Yes you read it right. It’s so very easy to be busy if you’re a dopamine addict like me. The shorter, sharper and faster the hit, the better. It is why in the noughties I enjoyed taking ecstasy more than anything else (sorry Mum and Dad). Way more than alcohol, really. Alcohol served as the great panacea for the depressive states and situations in which I found myself in as a result of being in active addiction. Ecstasy allowed me to dance, love everybody, feel loved back, and burn loads of calories. I was in the shape of my life in the raving days. I was also twenty years younger and without the demands a twin pregnancy takes on your body. I would guess that in my lifetime, if not my children’s, they will (and have started to) treat depression and other mental health disorders with modified and hyper regulated versions of these illegal drugs. There is a laboratory up the road from me in Cambridge that is doing this. I should really quote properly but this has been in my drafts for weeks and I keep getting interrupted by wonderful things like children and holidays (and children on holiday) so I’m just going to send it ‘naked.’
I stopped drinking and drugging a long time ago, but the pursuit of dopamine continued, almost to the gates of insanity that alcohol took me to over a decade before. I’ve had many emotional rock bottoms in recovery as a result of following a path of chasing the dopey dragon.
Last year and as you will know if you follow this blog I had a crushing mental breakdown. I got better after seeing a psychiatrist, going on medication, and doing Exposure and Response Prevention with an amazing CBT therapist. I now offer the same type of therapy to my clients, as well as working in a more general, psychodynamic way where it’s needed.
A year on, my brain is remembering the trauma of how bad things were. I feel I’ve got PTSD from recalling the heat on the rare summery days we’ve had, lying in bed awake most of the night while the fan swept over my sweaty, skinny body as I grappled with insomnia and appetite loss. Even the sight of getting the fans out this summer made me wince.
I’ve gone back into therapy again, this time with someone who combines CBT and more of the aforementioned psychodynamic psychotherapy, a modicum of what I do in my own practice. It has been groundbreaking. My new therapist told me that my thinking got completely hijacked last year because I didn’t look after myself. This hit me like an arrow.
Of course on the surface you could say that I live a pretty pure life. I don’t drink or smoke. My food habits are questionable at times, but not terrible. I’m in recovery. But I’m busy and I’m addicted to stress, and it’s easy to defend and deny anxiety and stress with twins… the old ‘if you had my life you’d be the same’ adage is truly believable. I have had to keep digging deep, rooting out the very nuanced-based behaviours that manifest as a result of being recovery from mental health disorders such as OCD, ADHD and addiction. It’s like whack a mole. Abstinence from the booze is the easy bit. The more you rip off the more is exposed.
Since I arrived in Cornwall I’ve had some great, phone free sitting on your hands moments. Beautiful things have happened with the kids. We’ve swum in the sea, paddle boarded, and eaten a mountain of ice cream.
Healing really is, at times, learning to sit on your hands. Not having a thought, and constantly acting on it, in the loop of anxiety and quick fix-ism. That eventually leads to burn out, hijacked thinking and general mental combustion, as I have described above. I’m currently writing this as one of my kids is trying to kick the type writer part of my iPad. This is stressful, but then, so is thinking that I need to get this blog out, it’s been a month. It’s really hard to stop. Stopping is the new starting, I think.
James Clear (of Atomic Habits fame) has a wonderful newsletter which if you buy his book, you get for free. I recommend both, and the app. This week, he quotes part of The Bell Jar, which I absolutely love. In every decision, every gain, there is a loss. When I got into recovery an old lady said to me ‘my dear, know the consequences, and be prepared to pay the price.’ I of course nodded and said I would, but I haven’t heeded this information at times. I will leave you with the great Sylvia Plath. More soon, but probably monthly, with a review of the books I have been reading, or what I have found interesting and helpful on the web.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Source: The Bell Jar
Jessica Drake - OCD / Anxiety Psychotherapist 