A Little Help: Part One

I've always prided myself on being resilient. Not to say I've had to overcome horrendous obstacles in the course of my life, but there have been a few twists and turns along the way that seemed pretty hairy to me at the time; a few wall-slams; you know, life. But I had been able to reliably bounce back over and over again.

Then, a few months back, not long after my sister died, I found myself suddenly feeling all my different mental and physical wounds and bruises much more deeply than ever before. I was still functioning, still getting up each morning and doing my job at work, but everything was an awful effort, and I spent much of my day cycling through anger, morbid sadness, or just dull pain.

Of course, I still had some moments of pleasure, but they seemed painfully more and more short-lived. Meanwhile, the darkness was deepening.

So, I took what felt like a plunge and got a referral through Kaiser for a therapist. I didn't know exactly what to expect, even though I had seen a psychiatrist for about a year when I was 16 - 17, but of course that may as well have been during a previous life.

The person I was referred to turned out to be an older woman - meaning, older than me - which I realized mattered to me. Honestly, if someone younger than me had tried to counsel or question me, I would have probably thought, "what the fuck do YOU know?" And I think I've always found it easier to talk to women than men. (Probably because, by and large, they're smarter and they interrupt less often.)

In my favor, I'm a good patient, meaning that I'm open to being treated and I think the idea of talking through difficult, painful thoughts and feelings in order to gain perspective and to figure out good ways to cope with them is a sensible one. (Turns out, not everyone does.)

Without going into a lot of detail, and to keep the story moving, I'll just say that I've made some progress,  partly because, not unlike Dorothy in Oz, I knew most of the answers all along.

• Some painful things really did happen to me, and to my wife, including loved ones killing themselves, other loved ones dying of natural causes, financial calamities, and our own aging and escalating chronic pain. (Add in our children growing up and leaving home into the mix as well).
• Over time, I had devised ways to make these experiences even worse than they had to be, by either blaming myself for not being a better friend, brother, son, husband, father, human being, whatever, or by calling myself a crybaby, or both.
• And I was also wasting more and more time in a state of anxiety, ranging from vague apprehension all the way to near-paralyzingly dread, in anticipation of every conceivable bad outcome. Again, few of my fears were entirely delusional; they were based on things that had happened before and could happen again - like getting laid off - but they had begun to resist my efforts to rationally defuse them.

As I talk these things through, or write them down, they lose some of their power, some of their density, their awful clouded weight. And I begin to see clearly again. The pain is still there, the losses still happened, the future is still uncertain. But I can breathe, and I begin to remember how much I've  learned over all these years. And though I certainly fucked some things up along the way, I also got - and continue to get - a lot of things right.

- To be continued. Of course. -