Therapy Chronicles №1
Doing 3 to 5 Tasks Everyday
Hello, Lovelies! If you've read some of my previous articles then you probably know that I'm in therapy for my mental illnesses, whoop whoop! My mental health takes a lot of work and I need somewhat of a team to help me manage it. I've been to therapy and workshops and was admitted to the hospital. I see my current therapist twice a week to do EMDR therapy and the work I'm doing now is better than anything I’ve done. Seriously my current therapist is fantastic and seeing her has started to change my life. By no means am I in remission but I am progressing.
Because therapy and reflecting on my work there has proven to be so helpful I’ve decided to start a Therapy Chronicle. In these articles, I’ll talk about what I learned, the emotions that come spilling out, and all the ins and outs of my therapy journey. I hope you enjoy it!
For the sake of privacy let’s call my therapist “Amy”. In our last session, we talked about how I’ve been feeling so low and have this strange brain fog. Amy asked me what part of myself is feeling this way and that's when the work began. I closed my eyes and went into my emotions trying to decipher what part of myself is feeling foggy.
Trying to locate exactly what part of yourself is unwell can be complicated so I need to be patient and trust myself. At first, I identified a part that is asking me to sleep constantly, to disassociate from life, and telling me that I need a break. Amy asked why. What part of myself is making this sleepy one act up? I looked deeper.
I found the fixer part of me. This part handles everything, all my school work, all the anxiety, all the reasonable and logical goings on of my life. That's when I found that this part of me is out of commission. It was telling me that it's got too much on its plate and it was overwhelmed.
Voila! Amy and I agreed that the foggy part of me was trying to alert me to a problem with my fixer, which then led us to wonder why again. Why am I feeling overwhelmed? That question can be answered pretty quickly, I’ve got school, friends, family, chronic pain, and mental illness. These things add up.
We found the problem so now Amy and I needed to find the solution. When I am overwhelmed and stretched too thin I simultaneously think nothing I accomplish is enough this makes me want to sleep and disassociate so that I don't have to deal with anything. It's a loop of unhelpful thoughts.
Amy said that I have a lot on my plate and work hard to get things done although my negative thoughts don't allow me to believe I’m doing a good job, I am. She said that for the next little while she wants me to try to write down 3 to 5 things that I can do the following day. These things include eating and getting dressed and any other mundane task you can think of.
Doing 3 to 5 things isn't the hard part here; the target problem this will work on is feeling like I’ve accomplished things. By doing these few tasks I’ll have to praise myself for each one and build a sense of accomplishment. I’ll also have to constantly remind myself that I did things today and change the negative wording of “I did enough” to “I did a good job”.
See, each time I say I did enough I’m amounting my worth to how much I do instead of simply doing my best and being proud of that. After we came up with a plan and our session was done I went home and relaxed because I worked hard in therapy that session and I did a good job.
If you enjoyed this article and think that you'd like to read more please leave a comment, some claps, or a follow! Have a lovely day!
