They’re All The Same
I am not doing as well mentally the past few days. Haven’t been able to journal. Not being as nice to my wife. Not mean either, but.. distant. I feel down and am having trouble with my energy levels. When I feel like this, I am not playful. I like to write when I have a little bit of play in me and when I don’t… ugh. It’s like vomiting dried toast, it hurts to get it up through the pipes.
Some of it seems to be sleep related. I’m just not sleeping that well and it affects everything.
The other part — other than the low energy — is a sense that I’m repeating myself with these entries — and when I feel like I’m repeating myself, or there’s “nothing to say” — then it’s easy for my “what is the point of this” default depressive internal voice to take control, saying something like I’m glad you asked, actually there IS no point to this, let’s watch a youtube video of nerds fighting about whether or not to buy the new Harry Potter video game instead of listening to your own inner thoughts.
I’m hardly the first person to have these thoughts. I sometimes read other peoples’ OD entries and I have seen the following at least two or three times: I am writing the same thing over and over again. I also watched an episode of Dr. Katz the other day — this is a cartoon therapy show from the 90s that used to be on Comedy Central — where Katz’s patient says to the therapist: you know Doctor Katz, I feel like I come in every week and we talk about the same thing, maybe I can just record one of our sessions on tape and play it back for myself every Thursday at 2PM, save myself the weekly bill.
I think the next great advancement in journaling is going to be ChatGPT related. I can ask AI to auto-generate an entry. It will read exactly like one of my own — it will say things like “what is the point of my life” and “my job sucks I do it mostly for the money but what do you do when you cease to find pleasure even outside of work? what do you do when you don’t get much meaning or enjoyment out of your job and you live for the hours outside of it but even when you are not working you can’t figure out how to be happy?”
And then it will include a snippet from a therapy appointment where I’m vaguely argumentative with my own therapist, Dr. BW, not because I disagree with him about anything exactly but because it’s in my nature to resist.
Here’s how therapy went. As homework, between appointments, I was supposed to write about how my upbringing at the hands of my abusive father affects me in the here and now, at age 45. I was tempted to just say “It doesn’t” just to be a pain but what I did instead was what he wanted: write down stuff during the week as it occurred to me.
- lowered expectations
- excuse making for others when they do terrible things or disappoint me (because I so often excused my Dad’s behavior — partially because my mother also so often excused it.)
- hard on myself, overly critical
- willing to accept mistreatment in life — from partner / job etc. — without much argument
- lack of confidence — at times anyway. (confidence bounces around a lot, high to low)
- difficulty pursuing my own genuine interests because I feel my father doesn’t approve and part of me still subconsciously seeks approval from him
- super alert as to changing moods of those around me because I learned that when someone becomes angry/anxious around me that things are about to get bad. So I’m always a little geared up —
- Related to the above, I want to please my partner always because I fear the “bad moods” — and I believe this stems from my Dad because his bad moods would result in verbal and physical abuse — and I feel shitty when I let her down — or I perceive I am letting others down, for that matter
- I often feel like “everybody hates me” and this stems from the knowledge that my Dad didn’t like me much when I was younger
- less social than I might have otherwise naturally wanted to be — I learned it is painful to be around others — always need to be alert, high energy — don’t feel safe by default around others
- want to live a life devoid of conflict — even though I know conflict is a normal part of life and is unavoidable
So we go over this list. He makes a few comments. He thinks my confidence is pretty good — at least, during our sessions, I come across as fairly confident, with a strong sense of self and a more or less consistent voice.
Nearly everyone’s a little inconsistent, everyone falters and feels lousy about themselves sometimes, he says.
So there are some people that don’t?
Yes. Some psychopaths have pure confidence, are completely self-assured at all times.
That does sound pretty great. Can we turn me into a psychopath somehow?
Another statement he made was that my high levels of anxiety around others is normal for people who grew up with mercurial, quick-to-anger parents, particularly those who can lash out physically or verbally unexpectedly — parents who change moods abruptly and seemingly without reason.
Then we tied my perfectionism and insistence on doing all the things as an adult– going through lists of obligations and tasks and trying to stay on top of everything — to trying to be perfect in childhood because I thought that if I could only be Good — if I could figure out how to be the son he wanted, I might make him happy, and he’d start loving me and treating me well instead of being a gigantic son of a bitch sometimes.
When we connected these dots, I had a vague memory of realizing this exact same thing with a different therapist five years earlier, the last time I had a therapist. And I told him.
I think I had this same breakthrough five years ago with my old therapist. And it didn’t fix anything. Knowing why I behave the way I behave really didn’t make me live my life any differently. I’m back here, years later, having the same breakthroughs that do nothing to push me forward, nothing to change my personality, nothing to make anything better.
That’s not completely true though, is it? You said yourself a few months ago that going to therapy five years ago helped you get over your previous relationship and start dating again. And you wound up with a partner who was a better match for you — and now you’re married with a house, working on having a kid. I would say that’s a lot of changes.
I thought about it for a minute and couldn’t argue the point.
So, listen Dr. BW. One of the common problems I have that will not go away — that I’d really like to disappear but persists — is this voice that constantly says “there’s no point to this” where “this” can be anything — this therapy session for example. And I think we just proved that there is often a point to things even though I can’t immediately see it.
Right. That’s why we keep saying “do the work” and “trust the process.” Because things are happening that aren’t always visible or accessible to you at the time.
In other words, the “there’s no point to this” voice lies. It tells me it has the answer but it doesn’t — it’s like a kid doing a book report on a book they haven’t read. They’re making shit up.
More or less, yes.
Can I ask you a question? Along with that “there’s no point” voice, there is this accompanying feeling that I’m worthless. And a decent amount of angst mixed in — it still feels like that teenage-y angst that I associate with bands like Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins — woe is me, the world sucks, I suck, I hate everything. Every band has a song exploring the topic of self-hate, like Matthew Sweet’s Sick of Myself. Why is this still inside of me? I thought I’d grow out of it. Do most adults still have this going on inside?
Here he gives a funny little smirk — I can tell he’s amused by this question — and he says that his point of view on this is “probably a little biased because of my profession” and then says almost all of my patients have periods of self-hate and it’s completely normal — as long as they’re functional. Adults simply find better ways to regulate it better, cope with it when it comes up, than adolescents.
I ask how I can do this and he says that as best he can tell, I’m already coping with it well — I’m often aware of it when it happens, which is great, and I have specific things I do to make it go away — exercise, put on music and work on a house project, throw myself into a programming task for my job, or even nap when I’m completely exhausted.
What I’m hearing is that I’m fine then, as-is. I’m either cured or as good as I’m going to get. And we should probably stop seeing one another.
Not exactly. We have to keep doing the work together. You have to keep showing up.
Of course you would say that. You need the money and I’m an easy patient.
Easy patient? That sounds like a lot of ego from someone who just said they lacked confidence.
At TIMES, I wrote At TIMES I lack confidence. Not all the time. Sometimes I think I’m a narcissistic asshole.
You’re not a narcissist. You put the needs of others before yourself most of the time. A narcissist wouldn’t do that.
Ah, but what if my real need is to be needed by others, and I’m actually satisfying their needs in order to make them dependent on me so I’m needed always and forevermore, which in turn allows me to continue my center-of-the-universe attention-hungry navel-gazing ways.
You’re not a narcissist.
OK, OK, glad we cleared that up.
More quickly, we also touched on: My older brother (no updates.) My mom, who is sad and trapped living with my brother. My wife J and the new IVF cycle we’ve started (nothing to report on there, really — she’s just taking the hormone regimen right now). I mentioned that J is watching, more and more often, tiktok videos of babies and toddlers now — which means she is, somewhere in her head, starting to emotionally feel like having a baby with me is a certain thing — and it isn’t, it’s only a 66% likelihood statistically — and it worries me that she’s starting to think this way because if it doesn’t happen the crash will be that much worse and I asked if I should bring up my concerns with her about “getting her hopes up” and he had no strong opinions about it. I probably won’t.
Valentine’s Day plans — I’m taking us to a nice restaurant downtown tonight. I’m going to try to be less distant, more present, going to try to enjoy her and whatever the evening brings.