That's a good idea – let your therapist give you some worksheets before you purchase any workbook. Ask him/her about their definition of the treatment and, if possible, maybe talk to those who have undergone the therapy. One of the hinkyest things about CBT, for me, is that Aaron Beck proposed the treatment only for milder forms of depression: others in the mental health fields took it and ran with it, and it was just as effective for treating severe major depressive disorder as sacrificing a black goat every day ensured a good annual crop.

Although I often say that I've been depressed since shooting out of my mom's birth canal (which just reminds me of Venice) during my stretches of severe MDD episodes, I find that I'm much more confused than usual. That may be the reason that I write so much when depressed, as I'm having social phobias/anxiety this time, and journaling aids my thought process, I think. My therapist said that I'm the only patient that he has ever felt as if he felt he should caution against journaling. Another thing that makes me feel odd about my therapist.

I'm overly zealous about self-reaction, and I suppose that spending as much time writing as I do, and reading as much as I do about what exactly might be going on in my mind, could be a bit obsessive but I don't have much else to do.

For almost two years, I dated a woman who identified herself as an alcoholic. She told me up-front – I didn't think it odd at the time because I was looking at a wine list, and since so seldom drank alcohol, it was no big deal. I tried to be supportive but – GOOD GOD! – the very first time that she rather forced me to come to a meeting!

She called and was incoherent (this was before we reached out and touched one another with cellular signals), but I finally understood that she had been drinking and that she was asking me to take her to an AA meeting.

When I got to her house, she was wailing like a banshee and collapsed in the front hallway. I felt terrible for her. I thought that she must have been on a binge for at least a day. It was hard to talk to her because she was blubbering so. She finally understood that I was asking how much she had drank. She made gestures towards the kitchen as if it was a villainous dungeon and I went and looked and, from what I could she, she'd consumed about one-half of the contents of a standard Reidel sherry glass that had been filled with a pretty good Chardonnay, sitting beside the glass on the kitchen island.

When I went back to the hallway, I asked a question that (I was to learn) a sober person should never ask a self-identified alcoholic - "Is that all that you had to drink?" The Banshee returned, but she was easily understood this time because every third word was "relapsed."

As we were on our way to the AA clubhouse, I tried - and tried and tried - to get the story straight. There was no way. Sharron was in a state that I had never seen or experienced - an active and violent self-hatred. There were a bevy of friends waiting, and they know what to say, I guess. I just hid behind the crowd to wait for an elder to appear, hoping that he or she would instate some order. It never happened.

The party finally moved indoors, which I felt would be refreshing, at least, considering the heat and humidity outdoors. Instead, I felt as if I had been cast to the ground by a legion of very, very weak demons; the type who would have, in the 1960's through 1980's, created a wall of pithy office cartoons that were on their 163rd round of being Xeroxed by that number of previous 'piths.'

And I was spot on. The terrifying Xeroxed pages were everywhere. There MUST be a name for that type of office decor. I have one old friend in the interior design businesses for office interiors. I'll call her later this week and see if there may be a name for wallpapering an office wall with multitudes of paper that same things such as "THIMK!" or "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!" That kind of crap. That's the absolutism that is always at the ready for self-loathing, self-professed alcoholics whether they drink a dram or a bottle.

I think that it would be possible to attend a dozen AA meetings, read the Big Book, read a few of the CBT books that are written for the client and come up with a pretty accurate synthesis of the diagnosis and therapy for the two. Both would be superficial treatments (they already are that!), but some CBT hawkers guarantee cures in ten one-hour sessions, plus homework, and AA fans work on the tattoo philosophy: once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, so there's no cure for it; you have to continually "work the program." I've yet to understand the idea of the need to identify yourself as an alcoholic for the remainder of your life. "Hi, my name is Guy, and I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober for 43 years." "Hi, my name is Joyce, and I'm an infant. I was born 27 years ago."

So, to conclude, I think very much the same of CBT as I do AA. Both – and it's important to think of this rationally – operate under the assumption that emotions are either bad, or worse, morally neutral; and that we can overcome our emotional thoughts, via CBT, by changing our thinking and, via AA, by keeping a "moral inventory."

Really have a lot more that I'd like to write, but my caregiver's here, and I need to scoot to the shower. I have lots of anger over the cons of AA and CBT. Lately, I've been viewing them as almost interchangeable. I was never an alcoholic but I was around the people who were "working the program," and I've suffered through CBT non-treatment and read even more so I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about the therapist-client expectations and though I went above and beyond with working CBT, it failed me, or I failed it. No matter how much effort I put into it, I could never look through the telescope and see Santa in the evening sky on Christmas Eve.

Oh - that higher power stuff... when I was hospitalized, I would be forced to attend all AA/CA meetings – even the beginner's meeting, or whatever they call them. The meetings where everyone in the room runs up to grab a new white poker chip? Maybe that's another step? But when the higher power thing came up, it was inevitable that someone would say, "your higher power could be a door knob." I don't know if that's a regional U.S. phrase or if they say poignée de porte in France or used ostium furunculus for those first AA meetings in Rome. Regardless - the first time that I heard that phrase, I couldn't help but laugh. I had to leave the room. Someone wrote a message here about the appropriateness of laughing or giggling when they saw others in pain. The reasoning behind laughter at pain has psychological logic and meaning. I'm not sure that's also true of laughing at others who are seriously contemplating the nearest doorknob as capable of having supernatural (or superhuman) powers.

By the time I was forced to go to those meetings when I was hospitalized, I would look around the room to see if anyone else was having a similar first experience like my own but what I usually saw were five or six people looking at the doors – the type of door that have push panels instead of knobs.

If you do get some worksheets, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about them. I am not completely dismissive of CBT; I just don't think of it as a treatment for serious mental illnesses.