Mind Control

I've seen the same psychiatrist since 2002, almost exclusively to prescribe meds to treat my depression.  But meds alone are rarely sufficient in treating depression.  One also needs counseling, to put one's mind out there for observation and critique with the goal of asserting some kind of control over one's thoughts and feelings.  Often, this control depends on uncovering the roots of depressive thoughts and feelings, of getting down to the bottom of things and facing things unfaced before.  And successful delving depends in turn on honestly speaking about oneself and trusting the counselor's ability to sort through misleads and avoidances until both arrive at some degree of truth.

My first counselor, 2002 - 2003, helped identify a main root of my depression but did little to stem my self-destructive behavior.  He said he was frightened of my intellect, though that may have been a counselor ruse.  Yet he did seem nervous about speaking, worried that I was critiquing how well he spoke or formed his thoughts into words.  I enjoyed our weekly meetings, enjoyed spending an hour talking about nothing but me, but apart from getting to that one root, we were not that productive together.

My second counselor, 2003 - 2007, was much more effective in helping me live more positively, even to the point of my living med-free from 2007 until 2011.  He was older than my first counselor; in fact, he retired in 2007, one of the reasons I stopped seeing a counselor.  One of the best things he did with me was to practice EMDR therapy (google it) to help assuage my emotional responses to certain thoughts.  He was not afraid of me in any way, was not reticent in challenging me in many areas.  Under his care, I came to see depression as primarily a way of feeling - I was going to feel bad, but that was ok - and found the strength to defuse those feelings, so that I considered myself "cured."

My third and current counselor (2012 - ?) holds a PhD and specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).  Together we develop disciplines to control my thoughts and feelings, which is actually quite difficult as I'm sure you know.   For instance, currently I tend to have distressing thoughts and feelings about my soft and squishy organs, 'cause I'm absolutely certain they're whats going to kill me some day.  If I let my mind go, I tend to seep sweat over pancreatic and esophageal cancer, both hard to diagnose early and, consequently, both extremely deadly.  I tend to see every headache or dizzy spell as signs of inoperable brain cancer, and find my self terrified by the certainty that I'm going to hear a doctor soon say, "There's nothing we can do for you."  I find myself wishing I was a spider-like creature, with a hard, hard carapace or exoskeleton, impermeable and cold, with a pendulous sac holding all those soft, squishy, swampy and vulnerable organs, and that by some miracle or special spider ability I could slice away that sac, watch it fall away forever, and survive as a hard, spindly, cold and rigid being with no softness (read "weakness") whatsoever.  CBT helps me first to turn such thoughts off, to think instead about all the good things my innards do for me (giving me life among the most significant).  Then, CBT helps me to face the scary feelings, to experience them, to realize that feeling them is not killing me and, so, to defuse a lot of their power.

Mind control comes hard to us, so we all live at the mercy of our minds.  For most of us, our minds rule benignly, but for depressives, our minds are vicious despots, out to get us at the very least, suicidal at the worst.  What control we have is tenuous, susceptible to accident, or illness, or changes in life circumstances, or media, or diet.  My control unraveled after summiting Mt. Madison in late July, 2011, but that's the subject of another post.  Thank you for reading.