MRS THERAPY GIRL

*This post does not contain explicit details of traumatic events but of the lasting effects of trauma that slip into even the most mundane days.

About a year and a half ago, I got an IUD inserted before my upcoming wedding. I have a blood clotting disorder that prohibits me from using any estrogen related birth control, so my options were limited and I chose the most effective one I could (I am not ready for a pregnancy scare in my life!). Unfortunately there is this one small thing listed that women in the trials reported (truly it is the extra long list of side effects you have to search for to find): 6.4% of women struggle with “depression/depressive mood”. Even as the girl who literally never wins those giveaways where you have only a small percentage chance to win, I was somehow lucky enough to join the 6.4% and got completely knocked down by an extreme depressive episode. It was not new for me, as I have had many bouts with extreme depression since I was 15 and I have plenty of diagnoses to point toward. However, this was during my engagement and it really sucked to go from extremely happy and healthy mentally, to the lowest I had been in years.

I was lucky enough to work for an institution that allowed me to be paid 60% of my wage during an FMLA leave, which I took, in order to go through 36 rounds of TMS therapy and twice a week Cognitive Processing Therapy with my counselor. It was in CPT that I learned about the concept of traumatic experiences and their aftermath causing “stuck points” in our brains that we can trace our anxiety spiral (and sometimes our deep depressive thought we can’t shake) back to, and it has truly changed my life. Even in seasons that I am doing relatively well with my mental health journey, I will find myself having a really bad day and falling into a spiral that is connected to one or more of my stuck points (which I identified with my counselor and CPT tools).

In an attempt to use the tools I learned in CPT, I now fondly play the game “True or False? Trauma’s Version” because if I give it a catchy name, I am more likely to latch onto doing it more often. Today is one of those days I needed to play true or false with myself, because I have been struggling with a couple of my prominent stuck points for weeks and it was time to face them head on. The only way past a stuck point is through it. Today it was “True or False? I am not capable” and “True or False? I can never catch up”. I have this job that really sinks its teeth into these stuck points and it keeps me feeling so low and so, well, incapable and behind. From the moment I was a junior in high school having life altering surgery, I have always felt like I am trying to catch up with my peers. It started with my focus being on survival before getting to focus on what I was wearing to prom and picking my dress out late that year. It continued when I took two years off in the middle of my college experience because I needed to deal with debilitating anxiety from unadressed PTSD. This meant watching all my peers graduate a semester before I restarted my college journey and transferred into a new university to finish my degree. Ever since those moments of feeling like I was experiencing life behind everyone else, I have carried that feeling with me. At work, I feel constantly like I am behind my coworkers in knowledge and competency. It makes me question my ability to do my job–a job I am told by a lot of coworkers I do better than the person in my position before me. But their words of encouragement fall on my deaf ears because their opinion feels false, and my stuck point feels overwhelmingly true. So, anytime I receive even the gentlest of feedback, I perpetuate that sense of “you’re incapable, you are behind” and I end up being so enthralled in that fear that I can’t catch up, or measure up, that I really do fall behind in my tasks. This gives me even more ammunition to the truth I am stuck in… and thus the cycle of anxiety.

So today with my catchy game, I am choosing to face those thoughts. I will refuse to treat them as anything but residual thoughts. They can only remain true if I allow myself to fall into the trap of their cycle, so today I am choosing FALSE (Michaela’s version). I will follow in the footsteps of the inspiring Taylor Swift and rewrite my thoughts into the new version that, if I work hard, can bring me the freedom of recapturing my story in a way that allows me to thrive.

So, do you want to play true or false with your stuck points? How can we help each other rewrite the narrative our traumatic experiences have held over us for too long?

MRSTHERAPYGIRL TIP: I usually crawl under my amazing weighted heating pad (it massages too) when I am having a tough day mentally and it is a great first step of self care.