[shame]

My T keeps asking me at every visit ... is this helping you ..talking about therapy. And she keeps asking me over and over are you angry? and i say no. She must ask if i am angry at least 3 times a visit .. and i keep giving her the same answer ... what is the deal??? Does she want me to be angry or what? Just getting tired of that question.
Another thing is i told her a few times that the reason i am there is for anxiety .. however .. if i was to take a depression test .. and i have .. it comes out major depression ..but i am not depressed at all .. so she askes why i think that is .. i have no idea! i know it doesnt make sense but it is true.
Could anyone help me understanding why i would have very negative depression results but not depressed?

[ECHOES]

Well it isn't unusual to not know how we feel. And tests are just tests.

How do you feel about what the test says?

In my experience anxiety and depression go hand-in-hand and one can be a relief of the other. When I've had many days of high anxiety, a sudden drop into depression is relieving.. at first anyway.

Tell her it irritates you that she keeps asking if you are angry. Ask her why she feels she needs to ask you so often. Perhaps she's sensing it and you're denying it? I do this and several visits ago I began with a statement that I was annoyed about something, then in mid-session she asked me if I was annoyed and I said No. She asked several times and I said No. She asked if I was annoyed with her.. lol... and I wasn't aware of being annoyed with her, so I denied it again. On the way home, more relaxed, I realized that I was the one who stated I was annoyed in the first place!! Then I denied it when asked outright. So, I am not very aware and also I still have trust issues with her, both reasons why I denied being annoyed. Also I am terribly afraid of anger, particularly my own. If I let a little out it will become overwhelming and explode, filling up the whole room! So, to defend against that.. I deny it.

Just some thoughts and you'll have thoughts of your own about how it works with you.

It's good that you're aware of 'something' going on there and questioning it! The exploration has begun in your mind. Now take it into therapy with you and see what else is there about it to explore with her.

[smiley1984]

the first thing i'd ask about her depression test - which one is it and how many questions and what is the sensitivity and specificity of the test she uses.

I thought the simple ones that take 10 minutes are just a screening tool - which means that it is supposed to highlight people that might be depressed and you should investigate this further, not that they are absolutely depressed.

In any area of medicine there is no test that is 100% accurate and even more so in subjective fields like psych. If you review the journals, there are entire articles that test and discuss the validity of all these tests.
And psych can be particularly hard to make a diagnosis as so many disorders have symptoms that overlap.
How about asking who cares about the diagnosis? - you want help with the issues that are bothering you right now.

> she keeps asking me over and over are you angry? and i say no. She must ask if i am angry at least 3 times a visit .. and i keep giving her the same answer ... what is the deal??? Does she want me to be angry or what?

she is probably trying to assess whether you are able to express anger / annoyance / irritation or whether you numb out / push it away. if you feel annoyed when she keeps asking you if you are angry then you could tell her so. took me months before i found the courage to say 'i'm getting annoyed with your asking me that all the time!' then we had a discussion about why it was so hard for me to feel anger and how i felt about feeling angry (ashamed mostly).

> Just getting tired of that question.

numbness... not even a little bit of irratibility / anger in there somewhere?????

> i am not depressed at all

what do you take depression to be? feeling sad? do you think you aren't depressed because you feel numb rather than sad?

what do you think anxiety is about? fear? do you feel that?

> Could anyone help me understanding why i would have very negative depression results but not depressed?

probably because you think depression means something a bit different from what the test takes depression to mean. anxiety and depression are significantly correlated. it wouldn't be unusual for someone with one to have the other...

[Hopefull]

Depression is not just sadness. Sometimes a person can say that they haven't felt sad but they have felt emotionally empty or numb. It's like you can't feel happy or sad. Also as some of the other people said anxiety and depression occur together all the time. When I picked up my emotional cold (depression), I started worrying about everything which gave me headaches. I found myself having to force my mind to stop worrying and re-focus on what I'm doing only to find my mind going back to incessant worrying.
As for the angry question, I think you can just tell her that you don't feel comfortable with that question. I developed the ability to tell her things like that about six months ago. The first time, I wrote her a letter and read it to her in the next session.

[shame]

thanks for your replies .. pondering them.
another question i have is - are there signs of anger that show to a T ..if so what are the signals? cuz seriously i am not angry .
i often dissociate when anxiety reaches that point .. probly why i dont feel things that are present.

Everybody gets angry / frustrated / irritable at times. If you don't... Then that shows that you are dissociating from the feelings or numbing the feelings.

It would be a normal response to feel annoyed (and to express a little annoyance) with your therapists persistently asking you if you feel angry. The fact that you feel numb... Kind of shows her that you have a problem with repressed anger.

[shame]

yea repeated questioning is annoying.
on repressed anger .. that is possible - but if i dont feel it - i dont see how that could be a bad thing. . same with depression .. why should she try to pull it up? if i dont feel it dissociating serves me well and i can function so much better. I am taking something for the anxiety and vitamin/minerals - feeling pretty good at this point.
Wondering why she would want to change that ..?

[Rapunzel]

Dissociating does make it possible to cope, but it is really only a temporary solution. The anger is still there, and eventually it's going to cause problems for you if you don't deal with it. Especially if it blindsides you out of nowhere because you don't even know it's even there.

There's a signature I noticed someone here using: "Depression is anger turned inwards." It just sounds like that might be what you are doing, even though you don't know it. Meds also will help you feel better and function better, but they don't fix the problem or teach you how to deal with your feelings. They can help to hide the feelings from you.

I have fought the idea that I was angry, too. But it's there, and it always leaks out somewhere, that is if it doesn't explode.

The problem is anxiety but you are coping okay with the anxiety at the moment?

I guess... If you feel you are coping okay with the anxiety at the moment then... Do you really want to do therapy? Are there perhaps other things that you would like to work on in therapy?

If it is about the anxiety... I guess therapy could be about figuring out what it is that you feel anxious about.

Er... What kind of medication are you on? I'm wondering if that it muting all your emotional responses...

What do you think about anger? Is it good for anything? Or is anger... Simply something that makes people do bad things?

[shame]

dissociating does help - maybe one day i will be able to cope better .. but for now works for me.

[shame]

anxiety is always high for me .. i take klonopin for the symptoms.