River: Insight of the day

[mdlbear]

As with so many insights, today's comes from a conversation with my dear, wise friend pocketnaomi: I'm pretty sure now that social phobia came before -- and undoubtedly helped cause -- my chronic depression.

Stands to reason. It's another damned feedback loop, of course: I'm afraid of people, so I'm lonely, and that makes me depressed, and that makes me feel both worthless and hopeless, and... You get the idea.

Well, OK; I have no idea whether it's actually social phobia, avoidant personality disorder, low self-esteem, or some combination. Or something else altogether. Low self-esteem, certainly. Something more to explore if I ever get up the nerve.

Depression is mostly just a chemical imbalance: I know how to deal with that. This other stuff is thoroughly wrapped up with my self-image. I don't have any idea about how to work on that. Most likely it would involve more contact with people, and, well...

Comments

[victorthecook.livejournal.com]

Easy stages. It's like picking loose a knot -- you tug a little here, push a little there, and see what the knot looks like now.

You're working on the depression; the knot will change shape as you do that.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Working on these things takes time--and you're making a lot of progress, it sounds like. Insights have been coming nearly every month; I had the impression some people struggle for years with this type of thing.

I wonder if maybe you're used to problems you can make steady, visible progress fixing, and can fix in a few days or weeks? In that case this might feel like you're making no progress when in fact you're doing quite well.

[mdlbear]

There's some of that, of course. But I'm also used to problems I mostly understand. Here I'm working in an area that I not only don't understand at all, but have been completely staying away from.

Sort of like the way I feel about history and sports, only worse.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I am not a psychologist, but my bet would be that the two biggest factors are low self-esteem and social phobia, which have led to chronic depression. It's a "chicken-and-egg" situation, though - did the low self-esteem cause the social phobia, or the other way around? This is stuff you're going to have to work through with both your individual therapist and your therapy group. I know that CBT (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy). the current technique for social phobia, is pretty much like the treatment for other phobias - a combination of exposing you to minor degrees of what you fear, until you can tolerate that, and then gradually increasing it, along with demonstrating rationally that the thing(s) you fear will not actually harm you. Again, though, I am not a psychotherapist, and I don't even play one on TV...

[mdlbear]

Yes, I was looking up CBT on Wikipedia last night. I can't even visualize how the exposure part would work, except for maybe some kind of role-playing. Maybe homework? Damned if I know. I guess that's what experts are for.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

It happens that my son the psychologist uses CBT quite a bit. I think what they might have you do is something like setting yourself a time for you to phone someone, maybe once a week to start with, and possibly a different person each time. (Yes, that's what I was trying to do in a very informal way. If you need a person to call, I'm always available after about 6 PM Pacific time.) They might also have you practice getting involved in some other kinds of social situations - perhaps the group therapy might include this.

[mdlbear]

*nods*

Yes, they said that group is a safe place to try different kinds of interaction, but I still don't know what that means, and I haven't seen anyone doing it.

My one encounter with psychodrama -- and I was just an observer -- merely confirmed my long-standing aversion to anything resembling acting, improvisation, or role-playing.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

You've only been to the group, what, twice? There are probably a lot of things the group is going to do that you haven't seen yet.

I don't mind "acting", as in performing in a play. But roleplaying just doesn't work for me. My son has played various tabletop RPGs since he was eleven or so, and when he was in high school, he joined a LARP, where he was very active until he graduated from college and moved (temporarily) to Sunnyvale. When he first started playing the LARP, he wasn't old enough to drive, so I drove him to and from the weekend events. Everybody was always urging me to join and play - I understood the terminology and concepts, I'm good at costuming, I'm even good at improvisation. But I just don't feel any particular need to pretend to be a half-orc tavern wench (and nobody would ever mistake me for an elf, even if I wore prosthetic ears).

[mdlbear]

Three times, I think.

Can't act, can't improvise.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

You can't really make too many generalizations about what can happen in the group if you've only done it three times.

And, when helping my son unload his gear at the LARP site, on several occasions I had to put on a white headband to indicate that I was "out of game", because my everyday clothing was getting mistaken for "garb". While I might well use a T-shirt and leggings as the foundation of a costume, if I intended it as garb I'd have been wearing different shoes, a whole lot more jewelry, and probably my purple lamé vest...