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2/2 If you're still having a problem imagining other places you want to go, work with your therapist to identify what sort of things you feel unambiguously positive about even though you may get intense anxiety that you don't deserve to enjoy such things. I have a theory (which I'm going to completely handwave here) that when we're depressed we often avoid thinking about the good things in life too hard because our brain is churning out hormonal painkillers of offset the mental and muscular pain of anxiety, and those painkillers are actually rather addictive, so you get used to feeling bad because once you feel sufficiently awful at least you get to wallow in your own hormones a bit and that yields relief. Thinking about good things initially makes you feel worse because you know they're good but you don't feel any chemical payoff, so when you try to model yourself enjoying this good thing you are only conscious of the burden of pain you're carrying and the temptation is to shift the focus back to that burden to get another shot of compensatory hormones. So say your happiest memory involves, I dunno, hot air balloons. You think about hot air balloons but you don't get any particular charge off it so you begin thinking that once hot air balloons made you very happy but now you only feel pain, and so you have lost your capacity to enjoy hot air balloons (or anything else) forever. But did your earlier self who derived great enjoyment from hot air balloons deserve to suffer for the sake of that enjoyment? Of course not. Can you imagine someone talking to that younger and happier version of yourself standing there saying 'oh, you're a horrible person, your naive joy in hot air balloons is an illusion will be crushed by a lifetime of misery, ha ha.' I'm pretty sure you can because that's basically what you're telling yourself as a despressed person here in the present. Now focus once more on the imaginary person saying this to your younger and happier self, and actively trying to make that self feel awful in the same way that you feel awful right now. What an asshole, right? IF you saw someone else doing that you'd tell them to shut up and shove off, and stop trying to ruin other people's enjoyment of life. Well, that's what your depression is - an imaginary miserable person that you carry around in your head who is constantly running you down and telling you that you're No Good. It's your own critical faculty on steroids a useful faculty but one that has gotten out of control and turned into the mental equivalent of a scab that you keep picking at day after day and never allowing to heal. It's not evil, or inevitable, or or inaccessible. It's just a part of your psyche that's stuck in a self-reinforcing loop, a race condition if you like. So all the coping strategies I've outlined above are ways of establishing different perspectives to stop seeing that psychic irritation as The Only Thing That Matters and instead acknowledge it as a Painful Thing but not the Only Thing. Drugs may assist with that process (or not; don't be surprise if it takes several attempts to find something that works, or that things work for a while and then stop etc.). I say 'process' because it's not a threshold thing where you have some big realization or turn a corner, come out of the darkness into the light, and you're not depressed any more. Instead it's this thing that just comes up more or less intensively and you need to develop a process of recognizing it as a symptom of your depression, remembering that its a painful internal injury rather than some objective moral flaw in the world or yourself, and then try to sidestep the pain the same way you would with the pain from a broken arm or whatever. This process won't make much difference at first, the same way that taking a deep breath doesn't help much with the pain from a broken arm when you need to do something like buttoning a shirt or turn on a light switch, never mind things like pulling on your pants or lifting heavy weights. On bad days you have to remind yourself 100 times a day that it's only a symptom and that sooner or later it will heal if given the opportunity, and then do it again 5 minutes later. but after a while you find you're only dealing with it 80 times a day instead of 100, or 50 times a day instead of 80, and so on. And that's how you learn to manage it. The more work you invest in managing it, the more it is to recognize as a symptom rather than The Awful Truth, so that when it waxes and wanes you can learn which strategies work best to deal with it, like when it's more effective to work or to take a rest. You know how kids are horrified by physical injuries because the pain if such a novel sensation and now they think this is how it's going to be for ever? Exact same thing. Just as it still hurts to hit your hear or cut your finger or break a bone, but you have learned that physical pain is transitory and treatable, you need to learn the same thing about mental pain, and keep patiently trying out different things until you identify the characteristics of of your particular mental injury and what you have to do to handle it. It is absolutely a manageable problem that becomes easier with practice - much easier, and that practice can significantly improve your competence to deal with other external problems and support creative and professional accomplishment. |
my therapist described me as having an "idealistic streak" and mentioned I might be happier if I were working on something that motivated me more than a paycheck. This is something I'll have to take into account as I look for a new position.