Psychotherapy And The Wonderful World Of Bloggers

Today I have been for my penultimate psychotherapy session with my current therapist. He is a lovely man and therapy with him has been good. We talked today about it being so near the end of our work together and he asked how I felt about that, especially in light of the disastrous termination of therapy that I experienced last year. There is no doubt that having a very experienced therapist makes a big difference, but as with all things people have to be trained and I am sure that in the future my previous therapist will be very much better at handling termination of therapy than he was with me.

I will miss my Tuesday sessions, not least because they have been responsible for a bit of structure and routine in my life for the last eight months. Today we talked about a wide range of subjects not all of them things that I would have considered as subjects for discussion during therapy. I said that I felt that while I still find it difficult to talk about my feelings when we are in a session, something that I don't think I will ever feel comfortable doing, one really positive thing to have come directly from this therapy was joining the knitting group.

It was as a result of one of our sessions that I made my first tentative steps into the world of the knitting group. My therapist encouraged me at a time when things were particularly difficult to take that first step and like blogging it has made a difference to my life. I haven't been for two weeks (the first week because of the trauma of becoming homeless and then last week because I really couldn't face it so soon after my surgery) but tomorrow I will be going and taking with me a finished item for all to see. I have just a few rows left to knit on the shawl/stole that I have been knitting for the last few weeks. I actually started it a day or two after my last visit to the knitting group and today I will finish the last of the 554 rows. It will still require blocking to show it off in all its glory but that is something for later.

I talked about going to the knitting group tomorrow and having this wonderful work of art to show to all. My therapist then asked why I had not talked more about my knitting in my sessions with him. His question was "Did I not think that he would be interested?" After thinking about this I suppose that I didn't think of it as being a subject for therapy, but following a complicated pattern and creating a work of art, as this shawl is, probably says quite a lot about me that I find impossible to express orally. One thing is certain, I will be taking it with me to next week's session to show him what I can do.

We also talked a little about my blogging. He has never asked for details of my blog and I have no idea whether I have given him enough information to be able to find it that easily, but one of his comments leads me to believe that he may have come across it at some time. He spoke of my ability to express myself in my blog in a way that I find very difficult, if not impossible, to do face to face. There is no doubt that blogging is a way of expressing my frustrations and pain and despair without having to burden someone with what I need to say. After all, you can carry on reading each post if it interests you but you don't need to continue to read if you find that what is being said is not interesting or thought provoking. I have always tried not to write post after post about how depressed that I am. There are only so many ways in which you can say it and I don't want to come across as someone who whines continually about how bad their life is. My life sucks; it's not how I thought it was going to turn out but it's a whole lot better than that of many other people out there.

This brings me nicely to what I wanted to say about bloggers. I know that it is something that I have said many times before, but it is worth saying again because I think that it is very important. There are some really nice people out there in the blogosphere and the supportive comments that I have received after my last few posts show how much we care for each other, even if we never actually meet. I may not be able to deal with comments as quickly as I would like owing to my limited Internet access at the moment, but logging in today as I have and finding six comments on my last post, all very supportive and kind, has reduced me to tears in the public library. As someone who hates showing emotion in public, I think you will understand just how much the sentiments expressed in these comments has moved me and saying thank you just doesn't seem to be enough, but it will have to do for the time being.

Once I am settled into some more permanent accommodation and have an Internet connection that I can access all the time, I will try to write most days again and to include photographs of whatever I am knitting so that you can keep up with how things are going. Once I have finished the shawl today, I need to head back to the socks so that I can get them all knitted and the patterns written ready for entry into the competition. I have five pairs to complete although socks grow a lot faster than the kind of lace knitting that I have been doing over the last few weeks, so while it may seem like a huge mountain of work, I think that I should be able to manage it without too much trouble.

Not A Review Of The Year

I don't want to think about how things have been this year. I have sunk to depths that I have never been to before and I have lived to tell the tale but I still don't feel great. Christmas was survived and New Year beckons, but I am well aware that I may have to face some really difficult things in the 2010.

So, I'm not going to review what has happened to me this year. I just want to say that I am grateful to all the bloggers who have helped me with their kind comments and good wishes. I know that they have helped me a great deal throughout the year, but more particularly so over the last few months. I can never repay their kindness, but I know that they don't want me to. Instead I am just going to say the following to you all

Best wishes for 2010
and may it bring you
all that you desire

Six Months Of Blogging - I Didn't Think It Would Last

Tomorrow it is six months since I started this blog. I'm still not sure what possessed me to do it, but I am glad that I did. There are times when that six months seems like a life time, and others when it has seemed to pass in a flash.

I wasn't really sure what I would write about when I first started, except that I felt that I needed to explain what it felt like, for me, to suffer with depression. My depression was not something new, I had been suffering for nearly 10 years, but because I live on my own it often feels as though there is no-one who I can talk to about how I feel, and even if nobody read the blog, I felt that I was at least speaking my thoughts out loud and not keeping it bottled up inside. I have been asked why I called myself Madsadgirl, and all I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm not mad, although there are times when I have doubted my sanity, I am sad some of the time, but there are also times when I am quite happy, and at my age I am stretching a point to call myself a girl, but the name sounded catchy and I couldn't think of anything else.

Many of my early posts were about depression, but I was aware that this would make a pretty boring blog and may not attract much in the way of readership if everything that I wrote was negative, so I also included posts about being a student with the Open University, about things that I had seen in the news and that I had strong opinions about, about the way that members of the medical profession, particularly GPs, were being vilified by some members of the government, particularly as these men and women do a difficult job and rarely get the thanks that they deserve.

Sometimes I wrote about things that were happening around me, for example the dreaded roadworks that are a consequence of the replacement of London's Victorian water mains, and I wrote about the sometimes funny and sometimes beautiful things that I saw around me. Knitting has also been a subject of a great many posts, even if it was only to say that I was having to unpick what I was working on and start again because I had made a mess of it.

Of course, depression and the effect that it can have on a person still remains one of the main reasons that I write this blog. I have written about the discrimination and stigma that those with mental health problems face, and I write about them through experience. I have also written about what it is like to undergo psychotherapy, not short-term cognitive-behaviour therapy that many undergo, but long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy with the traumatic issues and feelings that this can raise, and the relief that it can bring in being able to understand why I am the way that I am.

Sometimes I write almost every day, sometimes more than once a day, and sometimes there can be days between posts. My aim has always been to write something meaningful and that will cause anybody reading it to think about what life can be like for other people. I hope that I have achieved this aim and that what I have written over the last six months has helped people to understand what life is like for someone with depression and that it has given hope to some who find themselves in a similar state.

All bloggers say that they are surprised that anyone reads what they write, but we would be liars if we did not admit that there is a hope that someone else will read what we have written. I will never have the following of some of the blogs that I read, but I am thrilled that I have managed to attract more than 4600 hits since the blog started. I am honoured that some of my posts have been considered of enough value to warrant such worthy bloggers as the Jobbing Doctor and Dr Grumble to select them as shared items on their blogs, and I know that each time they have done this I have experienced a marked increase in traffic to the blog. Thank you, Gentlemen; it has been much appreciated.

Like many bloggers I tend to see what leads people to read my blog. Obviously the word "depression" brings up many hits when a Google search is carried out, and this is a way that a few find their way to my blog. Another frequent search term is Open University, or OU, sometimes with the word "studying" sometimes without. Psychotherapy is another term that has appeared frequently, with or without other search terms. I have been amused by those studying with the OU who have found their way to my blog when trying to get ideas for the particular TMA that they are working on at the time. That has happened for both of the courses that I am studying at present, but I am afraid that they will have gained nothing from what I have written other than to learn that even after many years of studying with the OU, I still find it extremely difficult to sit down to write an essay for a TMA.

I have made a number of virtual friends through this blog, and I have met one blogger, with whom I now correspond on an almost daily basis outside of this blog and who is now much more than a virtual friend. I started to write this blog anonymously, and I still think that was a good idea. I didn't tell anyone that I was writing it until it had been going for almost a month, and even then I only told a couple of people. Six months of blogging and there are still only a handful of people who know my real name and anything about me, and I find that something of a comfort. This means that comments received on my blog mean that much more because they do not come from people who feel that they have to make a comment because they know me.

So here I am, six months on. Has writing a blog made any difference to me? The answer to that is definitely a resounding "Yes". I have written about the good times and the bad, I have written about the funny and the sad, and I have written sometimes when my heart was breaking but I knew that writing was the only way that I could carry on. And receiving comments when I have written at these difficult times has helped me through them and helped me to come out smiling on the other side.

To all of you who bother to read this blog I say a big "Thank You", you have made life worth living again, and to those who comment "Keep commenting, I love them", and to those of you who read and don't comment "Why don't you?"; although I moderate comments I have published every one that has been written.

A Day Of Milestones

Today could well be a day of two milestones for my blog. I can't believe that I have managed to keep it going and not run out of things to write about. I don't live a very exciting life, certainly nowhere near as exciting as my working life was, but I have managed to find things to write about on a regular basis since I started to blog, only missing a few days along the way.

By chance as I was looking at various blogs this morning I found someone whose blog I had never read before, and as she has only been blogging for a few weeks I decided to read all her posts. She suffers from mental illness, and it appears that she blogs for much the same reason as I do. To keep her mind active because she cannot work, and to find ways of helping non-sufferers know what it is like to live with mental illness, and the stigma and discrimination that we suffer. Whenever I find somebody new I always look at their blogroll to see whether there might be other blogs that I will find interesting. I was surprised to find that mine was there. I had not been aware of this blogger's existence, and yet it seems she knew about me.

So what about the milestones? Well, this post is the th of the blog; and some said it would never last! And it is entirely likely that the visitor count is going to reach today. Yes, I think that we can call these milestones.

A Slow Blogging Day

Today has been a slow blogging day. I haven't really found anything worth writing about, and I have been out doing some research too, so my time has been a bit limited. Typical really, when I didn't have Internet access I could always find something to say, and now I'm back online the muse has vanished.

It's been a slow day for many of the bloggers that I read regularly too. So I sat here thinking about this phenomena and I came to the conclusion that it may be a new syndrome. SAD is now accepted as being something real, and the short days of winter are recognized as causing a mild form of depression in a considerable number of people. Maybe we are all suffering from LOS, something that is causing depression during August in the UK. What is LOS? Lack of sunshine, of course.

I have been fortunate enough to avoid being outside when two sudden very heavy showers, one this morning and the other this afternoon, occurred; in fact, on both occasions I got indoors about five minutes before the heavens opened. I remember being taught in geography lessons when I was at school that the predominent British climate was warm, wet with westerly winds. But I don't remember the summers ever being like this.