Full Time Job + Therapy

I am a full time teacher and am in seminary part time and have therapy two nights a week. I think having DID comes in really handy because we can compartmentalize our life quite easily so that one part doesnt affect another part.

Recently, I came to accept that I might need to be on antidepressants for the rest of my life. I have given it 110%, but depression still haunts me when I'm off of them. I can't think of a time when I didn't feel this way anyway... recently my new GP asked me what the "precipitating factors" were for my depression, and all I could think of was, "birth".

I had an "a ha" moment when I mentioned sadly to my husband that I didn't want to be on them for the rest of my life. He gave me a puzzled look and said, "Why not?" I realized I didn't have a practical answer to that question (other than of course if I found the side effects intolerable). My sadness about it was my looking at my mood difficulties as not a "real" medical problem, not worthy of treatment/intervention, and basically my fault -- something I had to "get over". All the negative stuff I used to tell myself before I realized I had a legitimate problem that wasn't my fault, and that I needed to do everything I could to get better -- both lifestyle changes, and for me, meds.

What makes you think that you need to "deal with it"? How long is too long to help yourself manage daily life? Someone with high cholesterol on statins isn't masking the problem or prolonging it -- they'd only be doing that if they were at the same time eating steak and butter all the time. But if you make those healthy changes, and still have high cholesterol... I mean would you tell someone with that condition not to take medication? Of course not.

So if you're doing everything you can in therapy and your meds aren't quite keeping you at a baseline level of "ok", think of it like a cholesterol-lowering drug. As long as you're changing your lifestyle too, you are NOT using it as an easy fix. Drop that attitude! It comes from internalizing the stigma of emotional difficulties. You need to do everything you can to take care of yourself.

I work full time too. During the worst of my clinical depression, I missed 3 weeks of work because i just could not be functional. But besides that, i had to keep working full time because my income pays most of our family's bills.

It was really hard to keep working full time when my depression was so bad! Not only were my emotions unstable, but i was physically exhausted all the time. I probably wasn't nearly as productive, but i did what i could.

On really bad days, if it was possible, I would take a couple of hours of my vacation time (or a whole afternoon) and go home early and just go to bed. I'm doing much better now, but I still have to do that once in awhile if I'm having an especially hard time.

I try to have therapy at 3 pm when i get off work, so i don't have to go back to work afterwards. I find it very hard to switch out of therapy mode after my session.

I work full time and my schedule fluxuates greatly based on the time of the year. In winter it's 40-45 hrs/wk. The rest of the year 50-70hrs/wk with a few 90-100 hr weeks during really busy time. I see t every other week since my insurance doesn't cover t.

I am very lucky to have flextime with my employer so I can leave for appointments.

I had a stretch where all I wanted to do was think about sessions all day. I was getting nothing done at work. It was a really rough stretch for me and I ended up taking lots of work home because I wasted so much time during the day.
I did a lot of journaling at night and that helped. I've also turned to making lists at work of what needs to get done. It helps keep me focused. Other things that have helped including listening to a complicated piece of music and trying to follow one instrument or harmony line through the whole piece, binaural white noise apps, and desktop fountain in my office.

Talk to your t about it. Mine was able to help me come up with some strategies (like the fountain) to work through it.