Tag: therapy

New Directions, Graduating Therapy!

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I know I said this before, but I’m going in a new direction on this blog.

I have learned a lot and graduated from therapy, and I (maybe paradoxically) no longer feel like I have the expertise to advise anyone in mental health. While I had a lot of KNOWLEDGE about mental health (and especially dissociation), it wasn’t the same as wisdom. Obviously, graduating from therapy doesn’t mean that I am perfect, but I am definitely capable of putting into practice what I have learned– which is mainly that we need to feel our repressed feelings. Mine is generally anger. Even if I struggle, I usually have a much better sense of what exactly I’m upset about, which used to be a big hurdle for me. I would often feel nebulously Upset and be unable to figure out why or what to do about it. Even just figuring out the truth about my emotions and their roots can be powerful, and often neutralizes the emotional problem.

I said before that I wanted to write about masculinity, from the perspective of a trans guy. (Not necessarily the same as writing about being trans.) However, I am not the expert on that either.

So what direction AM I taking?

I’m going to write about whatever I’m thinking about. As someone who used to be a professional writer, I always think that I have to be monetize-able and professional on my blog. Fuck that. That doesn’t mean, however, that I am going to use this as a public diary. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I am more interested in sharing my thoughts than my feelings. I do a lot of reading and research and I’m interested in sharing that.

Lately, most of what I’ve been thinking about is witchcraft and paganism. If that is something you’d like to read about, stick around!

I’m also going to grad school in January 2024 so I’m sure I’ll have lots of thoughts to share then. My major will be Library Science. I’ve been working in libraries for a total of like 7 years, so I feel pretty qualified to move up; I just need the degree.

Currently Reading: Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud (a re-read of a favorite!)

Thoughts on My Will (With a Capital W)

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My psychodynamic therapy journey has focused a lot on my Will. Will is defined, by my therapist, as what I want, but in a way that truly benefits me. It’s not just doing whatever I feel like; it’s doing what’s best for me personally and what matches my true self.

Through a process of questioning, we came to the hard-to-hear conclusion that most of the things that I do, I do to please my abusers. Of course, I don’t do everything my parents would want, to the letter. (After all, I am transgender– my parents are definitely weird about that.)

But yes, this includes my getting better journey. I go to therapy and try my damnedest because I know my parents want me to be more functional and “normal.” (But what kind of a goal is that?)

After therapy, I was given the homework of listening to my body for when it says “yes” to something. It doesn’t happen super often, and my “no” is much louder, but it did happen a few times over the course of the week.

One of the rather strange things I discovered is that I want to do witchcraft relating to bees. I love bees, guys!

This whole thing is actually great news to me. Now that I’ve realized I do so many things in service to my parents, I can start figuring out what I truly want. I am excited to discover more about myself!

On Turning 30

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To be honest, my twenties sucked.

Sometimes, getting out of a shitty environment can be “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” I started out the decade in a four-year-long abusive relationship. Then I moved back home to finish my undergrad degree, where I was also abused by my parents. I started a freelance writing career which was absolutely awful (more about that in this post) and, to get out of my parents’ house, started a situation-ship and moved in with him into a dilapidated church owned by my abuser’s best friend. We went through -11 degree winters with no heat. I continued to try to make a freelance writing career happen, even though I spent most of my time apologizing to clients for handing work in late because I couldn’t make my brain behave. I did sex work despite my history of sexual abuse. And for ten years after I came out as a transgender man, I made no progress in my medical transition.

I have small pangs of regret sometimes when I think about my twenties, as if I had wasted a decade, but my thirties are so far a vast improvement. My environment is much healthier, but more importantly, my brain is much healthier. Nothing is ever perfect, and it would be a waste of time trying to make it that way, but I am surrounded by people who care about me, even if they’re struggling too. My rented house has central heating, and central air conditioning as well. I have a job with a steady schedule, which helps me immensely, and I have plans to go to grad school in the same field and get started with a career I can be proud of. I started testosterone, and I’m working on getting top surgery. Probably most importantly, I have found a therapist who has actually helped me improve.

My knees don’t work, and I still can’t drive, but I am much happier.

April 2023 State of the Blog

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When I started this blog, I intended it to be focused on improving one’s mental health. I had a lot to say on the subject. I am an intellectual-izer (I made that word up just now) and, once diagnosed in my twenties with Major Depression and PTSD, had made it my life’s mission to learn about the mental illnesses that plagued me and stopped me from living the life I wanted. I became an armchair expert, which I will not discount— I don’t generally think a lack of formal education makes one’s expertise invalid, after all.

But recently, in my journeys with psychodynamic therapy and actually improving from my treatment for the first time, I have realized that I don’t actually know all that much about mental health. This Beginner’s Mind (or Socratean realization that I only know that I know nothing) has helped me make strides in my recovery by reminding me not to be set in my ways. Knowledge is not necessarily wisdom, and knowing the difference between dopamine and serotonin did not make me any happier or more functional. Obviously, despite all my research, I still had a lot to learn, and I want this blog to reflect that.

From now on, this blog will be loosely themed around becoming a better person. There will still be poems and book reviews and other musings and anything I feel like publishing (tbh), but I have decided I want to take the “meat and potatoes” of the blog in a new direction. There will probably still be a lot of stuff about mental and emotional health, but I also want to write about stuff like:

  • social justice (especially transgender issues)
  • being your true, authentic self
  • learning (both formally and informally)
  • anti-capitalist ethics and leftism
  • setting and achieving goals
  • healthy masculinity and what it means to be a man
  • healthy relationships (especially polyamory)
  • getting organized (especially Bullet Journaling)

On to my credentials: I have none. I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or therapist. I am not an influencer or a wildly successful business owner. I am just someone who has struggled to improve himself over the course of about 10 years.

A note on money: My job doesn’t pay all that well, but I make enough to survive. Write Mind will never involve affiliate marketing, selling ads, or upselling (beyond basic SEO to get my words seen by people who could use them). The point of Write Mind is not to make money. Any money I make will be from Patreon, in which subscribers can contribute donations freely and without coercion. If I make any resources or downloads, they will be free for anyone to use and not require an email list sign-up. If you appreciate my content and would like to be someone who helps me out, I’d love that!

If you’d like to be part of my journey, please stick around to read more!

Self Care as Bowling Bumpers

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The other day in therapy I came across a metaphor.

Doing self care (like eating regularly, staying hydrated, taking your meds on time, and resting) is like having the bumpers up when you’re bowling. If you go off course and bounce a little, it’s not a big deal.

I used to wait so long to eat that I was incapable of preparing something, so I would sit on the kitchen floor and cry until someone came across me and rescued me by making me a sandwich.

Now, if I wait a little too long to eat, the rest of my self care shores me up and I am capable of making myself something (or asking for help).

Doing the absolute most to take care of yourself will pay off in the moments that you falter.

Thoughts on Psychodynamic Therapy

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I started therapy again recently.

Therapy has never done much for me, to be completely honest. I have made a lot of progress in my seven years of recovery, but it has mainly been from a combination of medication, the support and insight of other mentally ill people, and my own damned hard work. Breakthroughs, which have always been pretty rare, seemed to happen at the kitchen table or alone in my room, not with a therapist. In fact, many of my therapists have been outright disappointing and incompetent, and I spent a lot of time teaching them about their own area of expertise. I had, for a long while, accepted that therapy was not for me.

This therapist, on the other hand, is BUILT DIFFERENT. Every single week I come away with new insight that improves my life. It’s not easy going— and I spend the majority of the sessions choked up or outright crying— but it’s finally effective.

My new therapist does psychodynamic therapy, which is not a popular type of therapy. It’s based heavily on the ideas of Freud, who until recently I considered a quack. I cannot provide a thorough definition of psychodynamic therapy as I have only just begun it, but here are some bullet points from my research:

  • Psychodynamic therapy comes from Freudian psychoanalysis, but it has been continually updated and evolved since his lifetime.
  • Psychoanalysis was super intense and often involved five days a week of therapy. Psychodynamic therapy involves much less of a weekly time commitment.
  • Unlike psychoanalysis, which necessitated the stereotypical couch, psychodynamic therapy just needs two chairs for the participants. This change reflects the newer therapy’s more equal balance of power.
  • Much of the focus is on the relationship between the client and the therapist, which is seen as a reflection of other relationships.
  • It deals with repressed emotions and the subconscious, as well as psychological defenses that help us avoid unpleasant feelings and experiences.
  • Rather than focusing on quick skills that target symptoms (like CBT or DBT), this form of therapy tries to make deep, lasting changes.
  • Like many therapies, an emphasis is placed on childhood experiences and how they have shaped the client’s life.
  • Dream analysis may be used.

I don’t know if my therapist is so great because of the psychodynamic framework, or if he’s just really good at his profession. It’s probably a combination of both. He goes above and beyond when it comes to learning and perfecting his craft, and it has paid off in improvements to MY life.

If you have done psychodynamic therapy and you want to let me know how it went for you, you can comment or email me at joelsherwoodblogger@gmail.com !

Motivation Hack

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Last week I decided to discuss motivation issues with my therapist again, which had previously gone poorly after he said that nobody does anything they don’t want to do, which confused and irritated me. Then I figured out he was re-framing things and also telling the truth.

Even when I have mixed feelings on something and would RATHER rot in bed, I’m doing it because there is some reason I WANT to do it.

For example, I do dishes because I WANT to help out the other people in my house. I go to work because I WANT to live independently.

This re-framing helped me hugely. Whenever I felt that internal resistance that says “lay in bed forever and starve,” I would say to myself “I WANT to take a shower because I want to be clean. I would even include fun stuff like “I WANT to make tea because it’s warm.”

I was really happy with this for like three days, but unfortunately the magic has started to wear off, so I have now switched to “I’m CHOOSING to do … because …” and it feels almost as good and is maybe a little more validating of my ambivalence.

I hope this helps someone else!

Exposing Exposure Therapy

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Exposure therapy has become completely misunderstood as it has entered the mainstream, even by some involved in mental health.

Many would expose a person to their trigger, with or without consent, and just hope that they eventually stop freaking out and realize it “isn’t so bad.” This approach often involves a loss of trust and feelings of control over the situation, and usually ends in dissociation and pretending that the trigger is no longer activating.

Instead, exposure therapy must involve a mental and emotional reframing of the trigger, and also must be completely consensual. For example, dead/dying or abused animals were a huge trigger of mine. I’ve been working through that by voluntarily joining a Facebook group that focuses on death and “vulture culture,” including animal bones and preserved wet specimens. By reframing the trigger as fascinating instead of horrifying, I have empowered myself, and I am capable of remaining calm when faced with it.

On Creativity and Healing

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As I have said before, freewriting doesn’t work for my mental health. Instead, I decided a few months ago that I wanted a structured journal to keep track of my moods and symptoms. (I have a separate Bullet Journal, which I use for planning, habit-tracking, and tasks, and then I have my more-recently-started “symptom” journal in a different notebook.)

I highly recommend symptom journaling so that you know where your headspace is at. Tracking your symptoms and/or moods can help you find patterns that you may otherwise miss. Our emotions (especially when we struggle with mental health) can feel gigantic and like they last forever, when in reality they change like the tides and can often be very different from day to day. That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t downward or upward trends! Seeing those trends can help us do damage control (in the form of self care) or even just enjoy good moods while they last. I feel much more in control of my life when I journal briefly about my symptoms.

To do a daily symptom journal, I split two adjacent pages into three sections. Each of the six daily sections in my symptom journal has about five lines devoted to it, which allows me to elaborate a little while still keeping the entry brief enough to be useful at a glance. (I almost never run out of room.)

Things I write about daily:

  1. How I felt that day. Obviously not all my emotions are symptoms, but I write about them all in my symptom journal anyway. Giving myself a little bit of room to be descriptive allows me to record causes of my mood (“had nightmares and woke up very dissociated”) or complexities (“had some anxiety in the afternoon but felt okay for most of the day”).
  2. Any physical symptoms or problems I had. Maybe my knees hurt, I had a stomachache because I ate too much curry, or I slept badly. (Often I write that I forgot to eat. Oops!)
  3. What I did to solve/help any symptoms/problems (physical or mental) and how well my strategy worked. Maybe I took ibuprofen for my knee pain, but it didn’t really do anything. Or maybe I was depressed but I felt a little more energetic after a nap. I don’t always have anything to write in this section, but I think it’s really important to track how your experiments go!
  4. What I thought about that day. This is one of my favorite sections. It’s my chance to write about what was going on in my mind, which (to me) is always interesting! It also gives me a sense that I’m moving forward in my life. For example, maybe I thought about what to write on my blog and came to the conclusion that I should write about journaling, or maybe I thought about what to build with a certain material in Minecraft. Often, I’m thinking about recovery strategies I want to integrate into my life, and when I journal about them, I don’t lose any potentially brilliant ideas!
  5. My happiest or best moment of the day. (It doesn’t have to break through the depression barrier to be the happiest moment of the day, since it’s all relative.) Often, this will be spending time with my boyfriend.
  6. Any information my alters have told me that day. Since it’s hard to keep track of multiple people in the same brain, I have a section devoted to that. For example, [LITTLE] told me the other day he doesn’t like green beans, so as a system we’ve decided to not force ourselves to eat the green beans languishing in the freezer.

Every Sunday, I do a weekly summary for each of the sections. I draw an extra page with my usual six sections, and write about how the week went and my happiest moment!

Some other ideas you may want to try if you pick up a similar journaling habit:

-Gratitude journaling. This was not helpful for me, but many people swear by it.

-Therapy summaries. If you go to therapy, you can write quick summaries of what you talked about at your appointments. You might also record your homework for next session, if that’s something that you and your therapist have decided on.

-Rate your mood out of 10. I really struggle to rate my mood, because it feels so much more complex than a number. Maybe I had a good morning but got depressed in the evening, or I was anxious but hopeful. However, this works for a lot of people, and having quantitative data on your mood can be really helpful when dealing with mental health professionals. (You may want to use color-coding instead!)