Kriscinda Lee Everitt

This picture makes me think of Dokken’s Just Got Lucky video. Click through to find out why.

So, as it turns out, right now–where I am with things–conventional therapy isn’t going to cut it. I go twice a week, an hour each session. I have a lot of stuff that needs to be addressed, but as things get addressed, what happens is that the depressive states tend to get lower and become more persistent. This is normal and I expected it. And frankly, I’ve been going through it since the end of February, which is why I’m so absolutely raw and exhausted now. It’s been a constant struggle. Constant. And every week or so, I nosedive into an emotional abyss, like I did last weekend.

When this happens, my mind gets stuck on an uncontrollable loop of complete self-loathing and the refrain “I just want to die” gets played over and over. You’d think you could just stop thinking that, but it’s not that easy. It really is uncontrollable. If I let my guard down for even a second, up comes the refrain. It not conscious thought; it’s just there, like a stuck record in a locked room you can’t get into to get the needle off. As you can imagine, it’s pretty dispiriting. That’s an understatement, really.

So, I have a little technique in my pocket to hopefully combat the self-loathing to at least mitigate the experience overall, but what about that involuntary suicidal ideation? That’s tougher. It wired into me. It’s basically what happens when you’re a little kid and everything around you is falling apart, or worse, when everything inside you is falling apart and you have no experience by which to process it. You have no way out because the authority figures–the folks in charge of your well-being and very survival–are the ones causing it. You can’t run away; you can’t talk back. You can’t express your pain in any way (which is also where the self-loathing comes from…well, one place). So, your child brain truly thinks the only why out of it is to die.

How the hell do you combat something so ingrained, something that rooted itself into your psyche during the time when you’re forming your sense of self and your image of how the world works? It’s hard.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, and we’ll see how well it works over the next month or so.

The above quote sounds pretty brutal, but obviously, it’s not talking about bodily annihilation. It’s talking about the annihilation of the things in you that, frankly, don’t work when dealing with how terrible and cruel and unfair the world can be. It’s talking about your pre-existing ideas about how the world should work–the ideas that cause you the most suffering. Or even ideas about yourself, like your self-loathing or toxic shame.

What I am going to try to do is, when I get into that cycle of suicidal ideation, I will accept that I want to die. “Die” not being bodily death, and “I” being the unhealthy, inaccurate ideas I have about myself and who I am. If I want so badly to die to be free of this shit, I will learn to retrain that thought loop onto the ideas I want to be transformed into a more healthy, accurate representation of myself. In that way, I should be able to, rather than constantly trying to run away from this shit, walk right into it and embrace it. I just need to redirect that terrible, self-murdering thought into the ugly areas that, frankly, deserve a good, violent, horrible death.

How exactly to do that? Well, I’ll need to be aware of what I’m doing, so I have little reminder notes with which I can instruct myself when I am, to put it bluntly, out of my fucking mind. When I enjoyed the occasional recreational acid trip in art school–a long, long time ago–just to keep myself somewhat grounded, when I dropped, I wrote on my hands “You are tripping.” And when things got a little crazy or too intense, I’d see that and everything would generally mellow out. These are little notes and I know where to find them, and I’ll know when I have to look at them. Then, I just have to have some discipline, which, when you’re faced with suicidal thoughts, that sort of strength isn’t too hard to find because, let’s face it: No one wants to die. And if I can find the strength to not kill myself, I can find the strength to follow some simple instructions on a piece of paper. And the instruction is simply to remind myself to redirect those thoughts and really let those shitty ideas have it. And to keep at it until the whole mess passes.

That’s the plan. It’s as good a plan as any. It’s the only plan I have.

This is how excited I am about intensive outpatient programs.

That said, we’ve been in contact with the local psyche ward here so that I can enter into an intensive outpatient program, which is basically as close as you can get to committing yourself without actually having to give up having a somewhat functional life. Three days a week, three hours a day. The purpose of this is to rework and rebuild some healthy coping mechanisms. Right now, I really don’t have any, except what I’ve just come up with above. This should help move that along. And I can’t really address the shit that’s behind all of this without having a way to pull myself out of the deep, dark holes it inevitably pushes me into. Once I get to a point where I can get myself out, I can go back to regular twice-a-week normal therapy. None of this thrills me, but it looks like it’s the only choice. And it’s better than living in the psych ward, which would be the next/last option.