Weekly Gratitude: My Coping Skills, and Three Things I Like About Myself

I've decided to turn this week's Gratitude Post into an exercise from my Mood Action Plan.  Last August, my MCBT class was assigned to make a list of three things we like about ourselves.  Things that we probably forget when we get depressed. 


This post feels awkward to write in some ways.  Depression is inextricably twined with negative self-image -- that's the whole point of this exercise -- but the way we're brought up makes it even harder.  Naming what we like about ourselves feels so much like bragging, like arrogance; and every six year old knows that nobody likes a bragger.

Women especially are socialized to play down their own abilities and give credit to others.  We're much better at telling other people they're awesome than appreciating our own awesomeness.  But, again, that's the whole point of doing this.  To remember that we're awesome, even when we don't feel awesome.  To hang on to three things we like about ourselves, no matter how hard our illness tries makes use forget them.

In my case, the problem is not really that I forget that I have traits that I like. I just get to feeling like they don't (and will never) do me a damn bit of good.  So I decided to change the terms of the assignment: I would look at how these traits do me plenty of good, because they're the ones that I use to cope with my mental illness.

I am grateful for my sense of humor, my creativity, and my curiosity. 



The First Thing I Like About Myself: My Sense of Humor

This was the easiest one to come up with.  When I'm depressed, my sense of humor -- which is pretty dark anyway -- gets pretty black and bitter.  Which happens to be the way I like my coffee ... or used to, back when I could drink it without getting depressed (see what I mean?).  Seeing the humor in the darkest of situations serves to illuminate it.  I'm able to see what's necessary to make it better; or, if I can't make it better, humor will lighten the burden.

For instance, my sense of humor was of enormous assistance last winter.  I mean, come on! I covered a cabinet in foil because it was menacing me.  Whatever else it may be, that's pretty damn funny.  Then I learned that this is technically "psychotic behavior" in spite of the fact that I "had insight" (that is, I knew I was behaving irrationally).

At that point, I was pretty scared, and in shock, and a whole lot of other things.  The word "psychotic" is pretty scary, especially when it's being applied to you.  But a small part of me was still laughing its ass off.  Great good gods, here I was, covering things in foil, and it was because I was actually psychotic.  I had no idea crazy people actually did that!

Finding something to laugh at provided a valuable counterpoint to the upwelling of emotions I experienced when my pdoc used the word "psychotic".  It would have been so easy to sink into a deeper depression, to lose all hope for recovery, to completely give up on myself.  My sense of humor saved me. Without it, I would have been completely overwhelmed.  Gratitude to my sense of humor.

The Second Thing I Like About Myself: My Creativity

Being a creative person means having a vivid imagination.  When I read fiction, I become a participant in the story.  The characters in my favorite books and stories are as real to me, in their own way, as the people I know in real life.  Having a creative, vivid imagination also means that strange ideas show up in my brain on a pretty regular basis.  For instance, what would happen if I suddenly found myself on the Left Bank in 1920's Paris, and met Picasso and Hemingway and Stein and Toklas, and good ol' Alice B. made us mushroom soup, but chose the ... um ... special mushrooms?  (If the page takes too long to load, you'll just trust me when I say that it's pretty bizarre.)

What I'm getting at is that when I had my psychotic episode, it was unprecedented, but not completely so.  The idea that I would just up and cover something in foil is within the realm of normal for me.  For instance, when my husband came back from the business trip he was on and saw the cabinet, he was a bit puzzled, but at first he assumed it was an art project.

There were important differences between my paranoid delusions about the photon-destroying cabinet and my creative ideas.  The delusions felt like they came from a similar, yet older, deeper, more intense part of my brain.  I felt compelled to act on them in a way that I don't with my creative ideas.  There was also an element of anxiety attached to the experience, because I was already having delusions about losing all the light in the universe. 

My psychotic experience, by definition, didn't make sense -- but I was able to contextualize it within the context of something that did -- my many previous experiences generating creative ideas.  Mad props, creativity.


The Third Thing I Like About Myself: My Curiosity

After the initial shock of my diagnosis wore off, I was able to rely on another coping trait.  I'm curious, and I love to learn about new things.  Neuropsychology is one of my favorite topics.  I knew that the more I learned, the less scared I would be, and I'd be in a better position to take an active role in my recovery.  So I started googling. 

My curiosity has led me to learn a lot about mood disorders in the past year.  I've learned that there's a proposed change to the DSM to include a "mood spectrum", with unipolar depression and bipolar at each end, instead of trying to make a sharp distinction between the two.  This could have important implications for treatment of these illnesses.  More importantly,  I've learned just how problematic the current DSM (DSM-IV) is.  Turns out that starting with DSM-III, diagnoses needed to be coded for the convenience of insurance companies.  Here I was, thinking that it been carefully put together on the basis of clinical validity! 

Learning this validated my own experience with my mental illness.  I was trying to understand it in terms of the DSM checklist, which didn't include daily mood cycles, and didn't include delusions that aren't quite mood-congruent.  I've come to agree with John McManamy, who is in the process of writing a People's DSM.  It's based on -- get this --the actual experiences people have with their illnesses.  Truly radical.  Thanks to my curiosity, I sought out information that has made me empowered to define my own experience with my illness

Last but not least, my curiosity led me to ask the question, do psychotic people really make foil hats?  The answer is no.  And that brings me back to my sense of humor.