Tuesday 21 September 2010

The first months of therapy

I was first referred to a clinical psychologist for ongoing depression, which I have suffered from at various times in my life since the age of eleven years old. I went for an initial 'assessment' where the psychologist told me he would ask me questions to assess wether they would offer to help me or not.
This threw me into a panic as I was aware how relatively normal I seem, and thought that he would refuse to help me due to there being so many people out there who were much more crazy. That didn't happen, however, I was offered to be seen for a period of about three months. At the time I thought this was how they do it in the NHS: allocate a certain number of slots to you and if you're not better by then, tough luck. I didn't find out until near the end of the three months that it was actually because the psychologist was moving away. I spent a large proportion of those months panicking because I was not seeing any progress in my levels of crazy. In fact, I was becoming even more depressed and not functioning well at all.
By the time he left I was not working and suffering from all kinds of dissociation symptoms and I felt an extreme sense of loss and abandonment after allowing myself to learn to trust someone having not done that much in my life.

Sunday 19 September 2010

My mess

I am a messy person. I always was messy. As a child I was incapable of keeping my room tidy; I hated tidying so much I would go to great lengths to get out of it. I used to sleep in a cabin bed and came up with the brilliant idea of hiding all of my toys in the space underneath it. I used to act as a human shovel and scoop all my toys across the floor and into the big hole under the bed. It was great, until my mum found out.
Nowadays, not much has changed. I have bursts of motivation when I will clean for a few hours but generally, I don't bother or am too tired, or just have no motivation. My house is a horrific mess. My sister stayed recently (I don't normally have people in the house because of the mess) and I spent a day tidying and cleaning before her arrival. It barely scratched the surface and her comment afterwards was: "Your house looks like a jumble sale". Sigh.
I make light of it and tell people I just have more important things to do in life, but if I'm honest with you, sometimes I don't want to go home from work at the end of the day because I feel depressed at all the mess. I would like to have a beautiful home that I could welcome people into, but I struggle to get myself washed and dressed in the mornings a lot of the time, so cleaning is unsurprisingly not a priority.

Thursday 16 September 2010

I am a person with more than one person in them. The old term for it was 'Multiple Personality Disorder' but it's called 'Dissociative Identity Disorder' (DID) nowadays which is fine by me because 'DID' sounds a lot less like crazy. I am still getting my head around it all. When my clinical psychologist first talked to me about it I thought of all the typical scenarios you imagine when you think of someone with Multiple personalities. I was seein a middle aged woman skipping down the street in a school uniform and pigtails and then later going for a drink in the pub wearing overalls and a tartan shirt and burping and farting and trying to pull a woman. I thought I couldn't possibly have this disorder as I'm quite aware of my mood shifts etc and I definitely don't have any overalls; but I am learning that it's not just so explicit as that. DID can be more subtle and for me, it is subtle yet distinct. I would like to tell you more about this but yet I'm already aware that having several opinions and views going on in my head at the one time, may make for a blog that is inconsistent and contradictory to itself.
On one particular day I may be able to give you a wonderful insight into DID, the next I may completely deny its existence.
I hope you will find this interesting anyway and perhaps it will help me to learn more about who's who in my mixed up world inside my head. Please bear with me (us) though and I will try to bear with myself. I predict that there are parts you may never hear from on this blog as there are parts that don't like much reflection or writing, but I will talk about as much as I am aware of.
But for now, sleep is needed.