Personal story, part 3 – IPT Therapy
Warning: I will deal with some feelings in this post. Just so you know. I’ll try to steer away from motivational quotes though!
A couple of posts ago I mentioned mentioned that I was going to start therapy, IPT to be precise, and since a couple of weeks I’ve been seeing a therapist once a week. Appareantly I’m in some sort of PDT (PsychoDynamic Therapy) which focuses on feelings and what might have caused the depression in the first place. It’s not about changing your mindset, like cognitive therapy, but to identify the causes and (I guess/hope) take it from there instead.
The first couple of times, I thought it was mainly a waste of time since me and the therapist aren’t really communicating in the same language. I’m a pragmatic, logical and analytical person - where she is very focused on communicating feelings and such yucky stuff. I suppose that’s a good quality in that specific field though. Every time she asked me what I was feeling about something, or a certain event in my past, she told me “That’s not a feeling” every friggin time. That gets really annoying after a while and I was about to really snap at one point. I still haven’t figured out what counts as a feeling and what’s not (to me; something you can feel like anger, irritation, frustration and so on is a feeling - but appareantly it’s not, psychologically speaking), but I guess it have something to do with my need to analyze situations. Try to put words on something that you don’t really know how to describe even to yourself - that’s what I’m trying to do once a week (early in the morning too!).
Last session, I actually had a small breakthrough. I was getting more and more annoyed at her unwillingness to acknowledge my description of “frustration” as a feeling, and she was getting more annoyed with my inability to actually say what I was feeling - when I managed to actually describe what I felt, with physical metaphores. She pretty fast zoomed in on that description and said: “You are describing anxiety”, and pretty fast followed up with giving me a emotional falcon punch by identifying my largest emotional weakness: “You are a good-for-nothing. You are unwanted and nobody likes you”. Holy bleep that made me shut up.
If what I described earlier was anxiety, this was an emotional roller coaster from hell making a small pit stop in purgatory. Time seemed to slow down and I actually had to take a couple of deep breaths to even be able to answer. It was a long long time ago since I last felt that feeling, and I really don’t want to do it again. BUT, in a weird way - it was nice to feel something else than boredom, irritation and indifference. Don’t get me wrong, it sucked, but for the last two years; I’ve been pretty much ignoring any feelings and been putting them away in a box somewhere.
On a side note: it only took me like 10 seconds or so to actually get the anxiety under control and back to “normal”, so obviously I’m getting good at bottling my emotions - so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice (?).