Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I can’t believe it, but I finished week seven of intensive outpatient DBT therapy today. The focus is mindfulness for the next few weeks, peppered with shorter concepts to bolster the much larger concept of mindfulness. Today that was gratitude and the “wise mind.”

Our minds exist on spectrums. On one end is the strictly logical mind which relies on reason at the expense of everything else. On the other end is the emotional mind which is impulsive and has no reason at all. The “wise mind” is somewhere in the middle. Which mind are you?

My feelings are intense and overwhelming, my mind is strictly logical. I am not very emotion minded at all. I seek solutions to problems, and if someone is crying to me about an issue they are having, I want to generate solutions and tend to assume they want my advice. That is not usually the case. People just want to be heard, they want sympathy, they want someone to understand and say yeah, this sucks. And that’s it. That’s very hard for me. I’m not one to cry with another over problems. I’ve never been in love and I don’t think I can feel love. My boundaries are rigid and strict. I’m analytical and seek to analyze and figure out questions and problems as they arise.

Until I’m manic, but that is when psychosis and mania take over, in which I’m completely dysregulated, with no impulse control or emotion regulation at all. This is always the outcome if I go off medication. If I become this ill I am neither emotion-minded or reason-minded, I am manic-minded, with hallucinations, suicidal ideation, and sometimes delusions of persecution.

So, I admitted all this in group. I am trying really hard to be more open. I realized I was judging myself. I admitted I didn’t feel a need to change my strict boundaries right now. But that I was trying as much as I could to incorporate more gratitude and mindfulness into my life. It feeds the reinforcement principle – if you’re feeling good, keep doing that thing. If remembering what you have to be grateful for feeds that feeling, keep doing that too. And mindfulness ties into all that because mindfulness simply means being in the present moment. If you’re always in the present, you’re forced to take a look around. It’s here that I take stock of things that ARE going well for me – I’ve nearly met my goal of three months’ perfect attendance at work, I own two houses and have a downtown rental I love, I worked really hard for and love the car I drive, my Honda hybrid, and I have a couple really close friends without whom I would not be alive. I’m sure there is more, but I’m trying not to get too crazy, too fast. I’m trying to carefully absorb the IOP concepts as they come and incorporate them piece by piece. It’s that or I get too overwhelmed and give up.

Nicole wants me to sing karaoke tonight. I’m excited to see her again, excited to sing again, I have limited time to enjoy the weekends left. I accepted the Sacred Heart job and I will have orientation for that in a couple weeks. I already let the IOP therapist know the days I will miss. I even had to get a couple nights off work to attend. This part time job will eat me alive, maybe, but I have to do it.

I just had to buy a 9,500 dollar furnace at my first house. I’m on a payment plan, but between that and the new sewer pipe after a tree root obliterated the old one earlier this year (12k) I have a lot of debt piling up related to this house. My credit card debt is not that bad, but my savings is all but ruined and now I have around 20k in debt on a new furnace and new sewer pipe. I intend to pay that off rapidly with this new job. There is a 5k sign on bonus as well, but I only get half up front and the rest a year later. So, I plan on keeping the job at least a year. Pay isn’t great, but there is a competitive differential. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort on sleep hygiene and good time management to be able to devote the needed time to sleep. I’ve worked hard to prepare myself mentally for what will be a marathon work schedule, over the long term. Dr Black doesn’t like it at all, but I intend to be quite disciplined. They are only eight hour shifts, after all. It’s just an extra 24 hours of work a week, that’s not that bad.

And so, I am trying to have a little fun first. I see Ceila tomorrow for dinner and drinks and to complete my I9, an employment verification form that requires an authorized representative, i.e., her.

Tonight, it’s time to sing.