12/09/19 Counseling Session

I talked about how last week was sad. How lots of really unexpected and hurtful things happened, like my beloved childhood dog dying at the ripe age of 17, and an argument with my boyfriend that I got worked up about.

But - I was OK talking about it.

Then we moved onto goal setting, and she’d asked me to think about three goals I want to try and accomplish through our sessions, she had asked me to put a list together the week before and I tried really hard to think about what sort of things I would like to work on.

The first is to try and turn my trauma from a weapon against me, into a tool for me. It helps me connect with people and gives me a unique presence, but I don’t need to be afraid of it or cry every time I think about my childhood. I don’t need to feel like a victim in my own story.

The things that happened to me were life changing, I could have been a completely different person if those things hadn't happened to me, so if I like who I am, that means I need to accept what made me who I am today, and realize that I am a product of my choices, not a victim of circumstance. I didn't ask for those things, but I can take what was given to me and turn it into something I want it to be. Trauma doesn't need to change me anymore.

The second is to learn how to soothe myself. I can’t always go home to pet my cat or go to sleep. I will have panic attacks at work or school, yeah I COULD go home, but absences are monitored and missing work will hurt my paycheck. So I want to try and create a tool kit of 5-6 things I can do for myself when I’m upset that will help me calm down and regain self control again. One thing is my fit bit, it has a program on it that will monitor my heart rate, so I know if I start feeling bad I can look at my pulse on my watch, and if it't bad enough, I have another program on the watch that will guide me through a breathing exercise. But, there are times that those don't help me, I will need to learn to assess when I get past the point of the tools, but I want to try and find a couple more that can help me when I start to get upset.

The last, is to find a way to monitor when I’m getting bad again. I can’t always depend on someone else to be watching me and making sure I’m OK all of the time. It was nice living with my grandparents who cared a lot and would notice when things got bad, but I can’t do that forever. I need to do it for myself and learn to create a happy space for myself. I am not sure how I will do this, but I know I need to. I visualize my pain as a vortex. If you want to imagine with me, I see a vast empty black plane, and when I look to the left/behind me, I see this swirling whirlpool that drags things in and never lets them out. I know that if I go near enough to it, I will be sucked in and left in the place I was during the worst years of my life. I want to create a 'fence' around that vortex that will help me keep away from it. I want to check in on myself at least once a week to make sure I am still in a good place. As someone that will live with Chronic Depression, I will always need to do this, and I know that if I start now, it wont be so hard later.

I’m thinking that writing will help, I might try journaling, in more of a scientific way, like I’m collecting data for a study, but also I’m going to continue to blog, because it makes me feel good and I like sharing my success stories, which might be an incentive in itself to keep going. I know that this is going to be a lot of work, but I've already experienced some very good results in changing my own behavior. I want to keep doing that, I want to grow as a person, and help create a path for others to grow if possible, that's why I want to share this, and I hope that if i read this later, or if someone reading this has a hard time, that either of us can take some advice. One step is a good step, two steps are good steps, any step forward is still steps forward. Keep going.