Quote:
Originally Posted by musinglizzy
For someone like me, who's relatively "new" to therapy yet (a year next month), it's helpful to read posts like yours....to see there IS light at the end of the tunnel. Baby steps are better than nothing, but they are still frustrating at times when you aren't quite so patient for change to occur. I have faith in my T, but it's a slow moving process and I've faced some set backs... so it's hard to see clearly sometimes. Thanks for the reassurance!
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I kind of think of it this way. It took many years of living in my pain and dsyfunction, all the while living in my depression and illness and trauma, before I even really started working on myself through therapy. It was bound to take a long time to reverse that process, to relearn how to think healthily about about myself and life, to overpower all those old messages and "lessons." I don't think that kind of damage can be overcome quickly. But I was very determined to do whatever I had to do, deal with whatever I had to deal with, (and later and probably even harder) really make the conscious changes in my thinking and behaviors that resulted in lasting mental health.
That's why I stuck with therapy so long this time around. I pushed myself hard to stay committed to healing. There were times when I say, "Good Lord, I'm going to be in therapy forever!" "I'm never going to get better," "I'm going to spend the rest of my life on meds and in and out of hospitals." But, my sister's death was a wake-up call to me. I realized how devastating losing a close family member is, even in circumstances of health causes when we all saw it coming. I realized right then and there I would never again contemplate suicide -- I will never do that to my loved ones - - and I walked away from that thinking and have never returned. That was step one on my conscious decision list.
From there I've made other very conscious choices about myself that have continued to move me forward. Holding on to those old "possibilities" such as keeping suicide on the back burner as an "option" were keeping me stuck. I had to give up those old habits (and they WERE habits for me), and in giving them up, I realized I had to replace them with something healthier. It has been a series of conscious choices from there on that have moved me the most. None of those choices involved ignoring my problems, continuing to chastise myself, avoiding my issues, quitting therapy too soon, running away from relationships, running away from risks. I had to face those things head on actually and do completely the opposite of what I had habitually done all my life that wasn't working for me. Hard work and took YEARS of therapy to get me to that place. But it came, and I'm in a really good place . . . FINALLY.