I’ve repeated my DBT class several times and here I am off the rails again. How the heck do I regulate my emotions!? Well, the answer is clearly that I don’t. This is out of order in the class but I needed a quick refresher course.

Understand Emotions You Experience

• Identify your emotion. Okay, that would be depressed, agitated. stressed out, frustrated, invalidated, doubting myself.
• Understand what your emotions do for you. Well, if it was fear and I was being chased by a bear that would be very clear to me. Are these emotions telling me I need a less stressful life? I’m already almost a complete hermit. I actually know a couple of the reasons I’m stressed but I can’t say to those companies, ‘leave me alone and quit picking on me, I’m too stressed to handle it’. So my feeling is these emotions are only hindering me.

Reduce Emotional Vulnerability

(oh boy, that’s the kicker)

• Decrease negative Vulnerability (vulnerability to emotional mind). Okie dokey, none of these are going to help me a bit. Treat physical illness, Balance eating, Avoid mood-altering drugs, balance sleep, get exercise, build mastery. Did all that, don’t feel a bit better. Gah
• Increase positive emotions.
• Short term: Do pleasant things that are possible now. Do one thing each day.
• Long term: Make changes in your life so that positive events will occur more often. Build a life worth living. I’m so far from that it’s laughable at this point.
• Be unmindful of worries. ………..

Letting Go Of Emotional Suffering

• Observe your emotion. Note it’s presence, step back, get UNSTUCK from the emotion.
• Experience your emotion. As a wave coming and going.
• Try not to block emotion. Try not to suppress emotion. Don’t try to get rid of emotion. Don’t push it away. Don’t try to keep emotion around. Don’t hold on to it. Don’t amplify it.
• Remember: you are NOT your emotion. Do not necessarily act on emotion. Remember times when you felt different.
• Practice loving your emotion. Don’t judge your emotion. Practice willingness. Radically accept your emotion.

Okay, I am over my head again/still. I just need to hang in here until I learn how to make this stuff work for me. I will never love feeling this way, of that I’m sure.

On my journey through this 13 year depression, which I saw no hope of ever coming back from, I have made huge progress. Sometimes you backslide again, and that old hopeless feeling hits. That is the worst part, that when you are in that place, you can see no hope, no surety that this is temporary.

The very worst moment I ever had, well it wasn’t really, but it signified all that I had lost, so I’ll recount it here. I left California to come back to Michigan, where I had already sent my kids since I was unable to work. Rented a huge truck, paid some people to load it up and drove across the country with my pets and everything I owned. I slept in the truck at truckstops since I didn’t have enough money for rooms. Got to my parents house and cleaned out my dads barn so I could put my stuff there. Then he told me I couldn’t. I wish he’d told me that before I brought it all the way across the country at that huge expense. I was at the end of my rope, had $20 left to my name and it was more than I could deal with. I came home because I was too far gone to work. So I got a couple of guys from 2 men and a truck to unload it (paid for by my friends who had my kids) and I told them to take whatever they wanted and throw the rest out in the horse pasture to burn. They thought it was Christmas and brought friends with trucks to haul away all my appliances and furniture (I still miss my beloved china cabinet). Then my dear father called his girlfriend (yes, he was still married to and living with my mother) and told her to come over and help herself to anything out there she might be able to use. The pile sat in the horse pasture for months and I was wandering out there one day and I found a Christmas ornament Melissa had made in kindergarten, made with popsicle sticks and her picture. I will never get over how I felt, finding that tossed out there like so much junk. That is when I knew there was no coming back from this one.

Well, I was wrong, you CAN come back from just about anything. I still waver between thinking my brother had the right idea with his suicide, because some of us aren’t fixable, to seeing hope for my future. I don’t know if I will ever reach a point to say that suicide is not an alternative. But for today, at least, it isn’t and that’s all I can hope for right now.

It has been slow progress these years and a great lack of any real help. Of course, when you are that far down I don’t think there is much they can do. I finally had ECT. Why it took them so long to decide on that I have no idea. I was in the hospital more times than I remember. But ECT was the beginning of the long road back for me. Even after that while I wasn’t actively suicidal, I saw no future or hope for the future. There were a few times I had to get it together; in 2003 when I had to make a decision about my growing brain tumor and successfully handled getting it scheduled at Duke and getting myself there, in 2006 when my daughter graduated and I had to move (the ssdi benefits for her cut off at graduation) and I could find nothing I could afford in Michigan, I looked on realtor.com and ended up buying a house I can afford (with nothing down!) in Indiana. But between those periods I’ve had many weeks of hiding in my hole as I call it.

So I suppose it’s not surprising that I went from functioning extremely well (for me) the last few months to a familiar revisit with my old friend depression. What was the trigger? Nothing that I can figure out except a 5 day migraine that is the worst I ever had. But doing nothing but lying around in pain and being able to do nothing but THINK about that pain was apparently enough to set it off. So here I sit, I won’t go out to get Saturday’s mail because there are always PEOPLE out there. I won’t go mow my front lawn for same reason. My dishes need doing, my house needs cleaning, my garden needs weeding and I need a bath. I stink and I don’t care, no one here to smell me anyway, right? It seems like it’s been much longer than a week since I saw my therapist, how’d I lose this much in a week? I hope I manage to drag myself in there tomorrow morning.

The memory of my recent steps forward haven’t faded yet so I am hopeful this is just a slight backslide. Maybe slighter than it feels since I’m actually putting it on here for the world to see. This is an image (contains nudity!) I did a few years ago. I actually posted it at 3DCommune at the time and had a critical comment and immediately deleted it. I have since reposted it as part of my story so to speak. I never welcome these visits but I know them like an old friend…no, an old enemy.

That depends on who you ask. Many say yes, many more say no. The most sense that I’ve read suggests that the predisposition to certain levels of brain chemicals is hereditary. This article from the University of Michigan Depression Center says both.

I lean more towards the environmental. If you are a child of depressed parents, that’s going to be a learned experience. I’ve seen both of my kids suffer from it, not to the degree I have yet and hopefully never. The important thing is to keep communication open and learn coping skills. I think I taught them better coping skills than I know how to utilize.

I lost my brother to suicide and it almost killed me. I somehow felt that it was okay for me to feel that bad but it was totally unacceptable to me that he did. I personally lay it all on environment though I won’t go into all that on this post.

This article is from 2006 and I was ready to rush right out and volunteer for their study. They’ve found that pacemakers can help Parkinson patients and also depressed patients. It will be ungodly expensive if it becomes the norm I’d assume, since they insert electrodes deep in the brain.

There is another surgery done in my city where they attach electrodes to the vagus nerve and it works the same way. Much cheaper and done on an outpatient basis. Apparently one of the weird side effects will be a squeak or something if you’re talking while the zap happens. When nothing else has worked these seem like good options to look into. But not for me at the moment. I’m not feeling THAT bad and after two brain surgeries in recent years I have an aversion to doctors and hospitals.

My kids came for the weekend.

I thought Melissa was moving home for the summer but she has a job interview tomorrow. So she may or may not make it home at all. I’d love to have her here but since growing up is something she resists with every fiber of her being, it’s a huge step that she would like to work and have her own money.

They helped me clear the garden area which had plastic down covered in wood chips. I actually didn’t do much helping myself since I am a complete wuss these days. Work 2 minutes, have to rest for 10. It’s my own fault I don’t get active. Anyway it was a huge project.

Speaking of resisting with every fiber of your being…:p I resist the things I need to do as routine day to day chores, I resist the getting physically in shape again, I resist having to interact with anybody. If I had my way I’d be a complete recluse. Heh, that really interferes with me practicing the skills I’m supposed to be learning in my DBT group.

I have this robin nesting under my back porch roof and we stressed the poor thing out with all that activity in the back yard all day. I was worried she’d desert her nest. Sunday it rained so we were off the hook doing more work out there and in the afternoon I looked out the window and she’s standing on the side of the nest. I think they hatched! So today when I had to go out I left out the front door and walked around the edge of my yard to get to my garage in back so not to disturb them. I think I’d better get batteries for my camera 😉

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to do the things I need to. My laundry needs doing, my dishes need doing and now for cripes sakes the grass already needs mowing! I can get focused on my art or a web project to the exclusion of everything. I’d like to turn that trick towards the everyday things in my life that need doing. I get depressed, then I get judgmental, then I just plain get mental about it.

It’s all part of that ADD thing. They talk about the focus problem but what they don’t tell you is your focus can get totally stuck when it’s something you’re interested in. Then the rest you can’t seem to force yourself to deal with.

I don’t know any women with ADD. Except myself and my kids. I’m sure they’re out there. What I have noticed is that the men with ADD that I know all married women who pretty well picked up the slack on everything. The job, the house, the kids. Maybe instead of kicking myself all my life for the way I am I should have just blithely gone about being myself and found some poor shmuck that would take care of all that trivial crap for me. Yeah baby, that’s my plan for my next life! :p