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Emotion regulation continued – in DBT therapy, attending to relationships fosters improved emotion regulation. This relates to last week’s emotion regulation core concept – building positive experiences. The therapist talked about the two extremes – the dialectical opposites – in DBT. There’s being too open, no boundaries, and then the other end, rigid boundaries, isolationist…
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A person with strong suicidal ideation reached out to me. I too have passive suicidal ideation so I feel there is little I can say. Here is what I said: I just got out of the mental hospital. I tried killing myself in it. They made me wear an anti-suicide smock, took my bedding and…
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There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments; that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion; that happiness is…
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I am in recovery. That is what the doctors say, the IOP therapist. They say it can take time to recover from a mental health crisis. I should know this, I’ve had severe crises in the past and barely survived some of them. But sometimes I’m not sure what recovery even means. Does it mean…
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I visit my mother every Saturday. That is all I can manage. I bring her rum, cigarettes, and lots of diet coke and some lunch. We eat together. She complains about always being alone. Forced to work, etc, etc. I am exhausted. She is an emotional vampire. I know I’m enabling. I don’t care. I…
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I managed to sleep with the assistance of the following medications: melatonin, vistaril, gabapentin, and ativan. That was Thursday – I went to bed at about 4pm and woke up at 10:30pm, getting a whopping six hours of sleep, and I only woke up once in that time. Then I went and picked up my…
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Holy shit! I got so much done yesterday after IOP. I cleaned my whole apartment, made a giant pot of mashed potatoes, did my laundry, cleaned up part of my closet and got rid of a bunch of things to sell/donate. My energy load continued into the late afternoon, and after 4pm, I had officially…
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Score one for independent cinema – Damien Leone’s Terrifier 3 is the top movie in the US right now. Art the Clown got no marketing, a small budget, and still beat Hollywood juggernaut Joker in its opening weekend, earning over 18 million at the box office compared to Joker’s 7 million. There were three walkouts…
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During my second week in the hospital, I finally called my mother. What a disaster. I had been stabilizing pretty well on medication changes and Dr Floura’s careful dialing in of the right doses and times. I had learned a lot about myself and that this depression was largely existential in nature, exacerbated by my…
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Week four of IOP and probably one of the more important modules, at least for me, is about to close tomorrow – Emotion Regulation. I have really struggled with some of the concepts and incorporating them into daily life. One exercise involved drawing concentric circles and in the inner, writing the emotions we do not…
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