I have some homework to do over the next couple of weeks. If you didn't know, I am going to a therapist - a psychologist type therapist - because my GP said I likely had an anxiety attack at the start of last month at work. I couldn't speak to the customer, couldn't move my hands or the rest of the body, blacked out and started convulsing. Off to hospital, off the to GP, off to the shrink.
I have a history of seizures, but the one last month was different inasmuch as after I came to, my muscles and head felt normal - with the usual grand mal seizure trick, my body and head feel like they have been through a tight wringer, body aches and headaches all around.
Anyways, I went to the shrink yesterday - I was bumped forward a couple of weeks, and the evening before, at 6pm, I got the call to ask whether I wanted to bring it forward. Confirming that I was on a 'mental health plan' as I was getting on a packed bus was probably not a good look though - although I could have been a doctor discussing a patient. Nah, I don't look like a doctor at all I am pretty sure.
Yesterday in the session, I spoke about my relationships with my family, what feelings I have for my birth family - I am adopted you see, and haven't been in contact with the birth lot since they rang out of the blue on my seventeenth birthday - and how I was at school, a B to B+ student making the effort for A grades I think I was. When I put the effort in that is, when I didn't put effort in, or didn't care, well. Then onto the suicide attempts at age seventeen...
The guy asked a series of questions trying to drill down to why I came up as highly anxious in the GP questionnaire - do I regularly feel suddenly out of breath, heart rate changing suddenly, to the do you get anxious about the possibility of anxiety attacks. I meandered through the questionnaire I think, but when he came right out and asked me what I feel makes me anxious it was straight off the top of my head.
Failure, rejection, relationships. In that exact order.
I don't feel a failure at the moment, but have the feeling if things start going wrong, they could go wrong spectacularly - the shrink put in the right word of what I was grasping around for, vulnerability. Yes, that's how I feel.
A general feeling of flatness has pervaded me for a while - he tried to get me to quantify how long it had been that I had been feeling this way. In a general sense, perhaps since before going to Canada, late 2002/2003? Of course, there have been ups, and there have been downs in that time, but overall, the feeling of flatness. Perhaps buttoning myself down the last two years on the finances thing as well has assisted that feeling.
I 'allot' myself times to be happy and such - trips, holidays and the like - whereas in Brisbane itself, I just make it up as best I can - perhaps.
He brought the whiteboard out to play, and did a graph of my unhappiness, with 1993, 2001 and 2003 the big dips. Homework for next appointment is to write out how 2001 and 2003 went wrong, think of the worst possible moments, write down how I felt, what I did, how I remember it, and rank about twenty emotions out of 1 to 100 as to how I was feeling at the time.
Fingers crossed, I will stick with making progress with this one.
Paul
I have a history of seizures, but the one last month was different inasmuch as after I came to, my muscles and head felt normal - with the usual grand mal seizure trick, my body and head feel like they have been through a tight wringer, body aches and headaches all around.
Anyways, I went to the shrink yesterday - I was bumped forward a couple of weeks, and the evening before, at 6pm, I got the call to ask whether I wanted to bring it forward. Confirming that I was on a 'mental health plan' as I was getting on a packed bus was probably not a good look though - although I could have been a doctor discussing a patient. Nah, I don't look like a doctor at all I am pretty sure.
Yesterday in the session, I spoke about my relationships with my family, what feelings I have for my birth family - I am adopted you see, and haven't been in contact with the birth lot since they rang out of the blue on my seventeenth birthday - and how I was at school, a B to B+ student making the effort for A grades I think I was. When I put the effort in that is, when I didn't put effort in, or didn't care, well. Then onto the suicide attempts at age seventeen...
The guy asked a series of questions trying to drill down to why I came up as highly anxious in the GP questionnaire - do I regularly feel suddenly out of breath, heart rate changing suddenly, to the do you get anxious about the possibility of anxiety attacks. I meandered through the questionnaire I think, but when he came right out and asked me what I feel makes me anxious it was straight off the top of my head.
Failure, rejection, relationships. In that exact order.
I don't feel a failure at the moment, but have the feeling if things start going wrong, they could go wrong spectacularly - the shrink put in the right word of what I was grasping around for, vulnerability. Yes, that's how I feel.
A general feeling of flatness has pervaded me for a while - he tried to get me to quantify how long it had been that I had been feeling this way. In a general sense, perhaps since before going to Canada, late 2002/2003? Of course, there have been ups, and there have been downs in that time, but overall, the feeling of flatness. Perhaps buttoning myself down the last two years on the finances thing as well has assisted that feeling.
I 'allot' myself times to be happy and such - trips, holidays and the like - whereas in Brisbane itself, I just make it up as best I can - perhaps.
He brought the whiteboard out to play, and did a graph of my unhappiness, with 1993, 2001 and 2003 the big dips. Homework for next appointment is to write out how 2001 and 2003 went wrong, think of the worst possible moments, write down how I felt, what I did, how I remember it, and rank about twenty emotions out of 1 to 100 as to how I was feeling at the time.
Fingers crossed, I will stick with making progress with this one.
Paul
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