I also was going through a depressive phase when my writing trailed off that helped contribute to the lack of posting as well. When one gets to be depressed, it can be difficult to find the will to do things that we would normally do or enjoy, and writing was just something that I couldn't bring myself to do, even though I consider myself to be a writer before just about everything else.
It's funny, looking back on it, my last post was also on mental health issues, discussing my PTSD and topics related to that. This post is going to be no different I am afraid. For those who were hoping for more on the weight loss journey directly, I apologize. However, I ask you to stay anyway, because this is related tangentially. For you see, I realized at a certain point that in order to continue with my weight loss journey and to become the better me that I wanted to be, I had to first see about addressing my PTSD and depression, to help both become more manageable. I had gotten to the point where I could physically do more about my condition with the help of my surgery, but now I had to get to where I could emotionally do it as well.
Around the time of my last post I was just joining up with Integrative Trauma Treatment Center here in Portland. It's a wonderful place and I managed to join in just as they got put on Medicare/Medicaid roster, so I was one of their very first clients. My therapist, Jack, has turned out to be a great guy, very helpful for me through this process.
I am not going to go through a step by step of everything we did, but there is something I do wish to touch on and that is the EMDR that we did. EMDR is a form of therapy that relies on rapid eye movement and helps to trick the brain so that you can access repressed memories, emotions and beliefs to process them out. The way that Jack likes to describe it is taking talk therapy and then doing the work of months and months of talk therapy, but compressing it down into weeks instead.
I was skeptical at first of this form of therapy, but I've been surprised about how effective it has been. I am by no means cured of my PTSD, but nothing is going to ever do that. But what it has done is helped to lessen it's impact on me. My flashbacks aren't as frequent and I can frankly discuss the fact that I was molested and the details of it without freaking out. It's uncomfortable for me, but I can discuss it. I can have people touch my neck while I am getting assistance in the shower without tensing up and freaking out which is a huge step for me. As long as I'm not having a bad day, from exceptionally bad nightmares/other factors infringing upon things, I'm... pretty decent as far as the PTSD is concerned, thanks to the EMDR. There is still some more outlaying things to do, but we've done so much work that I'm seeing a marked improvement.
The EMDR has also been helping me to process out a lot of the negative self talk that I do. I had lots of little anxieties and those inner voices telling me I wasn't good enough, I wasn't worth anything, I wasn't valuable. Another aspect of the EMDR is taking those phrases and processing them just like a memory to find what causes them, where they come from and to try and understand why I am telling myself those things so that through that understanding it loses it's power on me as I gain fresh perspective on it. That has also been helping.
Of course, this has had a side effect of me coming to start to question so much about my personal identity. Who am I, what am I? I've always been identified, to some degree or another, by my depression, by my PTSD, by being a survivor of childhood sex abuse. And while that will never leave me, I find that it doesn't have to define me either.
One of the difficult things I've been dealing with is my sexual identity. I've had a grand total of three girlfriends in my life; two of them long distance relationships. Part of this was anxiety, but part of it was simply the confusion of my life. Growing up, I hardly ever considered sex or sexual situations. When confronted with them, they didn't really interest me that much growing up, or when asked to put myself into the situation horrified/scared me. This led to my being called gay in high school, because that is what high school is like and constantly taunted with sexual situations/iconography.
I finally made up a fake girlfriend from back in my home town just to get people to shut up, though I doubt anyone actually believed me, but at least it got some people to back off somewhat, so there was that. But it started a trend of my feeling like I had to pretend to fit in among other people. So that is what I did, I pretended and those women who I thought were aesthetically pleasing I copied the comments of the 'normal' people to try and fit in, even though I had no desire to engage in anything sexual with them.
It's not that I've never felt sexual desire, I have, but it has been in the context of the relationships that I have had. And each one of those has been born out of a friendship first before ever becoming something romantic. I may not have acted fully on those desires, but I had them to some degree in that context. Sexual desire is just not something that comes naturally to me. It's why when I was losing lots of weight and was suddenly horny all the time I freaked out. I wasn't used to it or my body feeling like that. Even during puberty it wasn't that bad.
And it's not like I'm aromantic. I am a romantic person at heart. I always have been and I probably always will be, at least unless I become too jaded by life. Man of La Mancha is my favorite musical and I love the concept of the romance and intellectually it is something that I wish in my life with the right person, but that is the crux of it, the right person. It wasn't until earlier this year that I had heard the term Demisexual, but when I did, at the time it clicked for me and I began to feel like I identified as that, but at the same time, I have this lingering wonder, what if I'm not? What if it is just my lack of self exploration, my previous inability to even address these issues that has put me here. I just... don't really know for sure.
Ever since I started talking about this side of things with my therapist I've been having weird dreams of myself being attached to a female figure at times, and my therapist thinks it's my brain contemplating the idea of dating. He keeps thinking it's that and I don't know what to think. I hadn't even thought about that. One of the ones had to do with LARPing with several people and me being accused of being a bad LARPer or using people for me own RP edification and then abandoning them. My therapist got dating out of it, I don't know. I'm not even sure if I'm near ready for that sort of thing. I'm not even sure if I would recognize it.
I've no good internal radar for if someone likes me. Hell, I'm not even sure if I can differentiate the idea of if I would like someone as more than just a friend or if it is platonic affection that I feel half the time. I do know that my therapists thoughts has me questioning things now and trying to analyze these dreams more, but I just don't know. This is a topic that I really need to give some more time with and sort through.
And that's the thing, if it weren't for the EMDR, my therapy work, I wouldn't even be able to contemplate issues like this. They would simply be lost in the haze of my anxieties and hang ups. Sure I've got new issues to deal with here, trying to sort out who I am, my identity and desires and wants and other issues, but I'm able to do so from a healthier place than I was able to do so before.
Likewise, I am going to be able to better focus on my weight loss as we wind down this therapy, because my head is a lot more clear, I'm not prone to as much of the depressive states that I have been, so I should be able to avoid the binge eating from mood swings and can instead devote my energies to getting better.
I've got a lot of work left to do, both with my mental health and with my physical health, but I am getting at it, chipping away at the issues bit by bit, day by day. First one, and then the other, then I'll probably be back to work on the first again for a bit before moving right back to the second. It's a cyclical thing, working on this, but I'm getting there and it's going to work out. I just have to stay positive.
