The Boot

Something rattling around my mind today about depressive thoughts, depressive tendencies. Mine I mostly mean, though also my mother's and my young client's. And L's absence of same. I saw my wonderful supervisor today and told her how I still struggle with the aftermath of the blogging-about-work fiasco, how I catastrophise and undermine myself, and have again and again to rebuild my confidence from the ground up. She spoke about the 'boot on your neck' and the need to find ways to get out from under that violent pressure. And yes, it does feel like someone has a boot on my neck at times, exactly, right down to a very physical corelate of that metaphor. She advocated using something of a CBT approach - writing down these thoughts, seeing the worst excesses of negative thinking on the page, so I know them, and then can identify them when they come for me again. And it isn't that I haven't used this kind of strategy before, but it's a timely suggestion as they have been getting some leverage with me lately, and are just so damn destructive, when I'm trying to rebuild my life, and they keep jeering in my ear that I'm possibly incompetent, too inexperienced to be taken seriously, or there won't be the work for me that I anticipate, or I'm just going to contract a terminal illness anyway and never be able to earn money again, and will soon die anyway. Reader, you will either recognise the territory so well you will require no explanations, or marvel that it could exist at all inside an ostensibly well-adjusted, intelligent and sensitive person such as I, particularly perhaps an experienced psychotherapist... But so it is.

Currently I'm back with 'morning pages', Julia Cameron's basic practice from The Artist's Way, and every day I end my pages with affirmations, and every day one of my affirmations is I am willing to be happy (x 4). I made that one up, or if I didn't I no longer remember that I didn't! Either way, it remains spot on for me. There resides inside me a sub-personality (a critic, if you will) who actually isn't, at all, willing to be happy or to let me be happy, depending on how you conceptualise the dynamics of this. I have so many unconscious or barely conscious ways to make myself unhappy, I don't even know a lot of the time that's what they are, that that is what I'm doing, or that I can not do them. These depressive habits of mind, when one is in them, are so compelling, it is very hard to get the perspective needed to see that these are only thoughts - inaccurate and destructive ones that make you feel bad (bring on the CBT...) I think will is an important part of dealing with this, and I am determined to start exercising it more firmly to say NO to the boot on the neck thug! The other thing, as ever, is to feel angry rather than like a victim. I was talking about my disappointment with the way my manager managed what happened back there, the way she failed to support me essentially, and my supervisor asked if I felt angry and I said 'yes!' beginning to feel that as I spoke and she said 'good, that's better...'