I'm back!

Sorry for the delay...it's been a crazy month. Yeah I took a month off, and it feels so irresponsible to say that - but when I say I needed it, I'm not kidding.

It's hard for me to write super personal stuff here anymore, because some people will take vulnerability and exploit it. One bad apple spoils a whole bunch, am I right?

But last fall I started DBT (dialectical behavior therapy). I am very active in my mental health pursuits, not passive at all, and have spent years seeking healing but nothing ever quite clicked. From CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) to just regular old boring talk therapy, I learned a few things along the way - including being encouraged to test for ADHD - but I didn't feel much change happening. So I paused for a bit.

When I was ready to try again, I used Manhattan Alternative's website to find a provider who could be a good fit. I reached out to someone, who had no availability but they recommended someone else for me...and it's been the best match I could have asked for. A little like dating, no?

This winter was really, really hard. I started therapy a couple months before election day, and timing of the election perhaps just happened to align with the shaking up of my inner self. I spent the last several months feeling the worst I have in years, and it all felt like a waste of time. Little did I know I was finally unpacking something, slowly but surely.

I guess to give a very unqualified description of DBT is that we have these two minds - a rational, logical, survival side, and a more emotional side that can be quite turbulent. The idea is that the venn diagram overlaps in what is called your Wise Mind. Where rational survival AND being in touch with your emotions coexist. People from various backgrounds, especially those with history of child abuse (put your hand up!), trauma and addiction, tend to create a HARD separation between these two, and lack the Wise Mind crossover.

Without going into a sad backstory, as children my siblings and I were forced to go into logical/rational survival mode. My trauma response was to be super silly - and pushing down actual emotions and feelings of fear, anger, sadness, rejection, and pretending everything was fine. I had no way to express otherwise. Whereas one of my sisters became sort of cold and robotic, my coping mechanism to not feel the feelings was to goof off, I suppose. (And no one clocked the ADHD lol) But also to draw, read, make music, and excel in school. A nice distraction. This, however, also resulted in my having "night terrors" where I would have nightmares and sleep walk, doing strange things in my unconscious state, like turning lights on and off in the middle of the night and surely terrifying my parents. Not that they pursued figuring out where the fuck that was coming from.

Then came my college years, and suddenly I was free to express my emotions in ways I had not felt safe to before. Unfortunately this meant I had zero practice regulating my emotions that I had stuffed down, resulting in tumultuous relationships and overwhelming emotions that deepened my depression. I liken emotional regulation to the example of a five year old having a tantrum. As they get older, they practice letting their raw emotions out balanced with a parent or teacher or peer kind of showing them how to handle conflict without the tantrum (co-regulation). So by the time you're an adult, the idea is you've had practice and you're not crying in the grocery store anymore. Hopefully...

The emotional turmoil of being an adult with no practice pushed me back to the other side. The safer side, where I could focus on work and career, distract myself from any emotions and push them far away. This is when I became "successful." It's kind of sad actually, and I have to tell you I did not realize all of this until like two months ago. But the "happiest" time of my life, when I was high-functioning, working a fast-paced stressful job in fashion and getting promoted all the time, I was actually just so far from experiencing my inner self that I was actually miserable.

When I tell you I didn't cry for like five years, I am not joking. I could not. I did experience emotion, but I could not interact with it, if that makes any sense. I could feel sad, or disappointed, or grief (there weren't a lot of good emotions during this time lol), but I could not stay with the feeling and sit and actually FEEL it. I had not put my finger on any of this back then btw, so I didn't know what was actually going on . At that time I felt living this way was still safer than being an emotional wreck / hot mess all the time.

Maybe I'll leave the next chapter for my next post (which I promise won't be a month away this time). The chapter that describes how I came to know this, which is all very fresh btw.

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