated all my life, my feelings, my actions, for so many years.
I don't know exactly what it would feel like to not be depressed. To feel fully alive much of the time. I have... moments.
But what joy it will be to be able to walk down the road and feel that I actually am ok to exist, that I am a person who is real, whose feelings are ok and who people areen't out to hurt.
It is possible.... I have hope...
