About a year ago, my life stopped making sense to me. I wish I did not exist because the few happy moments are not worth my everyday struggle to survive. It is hard to get up, hard to put my clothes on, hard to do anything. I wouldn't say it is just laziness, it is the general fatigue from all I have been through. Despite being almost thirty years old, I am, metaphorically speaking, unable to stand on my own feet, so I am still both financially and emotionally dependent on my parents. I keep blaming myself for my inability to work and for the fact I forget everything I have been told; I feel like a complete loser and I am terribly guilty to be one. Of course, this way of living is close to unbearable. And since I promised I will not commit suicide and because I want to keep the vow as long as I can, I wish to change the way I am feeling and treating myself. I am not sure whether I have enough energy and will power to do so, but I am going to do my best.
The treatment my doctors recommended to me is called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or simply DBT [1]. This therapy is specially developed for people with borderline personality disorder, it is for example supposed to teach us how to control emotions and live in a given moment, not in the past or in daydreams. We should also learn to stay calm even during great emotional distress, not activating the downward vicious cycles that so often end in a mental breakdown.
I would really like to be able to have at least some control over what I am feeling. I am often very destructive in my ways of thinking because I can't handle and accept what happened to me in the past. For example, I hate sunny autumn afternoons, because I have so many heartbreakingly beautiful memories linked to them. I hate the smell of blooming linden trees, or the first snow in a city. I hate waffles and pop-tarts and mozzarella sticks. Indeed, they have done nothing wrong to me, except from being linked to something I had enjoyed a lot in the past but later I lost it. Most likely you can imagine how unpleasant it is when so many common things bring so much pain. And because I am not able to fully control my emotions, I am unable to separate the independent subjects from the woe and frustration I feel when the memories start attacking my mind. And I am defenseless because I don't know how to stop the feelings from overwhelming me. Then of course I am not able to enjoy anything and my day is ruined, normally then I just go to sleep when I can afford to do so. I would like to overcome it so I can again, for example, stroll under the September setting sun without all the knives in my chest.
As of today (15th September 2020), I have already started with the preparation phase, but not with DBT itself. This method should consist of both individual and group therapies, there also should be some phone coaching. Moreover, alongside the therapies, I also agreed on participating in some experiments, which should evaluate the effectiveness of DBT on me. They included questionnaires, a long talk with a psychiatrist, but also magnetic resonance and EEG. When they placed all the sensors onto me and drove me inside the tunnel, I felt like in some American documentary. But it was not uncomfortable at all, on the contrary, not falling asleep actually took some effort.
The therapies and experiments were conducted by the scientists from my home university, not by the regular psychiatric department staff. This made me trust the doctors and their assistants, because in a way they are my colleagues, they are working on their research and they are enthusiastic about it. This enthusiasm and their very personal approach were perhaps also adding up to the general comfort I felt during all the experiments, when my mind was stripped naked, often to the point where I would otherwise feel extremely vulnerable, fragile, or uneasy. However, the young and friendly team was so reassuring, they always told me what was going to happen and they answered all my questions with apparent enjoyment. They also took a great care about my physical comfort. For example, when I was cold, they wrapped a towel or a blanket around me; it was almost cute how one of the assistants made sure my feet were kept warm in the magnetic resonance tunnel. And among all this, they were joking around both with me and with each other. I am afraid that hospital staff, although maybe far more experienced than those young scientists, would act much colder and that they would not be able to make me feel so safe and secure. Based on this very nice experience, I hope the rest of the six-month DBT program will be rather pleasant. It will be some really hard work but with such a great team caring about me, I am almost sure it will be tough but manageable. My first group therapy starts on September 21st, so let's see how it all goes.
A photo from that beautiful fall afternoon when I saw the one I loved for the last time.
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