Harriet M. Welch

The other day I read someone’s blog in which she was writing about memories she had of her father. Unfortunately they were memories of her father yelling, throwing things, and slamming doors. Unpleasant memories.

I am the mother equivalent of that father. Until my son was 9 and my daughter was 7 I was just like that. Screaming, yelling, throwing things, slamming doors. Once I slammed the door on my son’s foot and my husband had to take him to the doctor for an emergency visit because we thought he needed stitches. I don’t think about those days, purposely. I squelch those memories as best as I can.

But reading the blog brought them all back. Sure I can blame my horrible behavior on mental illness, after all it totally stopped when I went on zoloft nine years ago. But that is still no excuse. Looking back I can see that I had terrible anxiety, as well as horrible obsessive thoughts. It was somewhat of a struggle to get through the day and perhaps that made me irritable to the point of being a monster.

I feel like the most formative years of my children’s lives were ruined and who knows how this will affect them later in life. I know there is nothing I can do about it now, except perhaps to ask all new moms to get help if they feel at all like I did. There is help available and you will be doing your children a disservice if you don’t avail yourself of it.

Tags: anxiety, daughter, intrusive thoughts, mother, obsessive, parenting, son

My husband did something very stupid. It’s unethical, immoral, and I thought it was illegal, but he tells me it’s not. He told me about this on Saturday, probably only because a lot of people know about it and he thought I might hear it from someone else. What he did has destroyed his social life, and severed friendships. It’s the result of an addiction, an addiction that I didn’t know he had. I don’t really feel comfortable saying much more about it here, but he realizes that he was wrong and he wants to change.

The first thing I wanted to do when I found out about this was to talk to someone. That is unusual for me, I don’t normally turn to others for this kind of thing. But since this was about my husband I didn’t feel comfortable talking to anyone, because I didn’t want to spread the news. Yesterday when I went to work I said to the woman I work for, “I guess you heard about what my husband did.” I was under the impression that her husband knew more about my husband than he actually does. She said, “No, I haven’t heard anything.” Well, since I started the conversation I ended up telling her. I cried a little too, but she was very understanding and helpful actually. I was glad I told her.

Today when I went to therapy I was kind of relieved that I had something to talk about – my husband’s situation – although I really would have preferred that this situation didn’t exist. When I got to J’s office I sat down, and noticed a leaf on the carpet. I picked it up, and he said, “I noticed that leaf.” I threw it away, sat down, and said, “I feel better now.” He said it had been there since late yesterday afternoon. I half apologized for my obsessive nature, and we talked about that for awhile, what makes it obsessive, whether my tendencies interfere with my life, etc. Most times they don’t, but I do find that people make remarks about me and my obsessive nature, and these hurt me because I’m quite sensitive. J did make me feel like I am not so abnormal though.

Then I told him that I didn’t really like that last week he told me that my check is always the first one he receives after he sends out the bills. He said he was sorry, and then kind of reneged on the statement, saying that two or three other clients also send their checks in quickly. He asked me why I don’t want to be the first one to send in my check and I said, “Because I want to be like everyone else.” This led to a discussion of being “good enough”. I actually had a “good enough” situation last night, and I didn’t even realize it until I talked about with him today. He asked me when good enough would be good enough, and I said, “When you can get away with it.” He asked for an example and I told him that last night I was making spaghetti and meatballs for my kids for dinner, but I got home from work at 6PM and didn’t have time to make meatballs so I used premade ones from the freezer. My daughter thought they were OK, my husband even ate a couple without comment, but my son questioned me about them and said he didn’t like them. So I basically got away with it. J thought this was a positive step for me. Imagine – I’m proud of myself for using frozen premade meatballs.

Then J talked about an article he read in the paper this morning about “green showers” – how we shouldn’t use very hot water or take long showers. And he thought of me because I tend to be a “green” person. I told him this is why I don’t read the paper, I don’t need another thing to worry about. I said we hardly have any guilty pleasures left in life and I would like to enjoy my showers. He thought that was a good attitude, and a change from how I might have been a few months ago.

Then I asked if we could change the subject and I told him that my husband did something very bad. I told him the whole story, and he asked some questions, and we talked about some questions I could ask my husband, and a little about addictions.

But, you know, after looking forward to talking with him about this problem I can honestly say that I was totally underwhelmed by the whole experience. J didn’t do anything wrong, we had a nice talk about it, but I didn’t feel anything. Where’s that feeling of catharsis that I’ve heard so much about? I didn’t feel relieved, I didn’t feel guilty, I didn’t feel anything. I think I’m just the kind of person who doesn’t need to talk to other people about problems, who doesn’t feel better from talking about them, and who just works things out alone. Or maybe because I talked about this with someone else yesterday I didn’t need to talk about it again. J is going on vacation Friday, so I won’t see him again for two weeks. I’m glad we didn’t touch on anything too serious today.

Tags: different, good enough, husband, obsessive, sensitive

I made the best drink today. I used the Tazo Vanilla Rooibos chai latte concentrate (bought it at Safeway) and combined it in equal amounts with Vanilla Soy Milk (Silk brand). Heated it in a mug in the microwave. Then the ultimate taste enhancer – a shot of Amaretto liqueur. It was so yummmmmmyyyyyyy. I only had one due to the high caloric value. Light soy milk would be better. I might have some for breakfast, minus the liqueur.

Something I’ve been thinking about today. I’ve written before about my bad thoughts, thoughts that pop into my head and interfere with my thinking. Thoughts that I end up ruminating on, even though they came out of nowhere and aren’t worth spending 5 seconds on. My psychiatrist says this is OCD. So that is the perfect excuse, right? I’m not a bad person because I have these thoughts, I have OCD! A great excuse. Why aren’t I embracing this? Why would I rather think I’m a bad person, than be a person with a treatable, somewhat socially acceptable mental disorder? I’ve been thinking about that.

In the meantime, go get some of that tea. And some Amaretto.

Tags: bad, drinking, food, intrusive thoughts

So I have cut waaaaaay back on my drinking. I have had one drink in the last 10 days or so. This is due to my new obsession. I also am going to have stop cutting for a while. Summer is here, the pool opened yesterday and I don’t want cuts and scars visible for all to see. It’s bad enough that I have to cover my tattoo every day now that it’s hot out. An ankle tattoo can be seen in any outfit except long pants, and I do wear capris, shorts, skirts, etc. I only cover it when I know I’ll be seeing people I know. If I’ll be around strangers all day it’s ok.

So without the drinking and cutting, my mind needs a new dysfunction. And what is it? Food! Exercise! I’m totally obsessed with food and exercise. I was dabbling in keeping track of things on Livestrong.com, but now I’m more than dabbling. I’ve posted on the forum to get help with my weight and fat loss, and exercise methods. I carefully plan every meal and snack so that I get the proper amounts of protein/carbs/fat. I’m working on adding more protein to my meals. I have spreadsheets and grocery lists and recipes and on and on and on.

I have lost some weight, which is good. I’m mainly trying to lose fat, build muscle and become more fit. I’m trying not to be so focused on the actual weight of my body, which isn’t a bad weight for me.

But between exercising, grocery shopping, preparing food, analyzing food, entering and deleting items into livestrong.com to find the right numbers – well, there isn’t much time for anything else. I am eating very healthy and doing great with my workouts, so I feel good about that. It’s just that I feel so obsessive and it’s a bit troubling.

Tags: cutting, drinking, food, obsessive, running

All this talk of being older and suffering from mental illness at a young age got me thinking about my past history with anxiety, depression and OCD. I started having panic attacks when I was 11. I didn’t know what they were, and no one else did apparently. I had such bad anxiety growing up and in my 20’s and 30’s. My doctors would see me at my worst – crying and shaking in their offices. Convinced that I had some horrible disease and I was dying. Why didn’t any of them ever refer me to a mental health professional? They saw that I was perfectly physically healthy, so wouldn’t the next step be to examine my mental health?

It wasn’t until I saw my son suffering and I took him to a therapist to deal with his anxiety when he was 9 years old, that I got myself some help. The therapist referred us to a psychiatrist so that my son could try meds and, hard as it was to put a 9 year old on zoloft, it changed him completely (for the better!). That’s when I decided I needed the same kind of help. I finally started working with psychiatrists and meds when I turned 40. I suffered for 40 years. Do I resent the fact that no one suggested I start on some meds or some therapy when I was younger? Yeah, I guess I do. But there is no looking back now, I can only look forward.

I have different issues now than I did 20 years ago, it’s like my mental illness has changed forms. I guess I’ll be struggling with this my whole life, unless someone comes up with a cure soon. It seems the therapies and meds for depression and anxiety haven’t changed much lately.

Tags: anxiety, childhood, pdoc, son, zoloft

Since I’ve told my therapist, J, about my SI it’s all I think about. I have to fight the urge every minute of every day it seems. Before, months would go by without feeling the need. I had an excuse not to cut for awhile – I was out of the type of bandages that I like. For me, it’s not just the cutting, it’s the whole ritual around it that I need. And since I didn’t have my good band-aids I couldn’t cut. But I was at the store the other day and bought some. So now nothing is holding me back except my own internal fighting with myself. And it’s exhausting. This is all because I’ve been discussing my SI with my therapist, and now I’m obsessing about it. The fact that someone knows, the fact that it’s not a secret anymore, should I tell him every time I do it, should I tell him when I avoid doing it, should I call him if the urge gets too bad, should I just do it and get it over with. I’m having nightmares too, and I’m not sleeping well. Then I fall back to sleep early in the morning and end up sleeping too late and my whole day gets screwed up.

I was so better off before I told him about it. This certainly doesn’t make me chomp at the bit to tell him any more of my problems or secrets. I think maybe there are some people who should avoid therapy, and I’m starting to think I’m one of them.

Tags: cutting, dream, sleep

I just spent close to an hour looking up and writing down the calorie counts for the items on the menu of the restaurant that I am going to tomorrow night with a friend. I’m not sure if I am engaging in obsessive behavior, or self harming behavior. I do want to lose weight, and I had lost about 33 pounds after I went off my anti-depressants two years ago (I gained 35 pounds from the meds). But I’m left with a very poor body image and I want to continue to lose weight, even though most would say I’m at a fine weight. I’ve got plenty of fat and flab remaining however. I’ve been at a plateau for a couple of months, but in the last 2 weeks or so I’ve lost a few pounds, so I feel like I’m on a roll. But I’ve been eating a really low number of calories each day – no one would tell me that this amount of food is healthy.

So I’m exercising every day and watching my calories – that’s a good way to lose weight and get fit, right? Where does it cross the line into mentally unhealthy behavior? And the exercise is exacerbating the tendonitis in my hip which is often extremely painful – another form of self harm, perhaps?

Tags: body image, eating, food, obsessive, weight

I had a five hour drive this afternoon and spent most of it obsessing about whether or not to “graduate” (nicer way of saying “drop out”) of the fear of flying therapy group.  I am a perfectionist, and I am trying to overcome this.  I am not a perfect flyer – I have “rules” about flying.  Certain types of planes, certain airports, certain airlines are off limits.  But so far I’ve been able to get everywhere I’ve wanted to go.  I’m not a perfect flyer, but I’m a good enough flyer.  It’s hard for me not to be perfect at something, but I have to realize that in certain circumstances being good enough is just right.

I also was obsessing about what my flying therapist said to me in her email.  She makes me sound so extreme:

“No one came into the group hating flying more than you — really resenting the idea that you should need to fly– and no one in the group made more progress.”

These statements are not true.  There were people in the group who hated flying more than me – they actually had panic attacks on planes, or wouldn’t get on at all.  Many people in the group started because they had a dying parent somewhere too far to drive, or they had a child getting married far away.  As for making more progress, many many people in the group ended up being fearless flyers with no “rules” like I have.

I really don’t like these extreme statements.  My son’s therapist used to use them also.  He would say things to me like, “No parent I’ve ever worked with has worked harder to get their child the services he needs.”  Or, when I asked him not to call me “mom” anymore he said, “It’s never bothered anyone else in the 20 years I’ve been doing therapy.”  My current therapist is always trying to convince me that I think of myself in extreme ways – I’m the most ugly, the fattest, the least productive, etc etc.  That is why he always talks about the bell curve and how the chance that I am at either end in any situation is pretty slim.

But then I’ve got these other people telling me how extreme I am.  I hate flying more than anyone, I’ve made more progress than anyone, I work harder for my son than anyone, I’m more sensitive than anyone.  Maybe they are just trying to make a point, but when it comes to a therapist I don’t think that is a good strategy.  I need to be able to trust a therapist, I don’t want to hear rash generalizations, I want truth.

So maybe I should stay in the group and become a perfect flyer with no rules.  Or maybe I’m good enough.  Now I just don’t know, and I’m obsessing about what to do.  Maybe I’ll talk it over with my current therapist and he’ll put me on the bell curve somewhere in the middle.  It’s hard for me to accept this bell curve idea when I feel extreme about myself, but as usual that is because of the vast gulf between what I feel and what I think.  That’s what everything always comes back to.  Sigh.

Tags: bell curve, flying, good enough, perfection, sensitive, son's therapist, trust

This one is for Tony.  Tony wrote a series of blog entries about self-harm and I commented on one of them.  He suggested I write about my experience on my blog, so I’m taking him up on it.  This is a difficult subject though, and could be triggering so please be warned.

I had never had an urge to cut or even the knowledge of self harm until a couple of years ago.  As I’ve said I’ve suffered from anxiety my whole life, but depression had reared its ugly head about two and a half years ago.  I am a court appointed advocate for a foster child, and at the yearly conference for advocates there was a talk about self harm.  I found the idea of self harm fascinating from a psychological standpoint, and began thinking about it more and more.  As I’ve also mentioned before, my therapist and my psychiatrist believe I have obsessive disorder, I’m denying it, but it could be a reason why I ruminated so much about the idea of self harm.

I began to do a lot of reading about self harm, books, articles, blogs, and forums.  The idea began to intrigue me on a personal level – how would it make me feel physically as well as emotionally to hurt myself?  It got to the point where I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I convinced myself that if I hurt physically perhaps I would hurt less emotionally.  So one night I actually did it, and yes, it did hurt physically, but there was an unexpected physical response.  I became energized, I felt slightly manic.  I was home alone and began cleaning the kitchen fanatically and doing every bit of laundry in the house.  Some kind of endorphins must have been released.  A few days later I cut again, and then I realized that this was very wrong.  There are healthier ways to deal with emotional issues, and I didn’t cut again for a long time.

Last fall I was again going through a period of depression and the self harm ideas began again.  I used every scrap of willpower and every coping mechanism to avoid hurting myself, but I ended up repeating the behavior a couple of times.  Again, once I had done it I knew it was wrong, and I haven’t self harmed since then.  That was also the period of time when I got my tattoo.  I felt that tattooing is a socially acceptable form of self harm.  I wanted to feel that pain and it felt good.  But it felt good in a scary emotional way, I can’t really explain what it is about me that causes me to want to feel pain.

Since then I have used other ways of punishing myself – the physical ways mostly being restrictive eating behaviors and excessive exercising.  I have emotional ways of punishing myself as well.  I know it’s wrong to do what I was doing.  I don’t feel that it was an attention seeking behavior, I hid the cutting and didn’t want anyone to know or to see and I was careful.

What is most wrong about all of this is that I am not a teenager or young adult.  I am in my late 40’s, and I never read about people my age engaging in this behavior.  I know I can’t be the only one, there must be others like me out there.  I’m sure it’s rare, but I can see why it is such a secret for older people.  This is something that I feel is looked down on by medical professionals and there is a definitely a prejudice against self harm even in young people.  I have never mentioned this behavior to my psychiatrist or therapist and I don’t believe I ever will.  I’m just hoping that by getting professional help with my anxiety and depression this behavior will never return, and I’ll never have the compulsion to do this to myself again.

Tags: anxiety, cutting, eating, intrusive thoughts, obsessive, running

Yesterday I saw my psychiatrist. I normally love my psychiatrist, he is a great guy. Our appointments are only 15 minutes and he gives me my prescriptions. Yesterday, though, he irritated me. No matter what I talked about he would say something like “Obsessive people tend to think like that” or “That’s a characteristic of obsessive thinking”. He believes I have OCD, and I don’t like to think so. He wants me on meds, and I don’t feel like being on meds right now. I’ve finally gotten off of all of my anti-depressants, and all I currently take is klonopin every night before bed, which I half heartedly am cutting back on. I do wake up in the middle of the night sometimes with panic attacks, so I guess I’m depending on the klonopin to prevent that.

So he is a psychiatrist and his job is to diagnose people and give them meds to make them better, and I guess that is what he is doing. But it was irritating yesterday. We talked about my therapy, and some of my issues and feelings. He would say “But, Harriet, when you think about these things rationally don’t you see that they are not true?” I practically barked at him “What the hell does rational have to do with it, when I actually believe something due to 40 years of thinking this way?” Hello? Am I daft here? He did concede that he is glad that I am in therapy and I am going even though it gives me major anxiety and that the process is slow. Well, thanks for that, Doc. Now let me go get my rx filled.

Tags: anxiety, intrusive thoughts, klonopin, obsessive, pdoc