Avoiding and dissociating

As much as I want to post here more often, I find myself avoiding this place. Avoiding others that are sick and suffering. Avoiding my own sickness and suffering as well, or at least as best I can. Occasionally I'll start to read other blogs, because I truly do care about how everyone else is doing and want to be a source of support, but then the distractions begin swirling in my head and whatever time I had available to spend here quickly disappears.

I was writing someone an email the other day. Nothing overly important, just getting caught up with an old friend who found me on Facebook. I knew what I wanted to say, and what I didn't, so it should have taken no more than 30 mins to write it. Ended up dissociating for almost 3 hours before something finally snapped me back to reality and I found I'd only written half of what I had intended to.

There's been a lot of that going on...dissociation. Losing huge chunks of time, often measured in hours, not minutes. My thought processes have been so disorganized that I'll be in mid-sentence and suddenly forget words. Completely forget them, as in saying tire when I meant to say table. Or not remembering a word like table and having to describe it as the big wood thing in your house that you eat dinner at. It frequently happens multiple times in a single conversation, even scarier is when it happens multiple times in a single sentence. I know my sister & daughter, the two people I speak to the most, are probably wondering if these are signs of early onset Alzheimer's.

I sometimes wonder if the problem is Alzheimer's. But more often than not, I'll blame the poisonous medications I've been on over the last 7 years and the ECT I subjected myself to for destroying massive amounts of brain cells. There isn't a single case of Alzheimer's in my family, though if it were going to start with anyone, it would be just my luck that it would start with me.

Still not medicated, though I desperately need something for the panic attacks. My therapist again asked me if I'd like to see one of the pdocs on staff at her office, but I didn't respond. I probably should, but I am currently unable to see what benefit going to see one will provide. I'm sure I can't just walk in there and ask for Ativan without being required to talk about all the stuff that's going on with me. Their job is to push as many pills on the crazy people as they can. I think they get kickbacks for volume, with no regard to what might truly be beneficial. Jaded. I know I am.

Therapy is going....

Not really sure how to complete that thought. It's just...going. She recently mentioned the concept of Internal Family Systems, and we've slowly talked about that the last two visits. Last week she gave me a small book that better explains the idea and I returned it to her today with copies of two blog posts I'd written on feeling "fragmented" (from January 2009) and "compartmentalized" (from May 2007), that I'd previously shared with the different therapists I was seeing at those times. The concept makes some sense, but like everything else, just seems to be a small piece of the puzzle. There's still a lot more going on that IFS doesn't seem to address.

I don't know what steps are taken to "reintegrate" all my managers, firefighters and exiles, but I guess I'm jumping the gun. I don't even know if my current therapist knows how to do this form of psychotherapy. I'm still waiting for her to drop the bomb that she doesn't, but she's willing to find me someone that does. In other words, she's just looking for a reason to dump me off on someone else. Story of my life.