Therapy Update…

So I had my second therapy appointment a few weeks ago now, but I haven’t had the chance to post about it yet. I’ve wanted to write a lot over the past few weeks, but for one reason or another I haven’t managed it.

The appointment covered pretty similar territory to the last one really and I am not sure it was all that helpful. I guess it was worth meeting again, if only to let us bring things to a close a little better, but it still felt a bit like a waste of time. It would have felt very rushed if we only had the one appointment though and I guess I may as well make the most of the psychologist’s time whilst I have it.

Unfortunately, she didn’t really have any further information on the future of the therapy service or when I might be able to see another therapist. They don’t know what is going to happen and it is unlikely that anyone else will be joining the team in the near future. It seems there are only 3 therapists working in the service at the moment, which explains why the waiting lists are so long. Two of those are CBT therapists, so are not really suitable, although apparently one of those is “much more than just a CBT therapist”. The other therapist is male and the assessing psychologist thought that a female might be better and more challenging for me (due to my usual preference of dealing with men). They all have full case loads anyway, so wouldn’t be able to take me on, even if they were considered suitable. It was suggested that perhaps the “much more than CBT” therapist could have maybe taken me on, but the assessing psychologist wasn’t sure if she had the space or if she’d really be suitable. She was going to talk to the team manager and discuss that possibility, but she did think that someone else would probably be better. If she can take me on though I wondered if I should just see her. At least there would be a concrete offer of therapy soon, which could mean I would get started before I am planning to go back to work. I am worried that if I have to keep waiting I will miss my opportunity.

The other option is to wait for the therapist that is out on maternity leave until November and hope that she will be able to take me on. She is a psychodynamic therapist and the psychologist I saw thinks she would be best placed to work with me. I am worried that she will decide not to come back to work or that she won’t have room in her case load for me though. Even worse, I worry that I won’t like her or be able to work with her. If I am going to have to wait a few more months, I’d like there to be some guarantee of a positive outcome at the end of it.

Otherwise I will just be waiting for someone else to join the service, although the likelihood of that happening and them being suitable seems pretty slim. I still can’t believe there are only 3 therapists for the whole service. I dread to think how many people they are meant to be covering between them or how many people are waiting.

As well as talking about therapists, we also talked about topics for therapy and what things I needed to address when I eventually get offered a therapist. We didn’t really identify much more aside from the previous session, but we did look at a few things in more depth.

We talked about school and about bullying a little. I never used to think much of the bullying I went through at school. I didn’t think it really bothered me, aside from making me a bit miserable at the time, but I’d been dreaming a lot about some of the main protagonists lately and some of the dreams or nightmares have been really upsetting. They have been less frequent in the past fortnight, but in the weeks before that they were starting to bother me a lot. I would wake up shaking and confused. I don’t know why it has suddenly come up in my dreams. There is no reason for it to be a problem all of a sudden. I’ve had a lot of nightmares in general lately, but school has definitely been the main focus. Some of these dreams are so realistic, they feel like buried memories and I wake up terrified that I’m back at school. Others are strange and convoluted and make little sense. It has made me think about how I felt back then, a little more. I wonder if things were actually worse than I remembered or hurt me more than I would like to admit. There are periods from school that are really clear in my memory, but other times are just gone and I wonder how much of that is me trying to forget the worst of it all. My  memory is patchy these days anyway, especially since the ECT, but my long-term memory is certainly less affected than more recent times.

Specifically we talked about how there were two kinds of bullying I went through and how they affected me differently. I was teased and bullied during a lot of primary and early secondary school. On the surface, most of the bullying at secondary school came in the form of name calling and the occasional push on the stairs from a bunch of lads in the year above. This was annoying, but I tended to brush it off and ignore them, or be pretty mouthy back. I was usually too quick for them..

On the other hand, even though it was less visible, it was the other stuff that got me. There was always a lot of teasing and bitching from most of the girls, many of whom were meant to be friends. There were a lot of things supposedly said in jest, that really hurt and worse of all, they were meant to hurt. People would pretend to be nice, but many of them were pretty damn cruel when they wanted to be.

In the long-term, this side of things has certainly had the most effect on me. I became afraid to get close to anyone, because they always seemed to stab me in the back. Even now I struggle to trust friends and worry about what they really think about me. I get anxious in social situations and never feel good enough. If people are being nice, I always worry they aren’t genuine. I try to come across as confident, but afterwards I always analyse everything to death and worry I came across as an idiot. I have little true self-esteem (although I can pretend), but when it was battered constantly for years, that is probably understandable. The only thing I have much faith in is my intelligence, ability at school/work and the like and over the past couple years that has somewhat taken a knock too, due to being ill.

Anyway, this wasn’t what I set out to write about, but we didn’t discuss all that much else aside from what I wrote about in the last post.

We left the situation with the psychologist planning to talk to her manager to discuss whether “Not Just CBT Therapist” or “Maternity Leave Therapist” would be best placed to take me on. She was then going to call me to let me know what is happening.

I thought she had forgotten about me, but she finally called on Monday. It seems I will have to wait for “Maternity Therapist” to come back. She may not be able to take me on straight away, but at least they will know more then. It could be months before I actually get to see someone now though.

I’m still frustrated by this. To think the wait is coming to an end and then to be let down is annoying. I just don’t know if it will be worth bothering by the time I actually get to see someone.

Oh well. I don’t know why I expected anything better.

Good days, Bad days…

I’ve had a lot of good days lately. My mood has picked up sufficiently that I am feeling almost “normal” at times now and certainly manageable at others. I have actually felt happiness or contentedness, something I wasn’t really sure was possible any more. My concentration has been improving and my confidence is growing.

I have started to contemplate the idea that I may finally be heading towards some form of recovery. Maybe, just maybe, we have found the drug that works, despite the problematic side effects.

I have been foolish though in thinking the bad days had passed. I had hoped that I wouldn’t feel that bad again, at least any time soon. I really didn’t feel good yesterday. I woke up feeling low and felt worse as the morning went on. For the first time in a while I felt seriously suicidal, as opposed to the passing thoughts that had been floating around, but which I could brush off relatively easily. I was having to really fight the urge to just thrown in the towel. I felt anxious and uneasy. I’ve been struggling with strange dreams and nightmares lately and they were bothering me. Everything just felt wrong somehow. I wanted to crawl back in to bed and hide there. It felt like nothing had changed. I thought I was past all that, but I was wrong.

Things did start to improve again yesterday evening, but I am feeling a little shaky still. I feel like I’ve been knocked off balance and I’m struggling to right myself.

I am trying to tell myself that this is normal, recovery isn’t a smooth process and bad days are to be expected, but it doesn’t ease the disappointment. Telling myself this didn’t make yesterday any easier.

I hope that things will pick up again, but I am worried that this will set me back. One of the things I struggle most with is the idea that I will never be completely well again and there is always a fear of relapse. A bad day is like a mini relapse and it makes me question if it is all worth it. What is the point in carrying on, if in 6 months, a year, 20 years I end up severely depressed again and try to kill myself? My thinking may be screwed up, but I just wonder if I may as well get it over with.

I had been thinking about going back to work. I do miss it and I’ve been missing it even more when I’ve felt okay. I wonder why I am not there. I know I have only just seen Occy Health and I agree that I’m probably not ready to go back just yet, but I was starting to think that I will be able to do it. Even 3 or 4 weeks ago when I was there, I doubted it would ever be possible. A run of good days has made me think it is, but this bad one has put the doubt back. I worry that it would only take a couple of bad days at work and I would be back where I was before.

I’m still really struggling with the future. I panic when I think about what lies ahead. I am scared of therapy. I am scared of going back to work. I am scared that I will relapse. I am scared of commitment in all shapes and forms. I am scared of getting married. I am scared of buying a house. I am scared of getting old.

I am frustrated, because I was meant to be seeing Dr M on Thursday and I got a phone call today to say she has cancelled. I am disappointed, as after yesterday I felt I could really do with seeing her again soon. I wanted to discuss the Reboxetine. I think it is time to increase it to the “therapeutic dose” (4mg b.d.). I hope that those extra 2mgs will be enough to stave off the bad days. I just hope it isn’t enough to tip the side effects into not-worth-it territory. She was also going to discuss what we can do to ease the side effects, particularly looking at sleep again – the insomnia is the biggest problem. I quite wanted to know what ideas she had come up with since I’d last seen her.

I now have to wait another 2 weeks. It is going to end up being 6 weeks between appointments by the time I eventually see her and we were aiming for every 2-3 weeks, so that’s not so good. It may still be better than the CMHT, but I could have done with seeing her sooner.

I guess I will just have to manage how I am. We will see what happens. I’d like some more good days.

Past Lives…

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading a lot of my old online journal entries. It’s weird to read back. I have forgotten so much. So many of my entries talk of nightmares, insomnia and mood swings. I blamed hormones back then, but it does make me wonder; was this just illness, unnoticed? I have posts describing agitated depression right back from being 15. I have other posts describing hypomania, yet I did not know to call it that at the time. I just thought I was happy. Other posts are melancholy. Most of them are monotonous, repetitive and boring, but there is some interesting stuff too. I wonder what my psychiatrist would make of my old diaries. I am going to copy out some of the key entries for my life map. I think it will help to flesh it out with my own descriptions of events from the time, rather than my retrospective ones. I’m cautious about medicalising my teenage mood swings though. I don’t really see how I can put them down to anything but the natural course of adolescence.

Aside from that, I’m not sure how I am at the moment. I was a little on the agitated side again yesterday. I struggled to stay still or focus in group and felt a bit irritable, but generally manageable. Today, I have spent a lot of the day in bed and just been cleaning or reading stuff online. Not exactly a productive day.

I am still a little on edge. I am just waiting. Waiting for things to change. Waiting for someone to help. Waiting for someone to tell me what’s wrong. Waiting for the medication to work.. Waiting to feel better… or worse. Waiting to see what happens next. I just don’t know what’s coming and I don’t know how long I can keep waiting. It’s all the same. It is all so pointless. Why am I waiting?