Swimming with the Turtles

[zig]

i'm moving to where the focus needs to be - on me. so today at IC, i walked in with three specify issues i need to talk about and stuck to them. C was happy and pointed out how unfocused i had been, and was glad to see my shift.
last session had ended with her making a note that we should talk about my feelings of hurt, betrayal and forgiveness.

but when i came in i said i wanted to talk about anxiety, obsessive thinking and detachment, and when she brought the other 3 up i said - i can't do those until i work on these. i could see she was really happy.

we spent most of the time talking about obsessive thought patterns - i admitted (for the first time how this has been a pattern always for me, not just during this sitch and how i can see that now - that there was always something i obsessed about - work, parenting issues, ex h, and now h)

i thought i'd journal her suggestions - for myself as well as for others here.

she first talked about how seductive ruminating is - it's sort of a mind addiction, that gives us the false feeling that we are "solving" the problem. all solutions come in the first 15 mins of ruminating and then the rest is just falling into the cycle and has no positive function at all.

she said that she was a follower of Stephen Llardi who wrote "The Depression Cure" and had done a lot of research on this.

I asked for specific tools to help me get started with dropping the obsessive thought patterns

1. exercise and getting out
2. good healthy sleep patterns
3. structure during our day
4. stop ruminating
5. fish oil

then we focused on how to stop ruminating:

1. learn to recognize when you start doing it (notice then decide)
2. use techniques to change falling into it when you recognize it such as:
- shift from inside your head to the outside world
- for a big thing : step outside or put an ice cube on wrist or temple - makes the brain shift it's focus
- talk out loud
- deep breathing
- engage in an activity - e.g.. go clean a drawer
- move to a different setting
- write down your thoughts (max. 5 mins)
- limit ruminating for 5 mins (that includes talking about it, posting about it, crying about it)

then i asked her - how does one get through some big thing - like finding out WAS was with ow for 10 days.

that led to the interesting discussion of SELF-REGULATING. to learn to self regulate one's emotions so that no matter what the 'bomb' is we should learn to not be overcome by it and let it take us down the hole.

SELF REGULATION IS MY RESPONSIBILITY.

i know that these are really obvious things, but i needed a reminder and thought it may help some others too.

we talked a bit about how we have to retrain our brains to stop these cycles.

we didn't have time to go really deeply into the anxiety issues - but i think that just starting to do these things will give me a chance to get to dealing with that.


hope this helps someone else too. sometime i feel that the simplest solutions that are right under my nose are the ones that elude me the most.