I am very pleased to say that after five months of hard work, I have finished Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Obviously there are many tricky things one has to deal with after finishing such an intense course, such as not being able to rant to a hot (sorry Tom) therapist for an hour each week and no longer getting a bit of a lay in before work.
It’s strange when someone gets to know you more intimately than most people you’ve known your whole life, and yet you know nothing about them. I learnt, in my last session, that my therapist had got into meditation as a way to deal with severe back pain that could no longer be controlled with medication. He would meditate as a way to accept the pain he was in, and eventually worked his way into becoming a therapist (the details of which I don’t know).
What I learnt is that meditation is for everyone. It's not a cliche for hippies or yogi’s or people wanting to 'connect to their spiritual side'. As an atheist this was certainly not what I was looking for. Known as ‘Mindfulness Meditation’ I learnt how to be still, comfortable with breathing and just sitting down. I’m not utilising this to its fullest, and I should really be doing at least 10 minutes a day of quiet meditation, but I do find it useful in many day to day situations.
Say you’re at work and your boss comes over and tells you to do something completely menial in a very condescending way. This can easily get ones blood boiling. I will just pop to the loo for a bit, sit with my hands on my lap and slowly count my breath. At first you just notice how you breathe, don’t try and control it. Being patient and kind to yourself is very important, so when your mind wanders back to your boss being a wanker, just allow it to happen and bring your thoughts back to your breath.
Time and again you will notice that your mind wanders and it’s good to notice why your thinking about what you’re thinking about and how you can learn to bring focus back. At first I would get so frustrated, as my CBT 'homework' was to listen to a medative CD for an hour and listen to a woman with a calm voice tell me to think about my left leg 'with kindness and no judgement'. At first this was infuriating! I wanted to tell the woman to fuck off and that I'll just go back to watching Buffy in my pants. But inevitably each day I did it, I felt calmer and more patient; don't get me wrong, it was still hard, but I felt like I wasn't so angry. In a society where we are more and more connected it is important to sometimes just be.
There has recently been tons of stuff on mindfulness this year already, just have a search in Google to see what I mean. I read a story about a woman who suffered from extreme anxiety until she was an adult. Then she got married and had kids and life continued and she felt better; until she was in a major car accident. She could not stop thinking about what might happen and what could happen, and it wasn’t until she was too scared to get on an escalator that she knew she needed help. She hated CBT. She hated meditation, she hated being quiet. She was bored, anxious and restless. But she stuck with it and it changed her life. That's certainly the main thing I've learnt these last few years.
Stick with it. If I hadn’t stuck to trying to move my arms every single day, I wouldn’t have ever washed my own hair again. If I hadn’t tried to roll over in bed I would’ve been stuck on my back like a turtle. If I hadn’t tried hard every week at therapy and every day in-between, I would still feel depressed and anxious.
I’m doing a 10k run in March. I couldn’t run 1k a month ago, and now I’m on 3.5k. If I don’t keep trying, I won’t be able to do it. It's the most obvious, simple thing in the world that we get sick of hearing. But only because it's true.
Practise makes perfect.
