Inside? That's another story.
I had a few bad months, mentally and emotionally. Well, more than a few bad months. But I had a few REALLY bad months. Depression and anxiety teamed up to poison my mind with all kinds of inaccurate thoughts. I kept imagining scenarios where everything went wrong, and reacting to them as though they were real. They weren't real. My mind created them out of nothing. My thoughts were not reality-based, and yet I responded to them as though they were.
One day I cried for 8 hours straight. I kind of reached my breaking point.
A friend of mine, who happens to be a doctor, recommended a workbook called Mind Over Mood to help me implement cognitive behavioural therapy techniques. It was exactly what I needed, because it teaches you to look at those thoughts, to examine them for accuracy, to determine whether real-life evidence supports them.
In most cases, for me, the anxiety thoughts had almost zero basis in reality.
While I was doing my worksheets, I didn't feel like they were helping me. I still felt anxious, I still felt insecure and unsettled. But the act of observing obviously changed me, over time, because these past few weeks should have been killer, and I've gotten through them with considerably more ease than anticipated.
I have my mother to thank, in large part. She doesn't know the meaning of the word "anxiety." Her philosophy is that she'll deal with stuff as it happens. No sense worrying about things that may never come to pass.
My mother's had a series of medical appointments throughout the spring and summer, culminating in a biopsy for which my siblings and I nervously awaited results. My mom wasn't nervous, though. "What's the point in being nervous? I'll just waste all this time when I could be doing other things. When I find out what's going on, then the doctors will tell us what to do."
We got the results last week. My mom has cancer. It always takes a while for these things to sink in, for me. I don't know whether I'm still in that numb stage, or whether Mind Over Mood truly did prepare me for this. Or maybe my mother prepared me by setting an example of not worrying. It isn't put on, with her. She is a truly happy-go-lucky person. She trusts her doctor. She trusts that the chemo and other therapies will do their job, and she'll be just fine by this time next year.
I hope she's right, but, more than that, I trust that she's right. Part of this is intuition. I woke up the morning of her appointment thinking, "It'll be cancer, but it'll be fine." It's just hard to trust intuition when its cousin, anxiety, has so often led me astray.
If you want more from me, consider following my music and anecdote site, A Friendly Musical Visit Every Day. I really do post there every day, and it pleases me so much to get visitors.
Your mother sounds like a great role model.
ReplyDeleteI recently read some research that showed people make better decisions when they take a third-person, outside-the-problem view. Simply changing the "I" to "Giselle" (or "Lisabet") apparently had the cognitive effect of distancing the decision maker enough that she could look at the problem more objectively, with less of an emotional burden.
I'll add your mom to my morning meditation, though she's probably right - she'll be fine. Cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence.
xxoo
I'm so glad you've found your way out of that anxiety loop, Giselle. I only have those terrible-problem-must-solve thoughts in dreams, all too many of them, but the thought of full-time tilting at imaginary and threatening windmills scares the hell out of me. It's like the brain searches for something to worry about whether there's any real basis or not. Maybe this is one time when having a writer's imagination dos us no favor. Or maybe in my case it's that my mother always imagined the worst as if being ready for it would stave it off.
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