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.

[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...