Thank you, everyone, for your shares on this.

Nammu, I hope I can get closer to where you are on this. I would imagine that is some kind of relief for you. I hope so.

LacunaCoiler, I'm sorry to read that you've had a stroke. I'm glad that you are making some progress in your recovery from it. You seem brave. I know that letting out the frustration and misery can be brave, too.

Downandlonely, I do the same thing, even with therapists I'm not altogether comfortable with. Sometimes I get home from therapy and think that I have totally misrepresented my week to her. Although sometimes my laughter and joking turns into a clear-cut sign of anxiety. One of my past therapists really understood this well. By the end of my most recent therapy session I was having such a time with this that I became discombobulated at the end, dating my check 2015 and making jokes about that, too. I think she sees through out, though.

Wild Coyote, following up on what I wrote just above, do you think your pdocs/tdocs could read beyond the smiles/happy facade?

Blueberrybook, big hugs! From your recent posts I know you are having a very stressful time of it. Please know that it can and will get better. I don't know if this would be of any help to you, but I wrote a blog post once about the avalanche of such stressors and the effects it had on me. If you're interested, that post is at Psychiatric Avalanche Effect – Unraveling the mystery of my past brain quirks – Bird Flight I have had a severe bipolar episode since I wrote the blog post mentioned, but things are overall better in most all of those ways. I'm still on disability, but things are better. Gosh, it takes time to heal! It is frustrating! But there are so many things I'm so happy that I have and always had, even if they were hard to enjoy at certain points. Things that seemed tough to accept, like taking meds and not being that "super woman" that I was at 29 years old, I now accept. We are STRONG people! I used to see myself as having grown so weak, but I now know many people never have to live through such hardships and many live through even harder ones.